A note on our founder

Dr Chris Forman, PhD, FRSA

Chris Forman is an industry scientist and co-author of Brave Green World (MIT Press). With degrees in mathematical physics, nanotechnology with enterprise and a PhD in protein engineering from Cambridge, he has about thirty years of experience as a researcher in world class institutions bridging industry and academia—Edinburgh, QinetiQ, Cambridge, Sussex, UCSD, Northwestern, SDSU, Tosoh Bioscience LLC.

He sat on the Synthetic Biology Steering Group at Cambridge as well as being a Nanoforum Senior Fellow at Cambridge, and has witnessed DARPA reviews in the US, as well as many brainstorms, conferences and workshops in his ~thirty-year career. His current primary research interests concern the role of information in materials systems — how molecular structure can be made to drive assembly and separation — a concept that runs directly into non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the physics of information: what it costs a physical system to record something, and what that implies for emergent structures in hierarchical systems complex enough to be called economies or ecologies.

He founded Deliberation Gateway in 2018 and has convened it ever since, out of professional frustration rather than academic interest. When everyone has too much at stake in their own career to shake the tree, nothing changes, however plainly it needs to. By working with the RSA and creating the Deliberation Gateway imprint Chris has found a way to use his technical and research experience to give professionals across the board a safe and respectful way into good disruptive behavior. How can civic deliberation change the relationship between everyday people and the professional institutions that serve them? The questions of leadership this raises — how we balance technical and human considerations in the way we choose our leaders and make decisions — are explored in the Gateway The Age of Stewards.

Chris moved to the US for personal reasons and took a role at Northwestern University as a project scientist, with a lot of freedom to direct his own research. He chose to spend much of that freedom building Deliberation Gateway alongside the science — convening conversations, learning the field of deliberative democracy, and forming the relationships that now sustain the imprint. That dual path is unusual, and deliberate: it has given him a line of enquiry he could not have reached through technical work alone.

The two halves of his career — technical and deliberative — meet on one very deep question. The unifying aspect of physics and deliberation concerns the role of information exchange between the elements of a system. Communication and decision-making run on information processing in physical systems — our brains — so how information moves between us matters, and so does the capacity we have to engage with and learn about each other. Pressing on why deliberation produces better decisions turns, fairly quickly, into a question about neuroscience and how our brains process information in two different ways: fast and slow. Physical systems don't have such complex information exchange between their elements, and certainly lack the ability to adapt the way they interact as humans do, yet the ability to learn is limited by thermodynamics, a concept which is made all the more clear with the advent of AI.

The bottom line is that as technical systems become more complex, and as we learn more about neuroscience — human learning — and machine learning, we understand that information processing in material systems is the underpinning physics that drives both ecosystems and economies. While working hard to bring people together in workshops and panels, conversations and thought-provoking output, Chris is also researching, in his own time, the physics of information processing in complex political systems. There is a body of work that is still underway exploring this question that has arisen directly out of his time at Northwestern, and that is heavily influenced by his knowledge of physics, protein modelling, communication systems and deliberative democracy.

Deliberation Gateway is where that work is gathered, numbered, dated and open to anyone who wants to help build on it.