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Thursday 10 February 2011

The Design

EOS aims to propose an alternative, moneyless, socioeconomic system to our current system through the application of science to society.  Basically, we can take the word "engineering" as meaning the "application of science".  So essentially, we aim to engineer society.

An engineering project begins with a "customer specification", which describe something about the end result but not really how will we should achieve that.  It becomes the engineers jobs to translate that vague customer specification into a solid implementation in a number of steps.  We often begin with developing prototypes and after testing out a number of prototypes we move on to what we call a top level design document.  The top level design document specifies in a bit more detail how we should achieve the end result.  We can then progress to a more detailed design document which describes in more detail the implementation.  We then go into implementation where we actually built what the customer originally desired, or as close as we can practically get.

The design process doesn't necessary follow the above linear path.  As we learn more we can go back to earlier stages and redo things so the designed becomes a circular process.  It is easier to correct mistakes in the earlier phase of design than to correct mistakes in the implementation so we should spend some time on getting the design right.

In EOS, we have a vision of a future, sustainable, moneyless world around civilisation.  That forms our customer specification.  We then see around this planet a number of groups exploring similar visions.  Effectively, all these groups are exploring different prototypes so we have moved on to the top level design for a proposal of an alternative socioeconomic system.  We simply call our design "The Design" and we have worked on it over the last five or six years.  I have been putting all our work together and am now produced a draft document that covers most of the aspects of our design.  I have now send it around to a number of people to review.  We still have more work to do but it feels like we're heading towards something that we could start testing; heading towards a moneyless society.

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