I’ve written earlier about the importance of being optimistic. I still think it’s important to have an optimistic outlook. However, I recently came across a description that better captures the position I aspire to. It’s in Hans Rosling’s great book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think1:

I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious ‘possibilist.’ That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.

I like the distinction Rosling draws between optimism and “possibilism.” For many people, optimism implies keeping a sunny disposition in spite of (or in ignorance of) the facts. That’s not healthy. What we want is a “clear and reasonable idea of how things are.” Seeing clearly, free from distortions.

The progress Rosling is alluding to is the subject of the book: factual data that shows how, overall, things have been getting better for humanity and for the world over time. If this sounds counter-intuitive, it’s because of several cognitive biases that affect how we understand reality (and which Rosling skillfully dismantles.)

Our effectiveness as designers (or citizens, or co-workers, or parents, or…) requires that we understand these biases and how they influence how we perceive things (and therefore, how we act.) How can you propose any kind of intervention into a system or situation when you don’t yet have a “clear and reasonable” understanding of it?

That’s why research is so important to design. But research is not enough. If you’re trying to see clearly something that is very small or very large or very distant, you must have the right instruments, and have them in proper working order. But much also depends on whether you know which instruments are called for to begin with, how to configure them, how to point them in the right direction, and what the “right” direction is. This requires that you be in proper working order — among other things, free from an “overdramatic worldview.”

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