Lockdowns and solutions
Yesterday, on October 13, 2020, seven months after the first lockdown in the Netherlands, the Dutch government announced the second, this time partial lockdown. To my surprise, the news was received generally positively. I guess people under such conditions want clarity, not choice and the responsibility and uncertainty that go with it. This could be a reason why we accept draconian measures with gratitude. Rather than having to interpret the basic rules of social distancing and protection from infections in our daily lives, we appear to prefer general restrictions and the consequent elimination of many situations in daily life. Why worry how having a meal at a restaurant can be made safe is there are no restaurants to go to? Remove the opportunity or temptation and the problem is gone - no need to solve it.
I do not share the apparently general acceptance and approval of how the corona pandemic is handled in the Netherlands. This does not imply I'm against anti-corona measures, that I find them unnecessary or contrary to my human or civic rights. On the contrary, I support the need for change and accept the principles underlying them, as well as the inevitable effects and the resulting necessity for social cohesion and solidarity. These are part of my human and civic responsibilities. In fact, I see the pandemic as an opportunity to improve our habits and environments, to make our lives healthier and happier.
What I doubt is the sufficiency of general principles and total restrictions. A lockdown is a very temporary solution. We have experienced how tricky getting out of a lockdown can be, as well as how easily we can then end up in the same problematic situation that seems to call for another lockdown - a vicious circles of binary options. Imposing a second lockdown, even if it's a partial one, indicates a fundamental failure, not only of the people and their behaviours but also of the approach to solving the problems caused by the pandemic. Have we learned so little in these seven months? That seems inconceivable. Unfortunately, too much attention goes to new measures, such as the use of face protection, and too little to how different principles, measures and devices apply to different situations, how they are interpreted, related to each other and other factors, refined and improved thanks to knowledge generated by the applications.
This is my main objection: general principles and measures are meaningful only in context. By working out what they do in different situations we can evaluate their effectivity and cost, appreciate the complexity of these situations before and after, and generally improve awareness and the ability to find practical solutions in daily life.
This brings me to what I consider a major failure of the governmental approach: we have been hearing how this theatre or that restaurant have successfully implemented the general principles and so managed to adapt their operation and environment, making them safe and keeping them profitable. Have such best practices been analysed and evaluated? Have we learned from them, have we worked on templates and elements that can be adopted by others, too, have we developed platforms for sharing knowledge and solutions? Rather than indiscriminately closing all restaurants, we should have rewarded and showcased those that have achieved the goals we aspire to and used them to educate the rest and stimulate general improvement. This is something we have to do, an inevitable stage towards safer environments and activities, which is only delayed by the second lockdown. It is moreover something we need to do even if medicine manages to produce the cures for COVID 19, so that we can be same from future pandemics with different causes.
In summary, we need to work out the necessary changes with more specificity and in more detail, so that they become applicable to any context and meaningful to all, learn from best practices and try to generalize them.
One could say this is a design approach and I'd take that as a compliment. Design can actually contribute much to the solutions required because by changing the environments within which we operate, it can also change our behaviour. That's what affordances are about: you can demand that people observe social distancing but putting markers on the floor makes it not only easier to understand what one should do but actually part of our interaction with the environment: a constraints that's easy to observe. It's the same magic as with a flimsy piece of tape that cordons off an unsafe pavement or the foam lines football referees use to position the defensive wall at a free kick: physically they may be insignificant but culturally we tend to obey them.
Of course, its is even better not to annotate but physically change the environment, taking into account the anti-corona principles. This is often seen as a long-term development because it may require wider or multiple entrances to rooms or buildings, wider corridors, better ventilation etc: costly and difficult modifications. This, however, should not stop us from starting already now. There are enough cases where adaptation is directly possible and we need to start producing the best practices from which we can learn. All we need is willingness to invest and to share.
