I certainly don’t endorse the proposed solution, but the approach has one thing going for it from a design perspective. It attempts to remove constraints. The problem is not that it goes too far, but that it does not go far enough. To truly re-envision the future we need to challenge all assumptions based on current reality.
For example, do we need to confine prisoners together in large numbers in a single place? Why? Presumably we originally did this to leverage economies of scale. Are those economies still present or relevant? To take it further, why do we choose to confine people at all? Are there are other ways we could handle punishment or rehabilitation that don’t involve locking people up? If there are would they be more effective than incarceration?
If we stop assuming convicts need to be locked up, and not just locked up but locked up in large prisons, all kinds of possibilities open up and we can begin examining technological solutions that address the fundamental needs:
- Keep the population safe
- Satisfy victims fundamental sense of justice
- Instill true remorse in convicts, so they don’t re-offend
I’m not going to solutioneer those here, but many of you are probably already visualizing smart anklets, victim indebtedness, pro-social gamification systems, or any number of other unique ideas that bear absolutely no resemblance to what we have now, and that’s the point. Ideas like that are not going to arise out of ethnographic study of prisoners (though it may inform them), because the thing envisioned is so far from current reality that no amount of contextual inquiry could possibly uncover anything actionable.
Edison didn’t execute a study of how people were using candles, Steve Jobs didn’t try to improve on the blackberry keyboard. Big ideas come when we erase the present context from our thinking and open our minds to all kinds of possibilities, some of which may sound crazy. It’s easy to shoot holes in Shane Snow’s idea or question his motives, but this kind of “idea shaming” isn’t going to move us any closer to real change.
