If politicians were product designers

Product design is all about usability. About making life easier. About finding tipping points that simplify, delight, and appeal to users. Politics on the other hand, seems to be about bifurcating along political lines. About lobbying, padding pocketbooks, career making, and sneaking through clauses that weigh down good laws with favors and short-sighted flab.

What would our country look like if we designed policies like we do products- to be elegant, functional, SIMPLIFYING? What if politicians acted more like designers? Instead of muckraking and mudslinging, they put their effort and money into publicizing great ideas?

What if our government worked collaboratively, like a design team, across the aisles? What could happen if instead of arguing, we ignored the bad ideas and put all our energy on implementing the best ideas? What if in determining the shape of policies, we could have "meaningful engagement" on the part of those effected by the policies? What if we forgot about party lines for awhile and focused on good design, on problem solving, on solutions that empathize rather than impose?

Couldn't we design our future better if we redesigned our way of working?

Brazil should learn from South African ideas

Before the South African world cup of 2010, the government planned to rip down and relocate the informal settlements near the Cape Town airport, an area now known as the Joe Slovo community (named for the former freedom fighter). In a country that faced cruel relocations under apartheid, forcing people from their homes is a precarious and necessarily scrutinized undertaking. The Joe Slovo community simply refused to go, concerned about distance from employment, skepticism about promises of new homes, and concern over the dispersal of their tightly knit community. The refusal resulted in a landmark constitutional court case. This case and other in South Africa surrounding property and settlement rights have come to resolution using what Justice Albie Sachs termed "meaningful engagement," a consideration of the voice and opinion of effected parties, typically leading to mediation and other Constitutionally protected forms of interaction with the legal and procedural responses which will govern their homes and alter their lifestyles. Sachs claims "meaningful engagement" is rooted in the ubuntu ethos of South Africa- the idea that humanity is reciprocal, what I do to humanize or dehumanize another effectively humanizes or dehumanizes myself.

Fast forward to Brazil's preparation for the world cup of 2014. Not only is Brazil confronted with  similar tenement housing situations, but the nation faces a parallel economic disparity to that of South Africa overall. Wisely, the Brazilian government is taking ques from the South African experience and the Rainbow Nation's approaches to problems similar to those Brazil currently faces. In Rio de Janiero, occupants of so-called shanty towns set for renovation are given three options: relocate temporarily and accept a place in the refurbished areas, take simple financial compensation, or stay nearby as houses are built. The choice is a way of engaging citizens in their own fate, of engaging all stake-holders-particularly the disenfranchised, which is the mark of a truly civilized society.

Like its experimental South African friends, Brazil has also instituted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the legacy left by a military dictatorship. The success of the cultural development and burgeoning international industries inside Brazil have enormous gain to be made if government can learn from the strengths and weaknesses of the South African TRC. Happily, Brazilian leaders were prescient enough to chose this alternative process. Or, perhaps they yielded to international pressure as other Latin American nations adopted truth commissions. Regardless, it will be fascinating to watch the the Brazilian commission develop.

If the Brazilian Comissão Nacional da Verdade can cultivate an ubuntu ethos, it may have the power to alter the previous torturous and repressive cultural climate of the path. The are significant differences between the TRC and the Brazillian commission already, half the number of Commissioners, a far smaller staff (14 compared to hundreds), half the time span (and half the mandate period), as well as an amnesty law of 1979 that threatens to bar potential whistle blowers and perpetrators from coming forward. The 1979 law stands as the most likely impediment to uncovering the truth about what happened to hundreds who "disappeared" under military rule. Unfortunately, without some form of revelation and conversation about these deaths, Brazil may not be able to ameliorate the cultural havoc such violence breeds. The greatest success of the South African TRC is a humanizing narrative about ways of responding to atrocity, namely, an ubuntu-based unity that the nation carries forward through its courts and which is re-articulated by its leadership.  Unless it can find a parallel message and evidence about the hidden atrocities, Brasilia may waste its time and energy on a Commission unable to achieve much Verdade. However, if the legal establishment can overturn the amnesty law, or find loopholes in it (as it has of late), the Commission may find better footing for its Commission and ultimately achieve more from its institution.

Similar desecration of rights, similar military repression, similar economic disparity, similar truth commission policy. But since the TRC was so grounded in regional philosophy, will the Brazilian results be similar?