A good read in the ACM Ubiquity: What if the experts are wrong by Denise Caruso. It's about how societies prepare themselves to be wrong when creating innovations that can have have important consequences on the world. Some excerpts:

"long-term stewardship" of man-made hazards; that is, how a society prepares to take care of the messes it has made that it can't get rid of, generations into the future. (...) To think that other people might suffer as a result of their actions is not part of the expert's world, or it gets pushed away in the drive to deploy the technology," said La Porte. "But what are the consequences if it turns out that all the things they believed in are wrong? That's really hard. And most technical people can't talk about this. What they do is theology to them, not science.

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Why do I blog this? even though this article addresses tech such as nuclear power and DNA manipulation, the author has a good point about designing new elements/artifacts (given the messiness of the world). And it leads to two questions: is it about designing to avoid future messes or designing in a way that this inherent mess could be taken care of?.

(the picture is a shot I've taken last week end: remnants from a restaurant that is refurbished)