Ideas for an Early Positive Sum Design Framework
Positive Sum Design (PSD) is a combined cultural critique and basis for approaching a design practice. Borrowing language and concepts from the field of game theory, PSD eschews zero-sum bias and suggests that the gains from positive-sum systems and interactions are of paramount importance as we forge culture and design the shared world.
Till now, the explicit intersection between game theory and design has been limited. These ideas, however, are not niche by any means: positive-sum effects, often described as “network effects” or other terms of art, are often touted as central to innovation, human cooperation, and social systems. In his book, Nonzero, **Robert Wright even extends this argument to life in general, claiming that “the non-zero-sum dynamic… has crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth thus far.”
Arguably, PSD challenges designers to do what they have always done: create in a way that yields a whole greater than the sum of its parts. As a focus of practice, however, Positive Sum Design reframes the activity of design to focus deliberately on creating positive-sum situations and rejecting the creation of zero- or negative-sums. This is completed through a framework of activities currently under development, including re-framing constraints that enforce zero-sum-ness and the identification and leveraging of non-rival and anti-rival goods.
Reframing constraints plays a vital role in Positive Sum Design. As a general rule, constraints can be immensely useful in design work — they provide the landscape upon and in which the designer creates. Constraints can even be inspirational — obstacles around which to innovate — and without constraints, a designer can feel directionless. PSD becomes most concerned with constraints when they begin to enforce a zero-sum, or negative-sum, situation. These sorts of constraints are often consequences of framing and are therefore mutable through a reframing process similar to that developed and described by Kees Dorst in his book Frame Innovation. By carefully revising constraints through reframing, the positive-sum designer allows new, positive-sum conceptions of the design context to come to the surface and flourish.
Not all useful reframings, however, are necessarily in service of Positive Sum Design. Take, for example, a situation where one uses a 2D blueprint to plan how one will fit a certain number of objects in a room. This is a zero-sum situation: any area taken up by one object is area that cannot be taken up by another. One can usefully re-frame this situation to include the height of the room, and therefore allow the planner to use the entire volume of the room for the objects; however, this is still a zero-sum game because volume taken up by one object still cannot be taken up by another. Therefore, the challenge for the positive sum designer is not simply how to usefully re-frame, but how to re-frame constraints to create positive-sum situations. This is a non-trivial task and often involves looking past the problem as stated: perhaps we have a yard sale and create space by selling some objects to neighbors who can better use them. Perhaps certain objects can be tetrissed-together in a way that allows them to share space that otherwise would have been reserved for one or the other. These examples are not perfect by any means, but they serve to underscore the point: re-framing for Positive Sum Design is difficult, and tools to better inspire this sort of thinking must be developed in order to support the creation of positive-sum systems.
Positive Sum Design also requires leveraging non-rival and anti-rival goods. These are goods for which consumption by one entity does not reduce the amount of consumption available for another entity (or increases the consumption available for another entity). Identifying and including non- and anti-rival goods into a design can create large amounts of positive sum-ness. The identification process often involves careful stakeholder analysis, as non-rival goods can be quite specific to a stakeholder or stakeholders. One particularly efficient way to approach identifying an anti-rival good is to identify a good that can be created in the design that is only valuable, and only affects, a single stakeholder (this approach is borrowed from negotiation theory as described by Dr. Lawrence Susskind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke3CU0eiilo). These goods are anti-rival by virtue of the fact that no other stakeholder is interested in them, so consumption by the interested stakeholder does not reduce consumption for others. While this approach is not as elegant as a solution that might yield an anti-rival bounty of social interaction, or some other non- or anti-rival good, it can be helpful to begin working in PSD, or to add further positive-sum-ness to a design solution.
Positive Sum Design as a framework for design practice is still under development and much will likely evolve as the methods are studied. The above is intended to be a starting point or provocation for interested designers who want to add some Positive Sum Design to their practice. If you do try any of the methods or approaches outlined here and want to add to the conversation, please reach out to the PSD medium publication heads, Ian Gonsher and Will Rutter at (wrutter@andrew.cmu.edu).
