Methexis Park: Co-Designing Better Decision Systems

Author: Cedro Peal, CEAD

Welcome to the Methexis Park System Design blog. I’m Cedro Peal, co-lead for the Landin Council’s pioneering new group, Civic Ecology Algorithmic Design (CEAD). Created in 2024, the CEAD group is pleased to launch our first major project: the Methexis Park Participatory Decision System Co-Design.

Introducing Methexis Park

In this project – the first of its kind – we are inviting all interested, affected and knowledgeable parties to work together to produce the design for a public-facing algorithmic decision system, controlling general access and facilities permits for Methexis Park. We invite all readers to visit the project website to learn more, and to sign up to the mailing list for updates.

As the jewel in the crown of Landin’s recreation and leisure offering, Methexis Park is also a site of national ecological significance. It is home to over 280 non-human species populations, including two protected and much beloved species: water voles and red squirrels.

The park is approved for redevelopment starting in 2027. As part of that redevelopment, with support from local and national funding, we are proud to be leading in the implementation of smart infrastructures, and the improvement of recreation facilities in Landin’s lower-income areas. Our aim is to take this redevelopment forward in such a way as to increase human footfall and amenity, while at the same time enhancing the space as a living system with inherent value and rights.

The technological context: decisions are changing

This co-design project responds to some of the defining problems facing governance today, as algorithmic technologies and techniques become essential infrastructure for our institutions, processes, and everyday lives. Many of these problems centre on the fact that decisions themselves have become more complex. Decisions are no longer necessarily made by government employees consciously applying policy and regulations to individual cases. Rather, they are often multi-stage composite processes, taking place in diverse sites and at multiple steps, and requiring a variety of inputs, kinds of data collection and processing, and multi-agency cooperation.

This complexity, and the opacity that comes with it, makes it much harder to understand where and why a decision outcome occurs. New kinds of discretion and decision-shaping agency also emerge. This creates new challenges for those affected by decisions (who might want to contest them), courts (who are tasked with reviewing them), and government departments (who need to understand, explain, review and evaluate their own processes).

The Civic Ecology Algorithmic Design group

Embracing this new governance challenge, Landin Council is taking an active approach. We created the Civic Ecology Algorithmic Design group because we acknowledge that in an automated process, agency over the design of a decision system matters – not only the making of this or that individual decision. We need a new awareness of how administrative decision-making processes work, and how they can meet our standards for both democratic institutions, and broader techno-social ecologies.

With this in mind, CEAD was created as a central hub of process design knowledge and management. It exists to build customised processes for government, adopting the most appropriate technical solutions. CEAD’s use case arises wherever we need a bespoke techno-institutional-ecological design process, avoiding the tacking-on of new technologies to existing processes – to which they may be poorly suited, and may transform in unpredictable ways.

Over time, CEAD will become a central repository of government design wisdom. It will accumulate a repertoire of modular design components, alongside an expanding knowledge of how different designs meet government process needs, affect the rights and values of subjects in an open democratic society, and interact with the broader ecologies that are our home.

Participatory co-design

I can’t finish this introductory blog post without saying something more about the key feature of CEAD’s working method: participatory co-design. Agency over system design is a new site, perhaps even a new kind, of governmental power. We must meet this challenge head on, and turn it also into a site of deliberation and scrutiny, a new subject of review, and a new organ in the body of the state. What better way to inaugurate the first group of this kind than with a localised process, centred on a public space, drawing on all of Landin’s glorious ecological and social diversity?

We hope that this blog will help serve all of these aims. It will give voice to the plural perspectives in and around the co-design process. It will help us all to see inside a necessarily chaotic process. It will amplify alternative points of view–including critical and lateral ones–to show us where we are going, to appreciate or alter our journey, or even to change direction if necessary. It will help to spread the word about our experiment, and it might even catalyse new participants into the process.

Participate! Deliberate! Regenerate!

Cerdo Peal
Co-Director
Civic Ecology Algorithmic Design group
Landin Council