Reflexive design

    From Consumerium development wiki R&D Wiki

    Reflexive design is the use of information from within the project, to design the project. In a totally reflexive design, no information or person has special status from outside the project, but is all evaluated by the same criteria both inside and outside the project. Elements of such a process here:

    • Consumerium:We - keeping claims about the contributors as a collective clearly noted
    • Consumerium:Itself - defining the project by what the project says about it
    • factions - representing differences of opinion within the system itself

    In user interfaces, a reflexive design is one where the control verbs have also no special status - they are words redefinable within the system itself. So the special words you see at the left ("What links here", "Bug reports") would be no different than other links, and also specified within the system as articles. Periodically, if someone changed the definition of say how bug reports should look, someone else would presumably come along and implement.

    Consensus decision making is quite important in any reflexive design project. Sysop vigilantiism and sysop vandalism are quite destructive to it, as they represent power grabs using powers from outside the dialogues.