This article was taken from the January issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
All designers design to be wrong the first time. The first version, no matter how well conceived, won't be as good as the second, third, and forth. David Kelley, founder of IDEO, put it succinctly: "You don't find out anything until it's used by people." In both software and hardware, we allow time for iteration because we know we will get it wrong. We should give our government the leeway to do the same for laws and social policy.
The start-up world is ruled by the mantra "Release early, release often". We embrace the uncertainty of the unpredictable wants, whims, and whimsy of the people that ultimately determine the success of our products. No amount of market research or focus groups give you the insight gained by simply releasing your product. It took Joshua Schachter three reboots - three entirely different websites - for the idea behind Delicious to finally to hit its stride. Then he sold it to Yahoo for $30 million (£18 million).
Releasing your solution often proves that you were solving the wrong problem to begin with. Start-ups rush out their first release to figure out what problem they should be solving. Wonder why we've got so many sites with a hastily slapped-on "beta" label? It's because you're the real-world focus group.
If something as simple as a website is rarely right the first time, laws don't stand a chance. They need a beta period, where the cost of failure is low; where laws can be wrong and then iterated on without calling them failures, or the politicians who create them flip-floppers.
So who's had the most experience in creating social policy, enacting it, watching the ramifications and unintended consequences filter through tens of millions of people - then iterating and fixing it in real time?
It's not the politicians. It is the massively multiplayer-online-game makers. Blizzard, creators of World of Warcraft, are probably the most skilled practitioners of highly-iterated, fully-tested public policy.
They have more experience in what makes people tick, and how unintended side effects can wreak havoc on the most well-intentioned rules. They understand social policy is design. If they ran for office, they'd have my vote.
Aza Raskin founded Humanized Inc, songza.com and bloxes.com, and is head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. This article was honed using other people's feedback.
Read other articles from the Rebooting Britain series - Tax people back into the cities - Teach kids to see in four dimensions - Exercise a green foreign policy - Open democracy to the online masses - Reinvent the way we live together - Live life as a lottery - Pull the plug on broadcast regulation - Make carbon emissions hurt - Slash the universities and go virtual - Make policy using prediction markets - Transform cities into green jungles - Promote another crash - Ditch Twitter: it's dangerous for democracy - Encourage failure - Make education more flexible - Set government data (radically) free
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
