Using viruses as models for infiltrating systems
Posted by Laura Dusi on December 15, 2014In this first semester at the Transdisciplinary design program at Parsons I have learned that most of my fellow students are interested in making positive changes in society and we early learn the importance of having system literacy in other to achieve that. As inherent to the design field we often talk about adding to existing systems, creating new ones and enabling new connections. We learn that the things created do not exist by themselves, they interfere with other elements of their context and might have resonance in other systems. The words “context” and “other (systems)” are used here to refer to the boundaries we impose in our system analysis, as Donella Meadows says in her book Thinking in Systems “there are no separate systems, the world is a continuum”.
What we in this semester have not explored so far is the fact that intervening in systems does not necessarily mean adding to them. Here I want to propose another approach for design. Instead of adding to systems how do we disable them through design?
The motivation behind this is my personal interest in corruption, particularly corruption in political systems. Corruption in governments around the world although not wanted by society still exists and affects democracy and governance. When analysing existing political systems we can understand corruption as a disease and as a self organized system which means they are more resilient.
An important part of the design process is to learn from similar and existing systems to create a similar or appropriate the same logic to a different context. Taking this in consideration what existing models can we mimic to disable system and their thought patterns so that they don’t reemerge? For this blog post my intent is to explore “viruses” as one model to consider on how to approach this issue.
Virus are infectious agents that need a living cells as a mean for multiplying themselves. It spreads from cell to cell silently until it provokes a larger reaction that makes the infection visible. There are many variations of viruses in the world, here i’m presenting HIV and Influenza to understand two different behaviors of viruses in other to analyze what we can bring to design. This particular viruses attack specific types of cells in the human body. HIV attacks lymphocytes affecting the our immunity system while Influenza attacks the respiratory tracts cells causing the flu.
HIV is a virus that weakens the body leaving it more susceptible to cath other types of infection and harder to treat them. While this might be the one you will want to mimic to destroy entire systems you should take in account that the contamination of HIV happens by exchange of fluids through physical contact and it is necessary for the healthy body- or system- to have some kind of open entrance like a wound for it to occur. So you would need a clear entrance in the system for the designed “virus”.
While the HIV virus contaminates a healthy organisms and only leave them susceptible to cath other diseases that then might disable the entire system, the Influenza virus disables already weakened systems, or make visible their fragility demanding a reaction of the system to become healthy. The flu is a very common disease and the reason for that is how easily the virus can contaminate the body which is through small-particle aerosols in the proximity to an infectious person. Because of that the virus spread around the world in 72 hours. Also a great difference between this two viruses is that, as said before, the human body can develop a resistance to influenza virus. Then again the virus changes its variant quickly so you can get infected again.
By relating government systems to human body the Influenza virus give us a model on how to infiltrate the system without being notice and destroy the very fragile (corrupt) ones, while only disturbing the ones that are not as fragile.
Either way there is still the question on how to do this. What can be the virus? What are we considering as cells in the government systems. Are people the cells responsible for multiplying the virus? Are flows or stock? It is also important to take in account that viruses damage cells. And the most important item to take into account is if we are leaving space for a better or worse system to emerge.