Engineering Purpose

Engineers are good at solutions. We're even fairly good at problems. Give us a client, and we'll design the most effective, doable solutions. Yet we act as if this particular type of problem is unsolvable, even unactionable. We design apps all the time that are intended to influence human behavior. And information flow is critical to cooperative behavior. The first rule of design is to include the client - and actually we do this on the above project, where we have people on the ground and whose families are disappeared participating in a slack group.