Quadrephania

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.

Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.

Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.

Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.

Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?

Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.

The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.

The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.

The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.

And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.

Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.

Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.

Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.

Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.

Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.

In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.

By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.

But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.

And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.

This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.

Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.

Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.

The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.

I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”

I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.

“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”

Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?

Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?

I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.

Intercursive knowing

Judaism, Kabbalah, Love

From Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

…the Zohar’s sexual symbolism reflects the influence of two different tendencies. Insofar as it shows a positive attitude towards the function of sexual life, within the limits ordained by divine law, it may be said to represent a genuinely Jewish outlook. Chastity is indeed one of the highest moral values of Judaism: Joseph, who by his chastity has “upheld the covenant” is regarded by the Midrash and the Kabbalah as the prototype of the righteous man, the true Zaddik. But at no time was sexual asceticism accorded the dignity of a religious value, and the mystics make no exception. Too deeply was the first command of the Torah, Be fruitful and multiply, impressed upon their minds. The contrast to other forms of mysticism is striking enough to be worth mentioning: non-Jewish mysticism, which glorified and propagated asceticism, ended sometimes by transplanting eroticism into the relation of man to God. Kabbalism, on the other hand, was tempted to discover the mystery of sex within God himself. For the rest it rejected asceticism and continued to regard marriage not as a concession to the frailty of the flesh but as one of the most sacred mysteries.

Every true marriage is a symbolical realization of the union of God and the Shekhinah. In a tract on the “union of a man with his wife” which was later ascribed to Nahmanides, Joseph Gikatila gave a similar interpretation of the mystical significance of marriage. The Kabbalists deduced from Genesis 4:1: “And Adam knew Eve his wife” that “knowledge” [Da’at] always means the realization of a union, be it that of wisdom (or reason) [Chokhmah] and intelligence [Binah], or that of the King [Keter] and the Shekhinah [Malkhut]. Thus knowledge [Da’at] itself received a sublime erotic quality in this new Gnostical system, and this point is often stressed in Kabbalistic writings.

This passage expresses at once how I know marriage, philosophy, design and everything in life I care about. This is why I am Jewish.

No complete systematic whole (synthetically constructed or analytically construed) is sufficient to sustain enworldment.

A whole must also form a gestalt whole (conceived as a whole and articulated as parts belonging to that whole).

And we ourselves must belong within this whole as participants who, through our participation, instaurate it.

But to do so requires inward and outward change, co-figuration of first-person and third-person, nearly always by way of second-person. We can systematize the little we can conceive whole without any disruption to our own subjectivity.

In craft artifact and artifex change together.

The change to oneself in first-person is experienced as the click of gestalt shift.

Gestalt-shift (whether perceptual, or conceptual, or both) is a manifestation of change within one’s pre-thought order among intuitions — to the structured receptivity to whom reality is given in direct perception long before truth is given. The name of this inter-ordered intuitive being — being who precedes and conditions all experience — is faith. Faith is not a property of belief. Belief is the property of faith, the deepest self who does all believing, perceiving, conceiving and — much later — construal and construction.

New words for new properly subjective understanding. A receptivity to some form of being — a capacity to take a given. We will call this an enception. A new enceptive order that manifest new conceptive wholes and articulations within wholes is a gestell, an enframing. (Heidegger was right that technik enframes, but he was wrong that only technik enframes. I will say that technik dysenframes.)

A perceptual gestalt shift, a conceptual hermeneutic shift, an equipped perceptual-conceptual-practical scientific paradigm shift, a comprehensive religious conversion in which one is reborn into a new world — these are all gestell shifts, changes of faith, transfifurations of soul that give us reality in new ways. They are all re-enworldments.

But listen: we are tuned for objective knowledge. We forever confuse subjective changes which manifest objective change with changes to the objects themselves. We have language for the objective changes we notice in our perceptual and conceptual field, but we lack language for the subject who changed and for the nature of change a subject undergoes. When we attempt to talk about subjects, we evert them into psychic objects so we can grasp them scientifically as psychological phenomena or as behaviors resulting from something nonexistently unknowable.

This is all just the latest iteration of the same primordial category mistake of subject and object, the edenic eversion that has plagued us as a species from before the beginning of history. We think we can grab Eden by the apples and own it as property, and we cannot.

We don’t know how to avoid knowing that knowledge is objective comprehension and mastery. We think we only know for as long as we can give an objective account. We cannot help but know that whenever somebody else’s account of things is incomprehensible and makes no to us that they are full of nonsense.

So the “masters of reality” white-knuckle whatever given reality is graspable to them right now — which to them is “objective reality” itself — and stack these little givens sky high. Their constructions reach the roof of heaven in the grandest narrative edifices, which remain such, even when the grand narrative is a tale of rejection of grand narratives. The new structures collapse as fast as they are constructed and soon the tall tale of overcoming tall tales is replaced with a new tall tale of oppression by the old constructions. The Tower forever topples into The Tower. The blocks are too small for the height. Only a single block the size of the tower itself can bear such weight.

I am less and less able to doubt the truth in the dialectical Sefirot. I experience it as excessively true.

Systemic gift-rejection

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Any service designer will tell you that value exchanges (or cocreation) are our core concern. At every point in the unfolding of service, value is exchanged or generated among those receiving, delivering and supporting that service. If the value exchange is solid, the service feels worth it to everyone, and everyone plays their part. If it stops feeling worth it, people stop participating, or they withhold full cooperation, and the service starts to unravel.

Typically we think of these exchanges as investments and returns. ?Everyone puts something into a transaction, in order to get something out.

But there is another element of value exchange that is neglected, if not rejected: those things we give because we need to give them. These are our gifts, and giving these gifts gives our lives purpose.

When we are given opportunities to give our gifts, life enters the services we serve, and invests our organization with purpose and consecrating radiance.

Few system-builders consider this crucial and infinitely renewable resource.

Most organizations are ready to squander everything in order to avoid wasting time and money.

Years ago I made a list of resources designers should consider. Somehow the original list got lost, but I found one record of it in a list of planned talks:

“Lean How?: How Design Methods Make Waste Tradeoffs” – Lean methodologies tend to emphasize efficiencies of time and money, but these are often gained at the cost of wasting other resources. This talk proposes looking at forms of internal waste (time, money, team morale, organizational credibility) and external waste (customer goodwill, innovation opportunities, attention and brand equity) and seeing choice of methodology in terms of waste trade-offs.

Volume titles

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Works

I’ve had many names for this book brewing in my head, each with its own thematic emphasis.

The book always concerns the relationship between design practice, our own personal and collective psychic-orders (faith) and our experience of the world. The core claim is always the same: our conceptions of design, of philosophy and of religion could benefit from a specific kind of revision.

Of course, each domain is fascinating and contested, and has undergone ceaseless revision since inception. And the intersections between the domains have been explored, often fruitfully, at least in pairs.

My tall claim is that if we shift our understanding of all three of them together in a particular way, they can be understood together in mutually reinforcing ways, that they gain clarity, relevance and inspirational force together as a metaphysical whole and separately as focused domains.

I have seen them this way for about two decades now, and this understanding has only strengthened, brightened and sharpened over the years. It has been uncomfortable, for it has misfitted me everywhere I would most love to belong, but these social costs are far outweighed by the practical, theoretical and inspirational benefits.

But these reunderstandings do not stop at theory. They have pragmatic and existential consequences. And the reunderstandings do not start with theory, either. What has necessitated the theoretical work has been the inadequacy of words and concepts to serve reality as directly intuited. The explanations we give for things we experience often neglect, dismiss, obscure, confuse the most important givens of everyday life.

So, while the medium of the work seems to be philosophical writing, its message points beyond philosophical content, and urges some revisions to the fundamental ontologic that shapes literally everything, sets relevance, affords and constrains possible responses, before it even occurs to us to think about anything.

So what is in question, although it is handled philosophically, and philosophy plays a central role, is not a philosophy. Nor is it an observation or a practice. It is all of these at once. And once adopted, it constitutes a different way to understand, inhabit, participate in and experience reality.

For that reason Enworldment has been a front-runner all-along, and the likely final title.

But Exnihilism is close, and it might split off into a short work of its own, perhaps a manifesto. Exnihilism will emphasize the uncanniness of revealed possibility, always from nothingness (ex nihilo); the harrowing ordeals a person must endure in order to receive such epiphanies; and the changed relationship with nothingness that such epiphanies bring, namely that nihilism becomes impossible. But revelation is not the right word. What is taken — received, perceived, conceived — is not just sitting there like some thing to grab onto and have. A person must go out and meet it, engage it, wrestle with it, collaborate with it, come to terms with its reality, make it one’s own. They are always part-created, configured, co-created, crafted in active-receptive participation. We will follow Bruno Latour, and call this kind of coming-into-being instauration. The experience of ex nihilo instauration leaves the one who undergoes it an exnihilist. The title might be a bad pun, but it is a holy bad pun, and it is charged with life, and it is the idea most needful in these dark times.

In the first half of the 2020s, Second-Natural was still near the front of the pack, and from time to time it took the lead. Second-natural addresses a long-forgotten goal of design — intuitiveness. Over the last fifteen years, designers have become increasingly enamored with systems thinking, so much so that construction of systems has eclipsed the matter of holism. When designers say “holistic” now, they tend to mean “all-inclusivity” and it usually refers to systems. A system that systematizes every relevant element is, to them, holistic. But the view is third-person perspective. Even subjectivities are understood in third-person. These are objective people, who have things called goals, needs, thoughts, feelings and so on. (This tendency is so pronounced, I have wondered if younger designers even mean the same thing as older designers when they say “empathy”. They seem to believe it a matter of having the same feelings another person has, which of course is impossible, but that is not what empathy does. Empathy does pluralism. Young empathy only states pluralism as a static fact, with each person isolated within one externally unknowable inwardness, and with everyone obligated to believe this and abstain from attempts to bridge these inward states and to see out from them, even if approximately. Empathy, like justice, is successful only when perfectly, indisputably and finally accomplished, and otherwise total failure.) Anyway — what is lost in all this third-person systemic holism is the first-person holism of gestalts.

The result of this is a philosophical shallowness that materially harms design practice, and consequently the world we inhabit. From a system-holism perspective, once an all-inclusive functional system is constructed and all relevant parts are incorporated, the work is done. For designers who still pursue gestalt-wholeness, this is only the cost of entry. The system must also be spontaneously perceived and experienced as a simple whole — a gestalt.

If we neglect this, our world is experienced as utterly overwhelming and our dealings with it exhaust us.

And if too many of us come to see truth as constructed — as factual systems built up into theoretical systems — but these truth systems are not received spontaneously as given, but, instead, intercept givens, and replace them with elaborate explanations — then we lose contact with the world, with our own intuitive sense of things, and truth becomes rote acceptance and conformity of ideology. A population in this alienated state is susceptible to mass manipulation.

Second-Natural proposes a goal of good truth design, that equips us with words and concepts that balance systemic thoroughness, completeness and integrity — systemic-wholeness — with gestalt-wholeness, so we can enworld ourselves intuitively.

Because philosophy is a genre of design whose materials are words, symbols and concepts, whose medium is understanding and whose goal is convergence of gestalt and systemic understanding supporting enworldment.

And this brings us to yet another title Everso. The premise of this work is that we misunderstand subjectivity in a topological way. We think of reality as essentially objective, and subjectivity as essentially emergent from objective processes. Everso everses this relationship — flips it inside-out. All perceived or conceived objects are artifacts of some objectivity, which belongs to some ontology in some enworldment or another. This does not imply metaphysical idealism, but it does imply methodological irreductionism. Reality is given in objectivity, but what may be given is limited by what a subject may receive. And this self-ordering of subjectivity — psychic order — is what I mean by faith. Faiths are changeable — radically so — but they cannot be changed arbitrarily. Faiths are instaurated, and the means of such instaurated changes (or instaurated maintenance of stability) are… philosophy, design and religion. And of these three means, religion is most focused on faith states. But faith is not strength of belief. And faith is not belief without evidence. Faith is that by which truths are understood in the first place, and that by which truth is experienced as true in everyday life. Faith is subjective form.

I will also note that a personal subject and an academic subject are essentially alike, and differ only in material form and scale. Many problems and confusions we run into in design, philosophy and religion are topological category mistakes.

I feel like I have four books in me, but none can be isolated, which I guess is what necessitates multivolume works.

The uncanny craft of parenting

Autobiography, Design, Love, Philosophy

For the last several years, Susan and I have been collaborating on a philosophy of parenting. It is an application of a more general philosophy, and that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment. (For background see the autobiographical endnote.)

This parenting philosophy (like the general philosophy and all its various applications) is a relationship-centered philosophy.

The job of a parent is the intentional development of a parent-child relationship from one of inequality and dependence to one of equality and independence. Within this relational matrix (the essence of matrix) — within this social womb — an adult personality takes form, in stages, from relative passivity to active partnership in configuring the relationship. Adulthood is achieved when from this process, a new adult emerges who is capable of equality relations with the parent and with others, and of performing the job of parent.

Parenting is a strange craft.

In every craft a crafter collaborates with a material until a work is formed and fully actualized, often, in the process transforming the crafter. But in parenting, what is actualized is a fellow-crafter. Parent craft begets parent craft.

What makes the craft of parenting so challenging, fascinating and unnerving is that the process of crafting iteratively changes its own conditions and inner logic, often radically. It is like a game whose object is to transform the game itself; and with with each move, the game and the rules by which the game is played are reinvented.

Susan gave this philosophy an elegantly self-descriptive name: Raise-to-Relate.

Autobiographical endnote:

“…that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment.”

This enworlding faith began forming the minute Susan and I met and began fighting about religion.

I was a standard-issue spiritual-but-not-religious liberal materialist with a rebellious curiosity about religious understandings. I grew up in UU milieu. UUs prided themselves on religious tolerance, but that tolerance seemed both incurious and impotent. Even at ten years old, it was obvious to me that these UUs lacked all means of effective intolerance. Wherever they had the power to pull it off, they were more than eager to suppress opposition. The primary locus of this suppressive power, of course, was with youth. Even the faintest trace of intolerance would not be tolerated. And as I got older, beginning with a conclusion that religion is something to tolerate, and never seriously questioning or challenging that premise, struck me as a mark of shallowness, immaturity and boringness.

Susan was a lapsed Catholic on a mission to recover her faith and reenchant her disenchanted world. Growing up, she was a strange child, and was persecuted by scandalized nuns for the heretical mystical rituals she invented and taught on the playground. College shattered many of her naive beliefs about the world, and her religion shattered with it. She wandered into light libertinism for a few years, but quickly became disgusted and demoralized by it, and had begun systematically reforming her religious life to get back in order. Disenchantment is relative, though, and, by my standards, Susan was still so saturated with enchantment that her being hit me like a heroic dose of acid. Her weirdness and her discipline were magically alien.

Within our first half-dozen clashes she turned my own intellectual conscience against my facile utilitarian morality with a simple devastating appeal: “You can certainly argue utilitarianism, but does it account for the intensity of your disgust toward immorality? Do you really care that much about the smooth functioning of the social order? Really?” I was used to butting heads with philosophical opponents, but Susan hit from the heart. She won that round decisively and permanently.

We have been locked in machloket l’shem shamayim ever since.

Whatever I learn is set in our marriage crucible, and whatever I say or make pours from its lip. My philosophy comes from something deeper than philosophy. It can be expressed generally, but it can also be focused into defined domains of activity like design or parenting, and perhaps this is where it becomes most comprehensible.

The Yes on the bridge

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

My own philosophical development, guided by the problems I intuit and feel most urgently, has led me through but past the regions of reputability established by twentieth century academic philosophy. I carry with me the beautiful and indispensable insights of pragmatism, phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics. But in the course of rethinking how I think, why I think also changed. My philosophical goals and ideals changed, and now returning to mere argument, accounting or even understanding as it is commonly understood is impossible. I cannot see it otherwise, now: the goal of philosophy is comprehensive transformation to self and world together. It is a change in attitude, disposition, inclination, sense of relevance that penetrates beneath the content of thought, beneath intellectual methodology, beneath habit, to the society of intuition known as “faith” in given reality, and given truth.

The always-elusive goal of philosophy is to assist radical change in enworldment, from intuited “worse” toward intuited “better”.

When I compare the aims of contemporary academic philosophies with the aims of pre-modern philosophies it is clear that I have arrived at a point of consanguinity with the latter, but having never reversed course, never forgotten what I learned on my way here, having never renounced any of it. I’m newly ancient, pure post- with no pre-. If I am not mistaken, I’ve done some sort of circumnavigation. But being me, I mapped my course very sloppily. My logs were haphazardly kept and provide only vignettes. There is nothing resembling a positioning system, let alone turn-by-turn directions.

I am not one to reject the Enlightenment. With its blessed artificial light we have been able to read twenty-four hours. We’ve pulled a three-century all-nighter, and we have gotten a lot of valuable work done that will continue to benefit us centuries to come. But we are tired. We are starting to nod-off and forget much of the knowledge we’ve crammed and the wisdom we’ve acquired — most of all that precious political wisdom called liberalism.

We are starting to slip into hallucinatory semi-dream and semi-nightmare. Or is it death? It has been so long since we’ve turned out the lights and allowed ourselves to sleep. When have we had darkness sufficient to see a star-filled heaven? We can’t find a place to stand and look out that isn’t covered over by the orange glare of burning gasses in space-time continua. We have shed bright, sharp, enduring, progressing, effective light on the What and How of the natural world, but at the cost of instrumentalist light pollution, which has obscured the Why at the heart of human existence. We have gone nihilist but no longer know how to ask Why. Instead we inquire into chains of causes and purposes that might retroductively account for the void in the core of our being.

Why am I saying this today? What is my purpose? What transformation am I trying to effect here?

With few exceptions, my morning writing has no instrumental purpose, and is free of all technik “in-order-to”. It is an artifact of transformation-in-motion, an expression made for no further reason than itself.

It is pure Why, and provides reason for everything else I do, chosen or compelled.

Years ago, when I’d undergone enough formation-world conversions to have undergone a meta-conversion to creation-world (what I now call “exnihilism”), I asked myself if I would continue philosophizing even with certainty that it had no practical purpose. The answer was whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-bodied Yes.

This asking happened in a time and place. It was definitely mid-morning. I was definitely cycling over the Bill Kennedy bridge over I-285. I think it was spring, and it was either 2003 or 2004.

Saying Yes, two things happened.

First, I became aware that this impracticality had enormous practical value. It made everything else valuable. Whatever played a role supporting my blessed morning reading, now had a utilitarian purpose I could feel as real. I did it in-order-to do this useless reading. My chain of in-order-to was now charged with felt purpose.

Second, from that point on, my thinking did become useful, even though it didn’t have to be. It became useful for the How and Why design, for focusing design on generating that Why value in our shared world. This Why is perpetually threatened existentially by the nihilism of technicians, technocratic administrators, professional-managerials and other servants of technik — people unable to find positive motivation for action, and so instead motivate themselves solely with avoidance of negatives.

(I would not call this type my enemy. They tend to be the most conscientious, thorough, detail-minded perfectionists. They keep the world running efficiently and that is admirable, necessary and deserving of gratitude. We cannot do without these system builders. But this type drives blindly wherever it is pointed. People like this can serve a vital community or a thriving business, and drive both to success. But it can also be programmed with malevolent ideologies of whatever kind, and it will apply the same virtues to win successes here, too, of the darkest kind. Adolf Eichmann was a very successful man, and any business would have benefitted from his virtues. He judged himself just by the perverse justice to which he subscribed. Had he been American at the time he would have been celebrated today as a hero. If he were alive now, he would serve Progressivism, because, in this time Progressivism is the ideology of the successful and respectable. But this builder will construct with whatever bricks it is given, and it can get along perfectly well without any cornerstone Why. The construction will become increasingly hard to believe and even harder to love. These builders are the intellectual light brigade. Theirs is not to reason Why; theirs is but to do and die, with an intervening comfortable retirement.)

Back to the Yes on the bridge. It gave my life its Why, and provided a Why-grounded instrumental reason for my design work. I would call this my knitbone moment. This is when my taproot found its depth soil, and my leaf growth found its practical horizons: my meaning, my patch of garden.

I don’t know what to call myself. I am both post- and neo-. Post-respectable. Post-philosophical? Neo-mystical? Neo-sketchy?

Post- retains the treasures of the past, and avoids the universal sin of turning back famously committed by Mrs. Lot and Mr. Orpheus. Traversing post- after post- can bring us to the best kind of neo-.

I need to bring together the precise, empirically grounded, carefully reasoned philosophical work I’ve done with the reckless but fruitful intellectual leaps I’ve made.

Years ago, crafting myself design rhetoric to help win designers some space for design work in a technik-dominated environment unable to comprehend our methods, I gave this bridging work a name: “leap-and-creep”.

If designers allow ourselves to learn beyond our own limits — which is what the best design research does — we can gain insights that we can apply practically, long before we can articulate or justify them. We owe our organizations justifications and arguments, but these justifications and arguments should follow intuitive application in prototypes. If an intuition works in practice and shows promise, then a team can get to work accounting for why, and making arguments why it might also work “at scale”.

(This is why we have “premature” ideas in the field. Our conversations with our research participants reshape our general understanding of our problem space in elusive and pre-effable ways. With “new eyes” opened by rapport with our research participants, we catch sight of novel possibilities we were unable to detect prior to the change. We were blind to opportunities that we now very clearly see. I have a name for this, too: precision inspiration. “Rigorous” design technicians who know the correct techniques and recipes try to suppress these ideas. I view them as data. Rapport is the most important understanding we acquire in the field, and our “premature ideas” are often our first expressions of these otherwise inexpressible acquisitions.)

If we are required to justify and account for everything we intuit before we are allowed to try it — if we are required to creep bit by quant-backed bit to our bold innovative leaps — this limits a team to the tiniest and least inspired incremental steps. Anyone who works this way, or worse, imposes this way of working on designers, lacks insight into what design essentially is and does, or has forgotten this insight, lost their own craft, and, to put it bluntly, has sold their soul to technik.

This technical, soulless insightlessness is evident in most reports constructed by professional research teams at most corporations. The reports are stuffed with qualitative and quantitative facts. Some of the facts are formulated in industry-standard “insight” format, but these insights somehow never effect real insight, that is, shift the significance of the fact-set as a whole in some revelatory way. But approximately one-hundred percent of corporate researchers are technicians who see such matters as idle philosophizing, and a total waste of time. So research teams are burdened with the task of mastering enormous bodies of existing research content, and blocked from direct access to the people and realities that inspire new and meaningful interventions. But most large organizations have given up on all goals beyond fixing broken mechanical problems in their soulless offerings portfolio. They are in the chickenshit business, and they can add bullshit later, when the semi-functional boredom heaps are sent to advertising for its shiny coat of bullshit.

…but this is all epic-scale digression.

I have made some crazy philosophical leaps and landed on some sacred ground. I need to creep back so I can map it, pave it, and get some people to join me over here in exnihilism. I have some explaining to do!

Therapeutic oracle

Esoterism

I have an unusual approach to oracles: I bracket all thaumaturgic practice, and focus solely on the descriptive languages embedded in the oracular system.

The question of whether chance-based methods produce meaning or randomness is an important one, but it is an important question toward which I practice fastidious incuriosity. I keep the symbols and the interpretative methods, and ignore the oracle production techniques.

Let us call what is left of an oracular system when oracle production techniques are stripped away “oracular languages”.

Two oracular languages I have studied and value for their powers of spiritual description are I Ching and Tarot.

Both describe, in different ways, spiritual situation: the situatedness of some situated being within some situating being. Or alternatively the situation of some spiritual participant who participates in a specific way in some partially-known whole.

Of the two, I Ching seems to have the most grammatical precision, and I have a clearer understanding how it works. But this might be insufficiently informed, because I have spent very little time studying Tarot spreads, which are unmistakably grammatical. I Ching might have sharper mathematical structure, where Tarot might have more linguistic complexity that makes its structure harder to grasp. As I write this I feel that I believe that this is the case.

I am saying all this because I have an idea for a therapeutic application for oracles. In principle it could work with any oracle which claims to provide a snapshot of a present situation with a futural trajectory, which, unless I am mistaken is what both Tarot and I Ching claim. Each claims to be a snapshot of a scene. In the shot, frozen in mid-action is some occurrence. Some of the image is stable and some of it is obviously in motion. Some of the image is foreground, and some of it is background.

Imagine an image of a high school football game. A player is in mid-jump reaching for the ball, and it seems possible but not certain that he will catch it. Behind him is a player on the opposing team who is mid-lunge, and clearly a fraction of a second from bringing him down with a tackle. Other players from both teams scramble in the periphery. Behind this action are cheerleaders who are frozen in hope. Behind them is a blurry crowd. The scene is lit by stadium lights and a drizzly mist is in the air. The helmets might be wet.

Nothing in this image moves, but the image is of motion, and we can anticipate how it is likely to continue. This is what oracles communicate.

An I Ching medium will say that the coins or yarrow stalks work like a camera to pick up or respond to or configure (in Charles Stein’s sense of the word) the subtle realities in play in the situation in question, and make it legible to those making the inquiry.

A very brief account of how these situations are captured in the parlance of I Ching.

The I Ching describes a situation by a hexagram of six lines, or yao.

Think of the hexagram as a statement. Each of the six yao is a unit of meaning, analogous to a word. But in the I Ching, both sentence structure and vocabulary is mathematically rigid. It is more like a mad libs fill in the blank than a real sentence, with each blank, or wei, bearing a fixed significance within the whole sentence, and the words that fill in those blanks being limited to four. The syntactic location of these four words, however, gives them different meanings.

Let’s start with the four word vocabulary, the yao.

  • Yang denotes action, positive closure, light, clarity, resistance, resolve, conscious awareness, all of which in I Ching philosophy are manifestations of the essential reality underlying these qualities, yang.
  • Yin denotes receptivity, negative openness, darkness, concealment, yielding, questions, unconsciousness and unknowing, all of which are manifestations of the essence, yin.
  • Changing-yang denotes yang which has run its course, and is now transitioning to yin.
  • Changing-yin denotes yin which has run its course, and is now transitioning to yang.

Grammatically, each of the six wei of the hexagram is occupied by one of these four yao — yin, yang, changing yin and changing yang. Obviously, there are myriad gradients in this cycle, but I Ching divides them into four categories. As with any sentence, the meaning of the whole lives in the relationships among the parts.

A hexagram is constructed of two trigrams — a lower trigram that describes the situated being, the subject of the situation, and the upper trigram, the enveloping being in which the subject participates and in which the subject is situated. The hexagram gives the structure of each and puts them in relation.

The trigrams also have a set structure. They are read from bottom to top.

  • Earth wei describes the objective character — the What or That or Is — firm or malleable, settled or unsettled, noticed or undetected, in the situation.
  • Man wei describes the participatory character of the situation — the How or Can the doing or being done to — active or passive, strong or weak, directed or diffuse, in the situation.
  • Heaven wei describes the value character of the situation — the Why or Ought or better or worse or beautiful or ugly — giving moral purpose or resistance, vividness or faintness, unification or diversity, in the situation.

So the complete hexagram describes situations by giving us (from bottom to top, so reverse from this list)

  1. Lower earth wei — the What of the situated subject
  2. Lower man wei — the How of the situated subject
  3. Lower heaven wei — the Why of the situated subject
  4. Upper earth wei — the What of the situating being-context
  5. Upper man wei — the How of the situating being-context
  6. Upper heaven wei — the Why of the situating being-context

One last note: any hexagram with any changing yao is understood to lead to another hexagram. The changing yaos are developed to their changed state. So a hexagram with a changing yang in the lower earth wei leads to a hexagram with yin in that same wei.

I’m out of time, so I need to wrap up too fast.

The therapeutic opportunity is in the lower trigram, because it is only here that we have some degree of direct control over the present situation.

The kind of influence we have in this lower trigram is rate of change. We can push or slow each yao’s development toward its next stage. But we cannot reverse it.

  • Yin can remain yin, or it can be willed toward changing-yin.
  • Changing-yin can be willed to remain changing-yin, or it can be allowed to develop into yang.
  • Yang can remain yang, or it can be willed toward changing-yang.
  • Changing-yang can be willed to remain changing-yang, or it can be allowed to develop into yin.

Each yao in the lower trigram can be willed or left to develop naturally.

We can look at future hexagrams that might develop from the current one, changing none, all or some combination of the three in the line of development, again, by selective acceleration and deceleration of yao, the constraints being 1) only the lower trigram can be changed, 2) only rate of change can be influenced and 3) development cannot be reversed.

Returning to our image. We can slightly change the football player’s rate of forward motion by extending his hands, or easing back on his forward stretch. But he’s going forward at some range of motion and there is no use in attempting to reverse it. The ball and the other players are going to respond to the player, so his control is indirect. The crowd, the stadium, the weather and the lights are entirely beyond immediate control. Perhaps cheering and booing will follow, but that is later.

The goal is to focus on influencing only what can be influenced, only within the range of possible change, and accepting as given constraints what cannot.

In a way, this is similar to how I approach Enneagram. Most choices can be analyzed in terms of choices between integration or disintegration. As a 5, I can be pretty sure I’m making a worse choice if I am moving toward 7 (more freedom and pleasure) and a better choice if I am moving toward 8 (intuitive mastery, mission and unsparing destiny). This method gives similar guidance by identifying the most possible options and giving specific strategies for accelerating or braking, and taking all less possible strategies off the table. We can’t reverse changing-yang into yang without committing the mystic’s sin of “turning around” and becoming inert columns of salt or forgetting ourselves in shadows.

There is a ton more to develop, but sadly I must end here.

Picking up again (August 11, 2026)…

Multiple variations to this approach can be taken.

All approaches start from an established hexagram. This establishment might be done by traditional oracle, using yarrow or coins. My preference would be to conduct a deep interview with the advisee to collect a description of the situation sufficient to link the description to a hexagram. Let us assume for the purposes of the method that, however we do it, we have, as our point of departure, a valid hexagram, accepted by both advisor and advisee.

In all approaches there is a “natural” future hexagram, where all changing yao are assumed to follow their course and ripen into the opposite. In the natural future hexagram all changing-yin becomes yang, and all changing-yang becomes yin. This depicts the trajectory of the situation if will does not intervene. This is what is given in a traditional I Ching reading.

But in this approach different willful interventions are considered in order to steer toward a preferred future.

Willing consists of holding back or slowing changing-yin or changing-yang and preventing it from becoming its opposite in the future hexagram. Or it involves pushing young yang or young yin into a changing-yang or changing-yin, respectively. In other words, willing a rate of change: either slowing change-in-progress or speeding stability toward change.

Let’s call any intervention willed development, and any non-intervention natural development.

  1. Things are left alone to develop naturally. (The natural future hexagram is the likeliest future.)
  2. The yao in the lower earth wei is willed.
  3. The yao in the lower man wei is willed.
  4. The yao in the lower heaven wei is willed.
  5. The yao in the lower earth and man wei are willed.
  6. The yao in the lower earth and heaven wei are willed.
  7. The yao in the lower man and heaven wei are willed.
  8. The yao in the lower earth, man and heaven wei are all willed.

Each of these eight potentially change the future reading. They may yield a different future hexagram, or they may change a stable line in a hexagram into a changed one.

Variation one: The advisor looks at all possible future hexagrams. There are eight options.

  1. All lower yao are permitted to develop naturally toward the future hexagram. (This is the predictive aspect of a traditional reading).
  2. All lower yao are held back. The flow of fate is slowed so the present hexagram applies also to the future. The effort is primarily focused on changing yao, preserving the remaining yin in the changing-yin, or yang in changing-yang, without attempting to reverse course.
  3. The yao in the earth wei is modified. If it is a changing line it is slowed. If it is young yang or young yin it is pushed to changing-yang or changing-yin, respectively.

This is where variations present themselves. I’ll cover three:

We can brute force it. We can work out the eight futures, read through them and interpret them into possible outcomes. Then we compare the outcomes, and select one. We then focus on the specific yaos requiring willful intervention, and what that entails.

We can take a preference-first (ought-first) approach. We start with the natural future. The advisor hears the advisee’s response to that future, inquires into what aspects of it are desirable or undesirable. The advisor interprets which yaos seem to require willful intervention, and selects a future hexagram reflecting these interventions, repeating the process if necessary with different interventions.

We can take opportunistic approach (can-first). We start with the natural future. The advisor then interviews the advisee on perceived levers of change. What aspects of the situation seems controllable to them, given available personal or environmental resources. The advisor interprets these levers into intervenable yaos, and selects a future hexagram reflecting these interventions, repeating the process if necessary with different interventions.

Of course, all this raises a whole new set of practical questions. How does one actually intervene in each lower trigram wei, and, per each what does willing each yao entail? For example, how does one go about pushing a young yang yao in the heaven wei into changing-yang?

This will need to be addressed later.

Prototype archetype

Autobiography, Design, Letterpress

I was just poking through old posts looking for an old Rorty quote (roughly, “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed…” when came upon an old post from July 2021, where I realized something simple and shocking: language is one prototyping material. And I will add now, it is often not the best one, but it is inexpensive. Talk is cheap. And anyone who sits in meetings all day will tell you, it is inexhaustibly plentiful.

Whenever I think about prototyping, the same image comes to mind.

It is a bad digital image of an improvised artifact someone at IDEO hacked together using whatever materials were sitting around to communicate an idea for a surgical instrument that could be gripped in a new way. They grabbed a cheap plastic clip, a 35mm film canister and a white board marker and hastily taped it together. The thing induced a collective eureka and eventually became a real product used by real surgeons.

In the Rorty / linguistic prototyping post I announced an intention to make a linocut print of the IDEO prototype.

Reading this today, I experienced a moment of smug self-satisfaction, for soon after I’d written this, I radically one-upped myself. It occurred to me that it would be even better to have a sculpture of that archetypal prototype! So I painstakingly tracked down the original materials and reproduced that prototype. And then I mounted the reproduction in a shadow box for display. I will not pretend I was not proud of both the idea and the execution.

My feelings toward this object are bittersweet. For years, when I still belonged at my organization — back when prototyping was central to our thinking methods — the prototype archetype reproduction was on loan to my organization, and sat proudly in our lobby to remind us of who we were and to provoke questions from visitors.

Now that everything we do is reports and words and talking and projections and plans and complicated system models, we are no more designerly and no less corporate than our clients. This symbolic artifact that once served as quirky evidence of who we were became a phony poseur prop, so I recalled it and moved it to a location where it was still true. It sucks to lose a home you helped build, furnish and ensoul. But, you know, this is how things go. This is why I always say: “Bros before cos.” Never trust an organization. Wah, wah, etc., etc. —

But enough crybabying. I have an idea.

I am returning to this idea of printing the prototype.

I am imagining a small card with a lino image of the IDEO prototype, with lead typeset slogans beneath it:

Stop talking. Start making.

or

Prototype it.

or

We think also with our hands and hearts.

or maybe an edition of each of the three.

Wow, I want this to exist.

I want to own it myself, and I want every designer who is still a designer to have one.

This is what I love most about letterpress.

I’m not in it to express myself or to strut around showing what I can do.

I am motivated by pure avarice. I want something to exist that doesn’t yet exist, so I can have it.

And then I become more generally offended at that thing’s nonexistence.

So I make it exist. And then I get to have that thing, and enjoy that thing’s existence.

There is a beautiful, true, dense and compact book that should exist.

It does not exist, and its nonexistence is my responsibility.

Its mysterious absence is increasingly obtrusive and painful.

I feel it like a futural phantom limb.

Let them eat slop

Autobiography, Ethics

Last night I was bellyaching to my friend Zellyn about everyday workplace hypocrisies. Stuff like when we are invited into a safe space to speak our truth, as long as everything said harmonizes with official lies everyone officially believes with all our line-toeing little sleeve-hearts. And how the high-flying bullshit spouted by managerials, and all the procedural chickenshit they impose is all just trifling nonsense. On and on I went. I have been severely STFU challenged of late.

And suddenly an apparition of Fish appeared in our midst.

And this is what he said: “Staylo, how is it that you’ve made it past your 50th birthday, still expecting anyone to say anything resembling truth with anything resembling sincerity?”

“This is all a game,” he continued. “Nothing about it is real, except the penalties for losing and the rewards for winning. Those alone are real.”

“And do you know the most reliable way to lose this game?”

“You lose this game if you forget it is only a game.”

That is what the apparition of Fish said to us. It was right in the middle of a vegan Indian restaurant, and it was awkward. But we had to give it to him. He had a point.

It’s an option, at least in theory. I’m not sure I could pull it off and stick with it.

It does have a certain appeal. I am no stranger to contempt. When forced to interact with people who refuse to be real, I have been know to make AI crank out fake sincerity for me. I don’t even read it first. Such people deserve neither reality nor my energy. They deserve only slop.

I could imagine aiming this same contempt at that non-consensual hallucination we call the corporate world.

I could enter this simulation as a player intent on winning.

But who am I kidding? I hate that shit. This soulless soul-grinder runs on “cynical reason“.

But it would be both cooler and funnier to win. And moralism is always the mark of the mark.

Is this even a question of morality? Is it more a question of style?

If only I had only one ear to hear only one voice from one shoulder. An ironist is damned to stereo.

Hubris of dissent

Ethics, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics

It is truly hubristic for anyone to believe he has a right to dissent — to disagree with one’s supposed peers and alleged superiors that what they call true is sufficiently true, and what they call good or just is actually good and just.

But I am not alone in my dissent. I am backed by some of the most notorious characters ever known — including a madman, and a treacherous coward, and a lineage of sketchy mystics whose vague mumblings clearly confirm my dearest priors.

Yet, here I stand, and here is my witness: the faith of our overclass is perverse; and that is why this faith holds manifestly false ideologies to be true, unprincipled exploitation of principles to be just, and glaring evil to be righteous. And this perverse faith grasps itself as epitomizing truth, justice and righteousness.

I can represent the overclass perspective only by standing on their vacuum of presumptions and method acting their nihilistic logic. And indeed, I often must, in order to avoid incessant social conflict and economic ruin. I know this faith, its language and its moves inside-out, as well as outside-in, and, for this reason, I understand it better than most of its own adherents, certainly better than anyone around me. I can steelman their own views better than they can. But they are incapable and unwilling to do the same, because, despite their claimed empathy monopoly, all they have is a bullet list of synthetic compassion recipes. If technik is your hammer, every Why is a nail to hammer with expert technique.

This faith cannot see from any perspective other than its own. It will “do the work” anywhere but where it is most needful. Were this faith to transcend itself, it would risk experiencing itself from an exterior position and become a witness to its own false nature and collapse in disillusioned self-disgust. In the words of Edwin Muir “He is the Lie; one true thought, and he’s gone.”

If I am wrong — and if I am, I would be the last to know — I will have to accept responsibility. I will give a full reckoning of my wrongdoing, ask forgiveness, and and start again on a better path.

But from here, now, I cannot ignore my intellectual and moral conscience, just because it was outvoted by the innumerable others who turned over their own consciences to the anonymous consensus.

I see things that demand witness, not in order to achieve some goal, but because Why requires it.

Here is the full poem:

He walks, the enchanter, on his sea of glass,
Poring upon his blue inverted heaven
Where a false sun revolves from west to east.
If he could raise his eyes he would see his hell.
He is no spirit, nor a spirit’s shadow,
But a mere toy shaped by ingenious devils
To bring discomfiture on credulous man.
He’s the false copy where each feature’s wrong,
Yet so disposed the whole gives a resemblance.
When he’s in anguish smiles writhe on his lips
And will not stop. His imperturbable brow
Is carved by rage not his but theirs that made him,
For he’s a nothing where they move in freedom,
Knowing that nothing’s there. When he forgives
It is for love of sin not of the sinner.
He takes sin for his province, knows sin only,
Nothing but sin from end to end of the world.
He heals the sick to show his conjuring skill,
Vexed only by the cure; and turns his cheek
To goad the furious to more deadly fury,
And damn by a juggling trick the ingenuous sinner.
He brings men from the dead to tell the living
That their undoing is a common fetch.
Ingeniously he postures on the Tree
(His crowning jest), an actor miming death,
While his indifferent mind is idly pleased
That treason should run on through time for ever.
His vast indulgence is so free and ample,
You well might think it universal love,
For all seems goodness, sweetness, harmony.
He is the Lie; one true thought, and he’s gone.

Social metaphysics

Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Well, I took the slack bait and responded to one of those inane “watercooler topics”. I’m posting it only because the term social metaphysics emerged in my response, I think it’s a good coinage.

“Social metaphysics” has a nice ambiguity to it, too. It implies a socially shared metaphysics as well as a metaphysics of the social.

I take it both ways at once, of course, because somewhere in the neighborhood of Beriah, givens get radically polycentered — givens and takers, alike — each instaurating the other in givennesss.

Recovering design

Design, Philosophy

As a designer I care about three things.

I care about making things people care about for many different but interconnected reason. An example, might be a pen with an appearance and tactility that resonates with the role of writing in their life. Or a bicycle that rides beautifully, but also reinforces the rider’s sense of himself as a person and as a cyclist. Or… most recently in my career, the as yet unachieved goal of an organization who provides those who serve it by serving from it a vehicle for their own root service, the opportunity I call knitbone.

I care about coming to transcendent understandings with teammates. These understanding were inconceivable prior to the design research, but actually conceived through the work, thanks to the specific conditions imposed by design: 1) multiple designing subjects, 2) multiple designant subjects, 3) a matter of concern common to all, 4) access to the raw reality, the actual matter, 4) no easy escape from the ordeal, where the path of least resistance is directly into and through the inconceivability.

I care about iterative philosophical refection on design practice, and philosophically guided practice, and the design praxis that develops and the strange, strange design enworldment such reflective practice instaurates. (Instauration is the revelation-creation that craft summons to life. It is what Charles Stein calls configuration.)

Watch setting

History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

I heard someone say something darkly true: “Anyone more religious than you is fanatical; anyone less religious than you is profane.”

This same principle can be applied to just about any attempt at balance. Wherever we set our mean is the zero point between deficit and excess.

I say “set our mean” but in most cases, the mean is set for us. However far our group drifts, there we are. We read the news to calibrate our sense of normal. For the average intelligent citizen of wherever, whether that paper is the New York Times, Berliner Tageblatt or Pravda is purely an accident of place and time.

Chokhmah obscura

Everso, Kabbalah, Polycentered design

I think of Chokhmah as the infinitesimal pinhole of a camera obscura through which the infinite light of Keter projects into an almost as infinitesimal five-dimensional plane the width, breadth, depth, duration and awareness of the whole cosmogonic unfolding. In this projection within One, each one of us lives and dies as an everted holographic vision of the whole, a subject of Malkhut.

This is a response to a (god)heady passage from Scholem:

Among the symbolical descriptions of the unfolding of God in His revelation, special attention must be given to that which is based on the concept of the mystical Nothing. To the Kabbalist the fundamental fact of creation takes place in God; apart from that he admits of no act of creation worth that name which might be conceived as fundamentally different from the first inmost act and which takes place outside the world of the Sefirot. The creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God Himself. This is also a crisis of the hidden En-Sof who turns from repose to creation, and it is this crisis, creation and Self-Revelation in one, which constitutes the great mystery of theosophy and the crucial point for the understanding of the purpose of theosophical speculation.

The crisis can be pictured as the break-through of the primordial will, but theosophic Kabbalism frequently employs the bolder metaphor of Nothing. The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God is externalized and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En-Sof, the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is this mystical ‘nothingness’ from which all the other stages of God’s gradual unfolding in the Sefirot emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the “supreme crown” [Keter] of Divinity. To use another metaphor, it is the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence. Some Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for instance Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain that in every transformation of reality, in every change of form, or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible. Nothing can change without coming into contact with this region of pure absolute Being which the mystics call Nothing. The difficult task of describing the emergence of the other Sefiroth from the womb of the first — the Nothing — is somehow managed with the aid of copious metaphors.

In this connection it may be of interest to examine a mystical jeu de mots which comes very close to the ideas of the Zohar and was already used by Joseph Gikatila. The Hebrew word for nothing, ain has the same consonants as the word for I, ani — and as we have seen, God’s “I” is conceived as the final stage in the emanation of the Sefirot, that stage in which God’s personality, in a simultaneous gathering together of all its previous stages, reveals itself to its own creation. In other words, the passage from ain to ani is symbolical of the transformation by which the Nothing passes through the progressive manifestation of its essence in the Sefiroth, into the I — a dialectical process whose thesis and antithesis begin and end in God: surely a remarkable instance of dialectical thought. Here as elsewhere, mysticism, intent on formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the instrument of dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by no means the only witnesses to this affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking.

In the Zohar, as well as in the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon, the transformation of Nothing into Being is frequently explained by the use of one particular symbol, that of the primordial point. Already the Kabbalists of the Geronese school employed the comparison with the mathematical point, whose motion creates the line and the surface, to illustrate the process of emanation from the “hidden cause.” To this comparison, Moses de Leon adds the symbolism of the point as the centre of the circle. The primordial point from Nothing is the mystical center around which the theogonical processes crystallize. Itself without dimensions and as it were placed between Nothing and Being, the point serves to illustrate what the Kabbalists of the thirteenth century call “the Origin of Being”, that “Beginning” of which the first word of the Bible speaks. The somewhat pompous phrases in which the opening lines of the Zohar’s interpretation of the story of creation describe this emergence of the primordial point — not indeed from the Nothing as remarked in another context, but from the ethereal aura of God — can serve as an example of the mystical imagery of the whole book:

“In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recess of the mystery of the Infinite, En-Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, neither red nor green, and of no color whatever. But when this flame began to assume size and extension it produced radiant colors. For in the innermost center of the flame a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En-Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the ethereal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely unrecognizable until under the impact of its break-through a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and therefore it is called Reshit, that is ‘Beginning’, the first word of creation”

By the Zohar, as by the majority of the other Kabbalistic writers, this primordial point is identified with the wisdom of God, Chokhmah. God’s wisdom represents the ideal thought of Creation, conceived as the ideal point which itself springs from the impulse of the abysmal will. The author extends the comparison by likening it to the mystical seed which is sown into Creation, the point of comparison apparently being not only the subtlety of both but also the fact that in either the possibilities of further being are potentially, though as yet invisibly, existent.

Beyond the “servicemaster”

Design

For the last several months I have convinced myself more and more completely that service system development should follow the example of software system development, and formally assign a trio of roles responsible for the desirability, feasibility and viability of what is being developed.

In software system development, the product trio is:

  • The UX designer is responsible for desirability, that is, everything concerning user adoption of what is being developed. If we build it, will people adopt it?
  • The software engineer is responsible for feasibility, that is, ensuring that whatever is being proposed is developed within given constraints. Given what we have to work with, can we build it?
  • The product manager is responsible for viability, that is, for ensuring that the system once built and adopted by users will help the organization flourish. If we build it within constraints, and people adopt it, will it serve the organization’s strategic goals?

Of course, teams are collaborative, so they must, in IDEO’s parlance, be T-shaped. Each team member must have a general understanding of design, engineering and business sufficient to support effective collaboration. But each brings a depth of understanding in their specialty and their domain of responsibility.

Given that service systems are at least as complex as software systems – plus additional layers of organizational and logistical complication – it seems self-evident that assigning responsibility for ensuring the desirability, feasibility and viability of a service to one role guarantees that something, and likely much more than something, will be lost.

Asking one designer to specialize in and bear responsibility for all three shows a failure to appreciate either the complexity of services or of human limits. A service designer who attempted it would have to work 120 hour weeks to juggle all three of these responsibilities, or 80 hours to juggle just two of the three. And ask any designer which of the three always gets dropped first.

In service system development the service trio should be:

  • The service designer is responsible for desirability, that is, everything concerning service actor participation in the service being developed. If we activate this service, will all service actors willingly participate in ways that support it?
  • The service system engineer is responsible for feasibility, that is, ensuring that the service is operationalized within given constraints. Given the organization and its conditions enabling and constraining it, can we activate, maintain and evolve it?
  • The service system manager is responsible for viability, that is, for ensuring that the service once activated by participation of service actors will help the organization that delivers this service flourish. If we activate it within constraints, and service actors participate as intended, will it serve the organization’s strategy?

Until we stop reducing the vast and complex domain of service system development to “service design,” the field will remain stuck in the age of the webmaster. Remember that guy? The webmaster was the guy in headquarters’ basement who figured out what an organization’s presence should be on the Information Superhighway, and then sort of hacked it all together. He was an overworked jack of all trades and master of none, especially not the design part.

Today what we call “service designer” really should be called “servicemaster” in honor of our pre-UX jack-of-all-trades predecessor.

The big hurdle, of course, is that the closest thing we have to each of these defined roles is still the overstretched, overburdened service designer. It is hard to staff roles with no existing practitioners, but my hope is that defining these disciplines might inspire enterprising, restless operations folks, process or industrial engineering types, CX professionals, or random multitalented domain-blenders to come along and fill these brand new, unclaimed shoes.

Dang. This is funny. I might post this on LinkedIn, under the disclaimer that this is my own opinion and not the opinion of my employer.

Alchemical design

Design, Esoterism

Craft is material dialogue. Dialogue is conversation craft. Alchemy is the craft of crafts.

First, I intuited it implicitly in R. J. Bernstein and Gadamer. Later, I found it stated directly in Buber: our best access to divine being is through dialogue with others.

Dialogue presumes two things: alterity and a possibility of transformative understanding.

Dialogue requires two things: shared good faith to arrive at understanding and shared material to serve as the medium for this understanding.

In alchemy not just any material will do.

The material must be real enough to perform its configurative, transformative task.

In alchemy, material is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of ideal dross, and rendered pure matter (hyle), pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.

In alchemy, soul is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of accidental dross, and rendered pure spirit, pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.

In alchemy, fragmentary soul and material are dissolved and purified and passed through the narrow neck of the alembic into the chamber to combine and unite, and unified are then drawn back through the neck to recrystallize together, refaithed, rematerialized, reenworlded. New artifact, new artifex, new chamber.

This is why designers go to the rough ground of reality.

It is only here we find matter-rich materials that can support radical new understanding. What gets passed along in organizational media is precisely form, not matter. The form of the medium filters whatever data it cannot convey. The data that survives transmission is too anemic to support anything but compulsive rethinking of old thoughts.

It is the media, the material forms, the forms of understanding, the very soul-form of the organization that is in play in radical design.

Radical design is alchemy.

This sacrifice of form in radical design must be performed in the faith that resouling and reenworlding will redeem the sacrifice.

Subject and object shed form together in order to be reclothed, refurnished, rehoused, reenvironed together, all at once, in new enworldment.

This is the artifice of design.

Design is a craft requiring much technique, but much more than technique.

Mere technicians can only construct systems of unnatural artificiality. They are limited to assembling preformed components. They can build only structures the components afford. But today, the problem is the form of the components. This is why the design work of design technicians is sterile and entirely uninspiring, which is good enough in a joyless world that no longer desires or expects anything beyond fixed function.

The higher goal of design is second-natural artifice that summons whole worlds teeming with inconceivable new beings and meanings.

Alchemy might have preceded modern science, but modern science refused the very cornerstone of alchemy: its transformative Why.

This rejection of Why, first methodological, then later metaphysical, is the nihilism concealed in the heart of technik, which knows only the questions What and How, and hears that implicit question behind every truth. When someone asks “why?” the ear of technik hears a prescriptive “in order to what?” or a descriptive “how did this occur?”

Design is alchemy’s true heir, but to receive its inheritance it must reject the rejection of technicity.

Design must restore the Why to technik’s What-How so the technocratic world of techno-scientific engineering and management can answer to a higher Ought and serve our human purpose instead of enslaving humankind to its Whyless systems.

Not only are we allowed to do this, we must do what we Ought.