Dembrane is a deliberation and consensus-building platform designed to help governments harness the collective ingenuity of their constituents.

Dembrane was concieved during my masters thesis at DAE under the title Strange Democracy.

Contents, overview.

Hint: Click the pink links to read more!

In 2018, a project of mine at DAE culminated in a film called: "Noi Contro Loro". It was about how a far-right politician in Italy used social media to present an authentic imago, all the while optimising their posts to maximise traction. I realised that part of what made the politcian succesful was that they proudly displayed attacks against them and they profited from they chaos they themselves engineered - They were antifragile. Instead of contribute to the cacophony by publishing the film, I realised that working on the hidden layer - the root cause - might be more productive.

Not having a great deal of experience in political theory, I needed to immerse myself in the field, and in the current state of the literature on Sortition. I summarised my initial findings in a large format research poster that would help me understand sortition in more detail.

The "real average" is a representation of what the "color" of an ideal democratic government of these dots should look like: a reflection of the average color of every living dot. The row of boxes below reflect various electoral systems. All of them reflect the dots to some degree, and proportional representation is the "best" of the vote-based systems, but sortition matches the real average most closely in almost every case. There are many facinating properties of this simulation, I'd be happy to tell you all about them!

"...at least random people wouldn’t be scared to compromise."

- Member of the Eindhoven City Council

"Politics is crazy these days, if you compromise on the party line, there’s no way you’ll be asked to take a leadership role, so people don’t debate good faith anymore, you know, they only care about optics and ambition, especially on the national level […] with randomness it doesn’t matter if theres more women one year, or more men, or any of that rubbish: it just matters that you can debate on the facts and compromise without betraying ‘your team,’ I like that..."

- VVD youth party board member

As a part of my investigation on trusting randomness, I recorded myself for a whole day as I made made decisions using coinflips and dice rolls. It was an intruiging process, and I discovered that coin flips and dice rolls aren't the best way to reduce descision fatigue, as you have to come up with the options beforehand. After a full day of seemingly random decsisions, I was exhausted.

Interested? Listen to the podcast here:

Apophenia can be a major hinderance to trusting randomness. It is the human tendency to see pattern in noise. It has been observed in many fields and millions of people fall for it.

To explore the problems of apophenia, I taught myself how to give tarot readings. I was intruiged at how people would asign meaning to the order of the cards, even though they were, in the strictest sense, completly random.

The problem of apophenia was never truly resolved - even if I stressed the randomness of the order, people would be struck by the profoundity of some readings, or become highly defensive during a negative reading.

I continued to use Tarot for a few months, exploring what conditions enhanced or reduced the apophenic effect.

Onze zetels was the first iteration of a holistic "coming together" of the sortition project. The idea was to randomly select 5 designers and have them design 5 different chairs or thrones that would have the ability to record and playback audio recordings of creator/audience responses to the question: "If you were in power, what would you do?"

Preliminary project proposal (Dutch)

The mini-project was hailed with enthusiasm by friends and family, but heavilly critisized by the head of the Information Design department. He asked: "Where is the design? Everything is random, you're using design as a gimmick."

I confess to feeling a little missunderstood, but I understood the critique: the project was fun, but didn't communicate the essense of the research. I went back to the drawing board.

One of the concepts explored in the book was the barnsely fern, where a short set of transformation rules, iterated over at random, produced a fractal pattern. I iterated over the rule set in other, non random ways, and never got the same result. I reaslised that randomness has some special characterisitic that allowed the fractal structure to emerge.

Time iteration

Chaos iteration

Going back to the drawing board (killing my darlings) allowed me to make a second serendipitous connection: Scientists and engineers use randomisation all the time! Exactly for the reason that large numbers of randomly selected inputs act as a kind of blank canvas, an egalitarian sampling method that breaks information feedback loops that cause bias and allows for the exploration of complex systems.

From my thesis: Strange Democracy

I realised that the nature of my reasearch had been highly connective: bringing together insights from very disperate fields. I thought that I could create something that mirrored that connectivity, by creating a mini-documentary about randomness, science and the future of democracy, containing interviews with experts from each field. I sent out emails and got a great number of reponses.

Exerpt from interview with Hubertus Hofkirchner and John Burnheim