When greed meets bafflement, and the anti-aporia reflex of Masters of Reality is overridden by fever dreams of striking it even richer, all kinds of awkward enthusiasm is released into the world. Some of it is true and most of it is tasteless. Market bubbles are inflated with the laughing gas of enthusiasm.
Few know that the word “enthusiasm” was originally a pejorative.
When bubbles burst, enthusiasm recovers its disgrace.
But never forget: spirit is also air.
It’s a gas, gas, gas.
Soul balk is where your soul hits its limit and refuses any further cooperation.
You tell yourself to do something, and your self tells you to fuck off.
One face of all is material.
This material is not a materialistic material of science, politics or society.
This material is the stubborn resistance and graceful pliability of the world around us. It is the world we inhabit, in and among whom we live, in and with whom we participate as part, and to whom we belong.
One face of all is spirit.
This sprit is not the spirit of spirituality, religion or culture.
This spirit is awareness and oblivion, revelation and veiling of what matters most — infinite value in which all life, ourselves included, is rooted, on which all value subsists. Value is love.
Between these two faces is self — materially given, spiritually receiving, spiritually giving, materially shaping.
This self is not the self of psychology, economics or romanticism.
This self instaurates. The self discover-creates and makes sense of everything. It create-discovers and makes inspired works. This self is instaurated. As the self makes sense of everything and makes inspired works, the self begins to make inspired sense.
Instauration of material and spirit is instauration of self.
This self is singular and plural, I and We. Any singular self, of whatever scale, from intuitive spark to universal solidarity is e pluribus unum.
Material, self and spirit are traditionally known as Earth, Man and Heaven, the Great Triad.
Translating it for my family: Assiyah-Yetzirah, Yetzirah-Beriah, Beriah-Atzilut.
The concerted effort to convene Earth, Man and Heaven for the betterment of the world, with no attempt to reduce any one to any other, nor to allow any one to dominate or predominate over any other — but rather to find the right momentary constellation for present place, the present selves in the present time — this wants a name, but whatever has a name invites lust and conquest.
Perhaps the name “design” was as good a name as any.
Obfujection is a portmanteau of obfuscation and objection. It names a common and pervasive category mistake: taking a subject as an object, thereby obscuring subjective reality as attention is misdirected toward a phantom object with various objective properties.
A place where obfujection is the norm is selfhood. We obfuject ourselves into identities, roles, types, or personas — none of which is self, of course, which is subject.
Another place is virtues. Empathy is a big one right now. It is taken as a psychic virtue-thing that becomes an object of fascination, studied, discussed, extolled — but seldom actually done to acquire understanding of why someone perceives, conceives, and responds to things in ways that differ from us.
Another one that annoys designers: when appropriators of design language call an artifact they’re making “an experience”, they are obfujecting the subjective experience real designers aim to produce and replacing it with an object, which is a damn pity, since “experience” language was intended precisely to shift focus to the subject.
Religion is an obfujection wonderland. Atheists and theists alike obfuject God as a being who exists or doesn’t exist. Entire religious sects have been founded on obfujections that turned exemplary subjects, with whom we were to turn together toward God, into human idols.
We even obfuject academic subjects when we reduce them to factual knowledge.
Obfujection performs two useful functions.
First, it tames unnervingly incomprehensible realities by everting them into harmless graspable things.
Second, it absolves us from participation in realities that might threaten our current enworlding subject.
I have used the word polycentric to mean two different things.
The original meaning, used by Michael Polanyi and later by Elinor Ostrom, referred to things (usually social things) having multiple agential centers. Only by understanding the semi-automous operation of these centers within an irreducible system can a polycentric phenomenon be comprehended.
The other, less orthodox meaning came from design industry resonances. Starting with Don Norman, design has decentered the designed artifact in order to recenter it on the people for whom the artifact is intended. User-centered design, then, more generally customer-centered, employee centered, patient-centered, student-centered, citizen-centered, name-your-role-centered design. These have been generalized into human-centered design. I’m not sure what we call what Temple Grandin did…
To my designer ear, polycentric described a key difference between the old one-person-at-a-time-centricity design I had done in my former life, and the new focus on interactions among multiple persons in service design.
But the more I practice service design the more these two meanings diverge and seem to need two separate words.
Service designers are vitally concerned with the polycentricity ?of social systems. How do polycentric systems (which include but transcend project-sponsoring organizations) produce various outcomes, or fail to produce them? ?How are all these agential centers (“service actors”) interacting to strengthen or weaken the organization?
But that is only the objective third-person behaviorist understanding of the system. It gives us the What and How, but it does not give us the Why, which is the key to influencing the behaviors that produce the outcomes. To get at the Why we must understand the view of the system from within, from the perspective of each of the service actors who participate in it — who, based on what they experience, respond one way or another, supporting, undermining or abandoning the service.
I have been experimenting with using the word polycentric in its normal sense to describe in the third-person, the objective, emergent phenomenon of systems with multiple agential centers.
To describe the subjective, first-person interlapping experiences of multiple persons participating in an interactive social system (service or otherwise) I am using the word pluricentric.
As I’ve mentioned a half-zillion times before, service design considers the experience and agency of all participants in a service. We consider not only the people who receive the service, but also those who deliver the service, and those who support them. And of these who deliver and support the service, we consider more than just employees, but people outside the organization who partner with the organization. And often we consider indirect recipients of service, for example, members of a household, who influence the experience and actions of the direct recipient.
Every one of these service actors has a different experience of the service. A nurse, for example, almost certainly has a different overall life experience from many patients. When a patient and a nurse interact in a medical setting like an emergency room, that encounter is very different for the nurse, for the patient and for the patient’s spouse. Each wants different things from the interaction and experience it very differently. Part of what they all experience is what they perceive everyone else’s experience to be, so there is a feedback dynamic among participants. The nurse responds to the patient’s pain and the spouse’s fear, and both patient and spouse are keenly sensitive to the response and what it indicates about the person on whom they are suddenly so terrifyingly dependent.
The field of design is early in its development researching pluricentric dynamics and responding to them with design interventions capable of producing favorable polycentric outcomes.
The trends suggest retardation or regression rather than progress. So far, the emerging field of journey management has been monocentric. It is possible to hack it into a semblance of polycentricity, but doing so requires vigorous upstream swimming. Product management, after subjugating designers, and forcing them back into aesthetic and usability servitude, has rediscovered discovery to its great hubristic delight. Service design is whipped along at a trot too brisk even for adequate monocentric approaches. Economic hard times always hit designers first. But everyone says that ecomonic hard times are when the best investments can be made.
“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.” — Black Elk
I am starting to believe I hallucinated a memory of Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, joining a company (called Meta?) on a mission to build a chip with the smallest possible inbuilt instruction set.
According to my own dumbed-down-to-pure-myth understanding, “instruction set” means hardcoded know-how. Meta wanted as much of this know-how to be softcoded. The chip aspired to silicon tabula rasa. It was a chip with no instincts, no reflexes, no presuppositions, no unconscious, no bodily autonomy. It was all explication, derived from atomic logical operations, infinitely flexible, constrained only by pure logical necessity.
It was the image of our ideal self. It was another of our those artificial Adam projects we compulsively spin up,
In my recollection, the concept utterly failed.
Now that my delicate, impressionistic dream-memory is safely set down, I will see how much of this is factually accurate.
Most endure the nihilism of our time with dull, dutiful complacency. Others blame and lash out at specific people as the cause of their deprivation. Others suspect unknown people and groups, and look for signs pointing to the source of this pervasive wrongness. Others hole up and shelter themselves against the times, hoping meaning will come to them in their solitude.
But meaninglessness is the air we breathe. Through emoting mouths, we exhale and exhale and exhale our remaining spirit.
Our time knows neither how to find meaning, nor how to make it. If, by some everyday miracle, meaning finds life, we do not know how to nurture it. Rather, we kill it in the cradle. In our vacuating ethos, such euthanasia is the only ethical thing to do. We may detest this world, but we love the ethics that sustains it.
Why excuse poor behavior, when you can romanticize it? Some hifalutin euphemisms:
When I was four or five, my parents gave me my first album. Beatles Revolver. One of my favorite songs on that album, and possibly my favorite song ever, is “She Said She Said”.
Strangely, all my life, until quite recently, I misheard the lyrics. Even now, if I don’t pay attention I still hear it as:
And you’re making me feel like
I’ve never belonged
That has been the dominant feeling of my entire life.
Enneagram experts tell me I am a five wing with a four wing. I’ve wondered if I might not be a four with a five wing. Five, for me, is how four expresses itself. I’m almost a four with an everything-else wing. I cannot get along with the other kids.
Part of my belonging problem might be that my judgments are very much my own.
On all important matters, I know exactly what I think. It is a direct result of effort. If I find myself at a theoretical, practical or moral loss, that loss becomes a philosophical problem. I have processed mountains of lead into gold with my industrial strength philosopher’s stone.
Further, I have paid close attention to what I admire (even when others disparage it) and what I experience as contemptible (even when others praise or “normalize” it).
I take my own judgments far more seriously than those who have not put effort into forming their own personal opinions, but who, instead subscribe to general expert-certified opinion, as if it were another cloud service, like Spotify, NYT or Netflix. I find the streaming beliefs of the people around me to be wrong at best, and more often vapid and embarrassing. The worst of these beliefs are the beliefs these subscribers hold about their own personal virtues. Self-awareness. Critical thinking. Empathy. Justice. Questioning of authority. Radicalness. The belief that they epitomize these things is pure metacognitive incompetence.
For this reason, whenever I am praised to condemned, I don’t think any better or worse of myself.
But that does not mean lame beliefs, stupid political attitudes, negative judgments or failure to appreciate my contributions do not bother me. They bother me a lot.
But they do not bother me as judgments of me as a person.
I experience them as evidence that I will never belong to groups who subscribe to such nonsense.
And it subscription nonsense, by which most groups are defined. The subscription medium, not the steaming content, that is the message.
I experience it as the hopelessness of ever having a place.
In times like these, we are forced to choose between social alienation or self alienation. Most take the road of self alienation.
They’re making me feel like
I’ll never belong.
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”
For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.
These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.
Its been over a decade since I read this essay, so I cannot remember, but wikipedia assures me that Isaiah Berlin said Tolstoy was, by nature, a fox, but by conviction a hedgehog.
Maybe I need to reread it.
I wonder if he offers any examples of poor souls who were, by nature, a hedgehog, but by circumstance, the foxiest of foxes.
There is a fine and blurry line between cognitive impairments and a sense of purpose in life.
Behind one species of hedgehog — let’s call it the involuntary hedgehog — there is a small set of highly developed abilities, organized as a methodology. Part of the methodology is seeing the world that reveals applications for the methodology.
This hedgehog can do all sorts of things with this methodology — as long as he is allowed his methodology. Take the methodology away, the hedgehog’s quills are plucked and he looks like a shaved runt fox. Tragically, one of the methods in the methodology is not providing itself the conditions needed to apply the methodology. If the hedgehog’s quills are plucked, the hedgehog cannot defend itself long enough to restore or regrow them.
I can use design to solve all kinds of problems — but only if I have conditions to design.
If I am prevented from designing, I am well and truly fucked.
Why would anyone say “I have time management problems” when they could say “I abide in eternity?”
Latour, from “A Cautious Prometheus”:
Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc. But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these. In other words, you in design as well as we in science and technology studies may insist that objects are always assemblies, “gatherings” in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, or things and Dinge, and yet, four hundred years after the invention of perspective drawing, three hundred years after projective geometry, fifty years after the development of CAD computer screens, we are still utterly unable to draw together, to simulate, to materialize, to approximate, to fully model to scale, what a thing in all of its complexity, is.
So little design writing pays attention to the social reality on both sides of design — design-in-the-making and design-in-use.
Whenever designers wax political, they fall in line with politics-as-usual. They talk about all the ways design should serve the political goals shared by all good people, opposed by bad people.
It is as if they have never designed.
It is as if they have never aligned any diverse group of people around a goal before.
It would be so much better if, when politics comes up, people would wax designerly,
We do not need to politicize design. We need to designize politics.
An industrialist lived the first half of his life solely for wealth. He worked hard and now he was worth nearly seven zillion dollars.
But something was missing. He felt a void in the center of his soul, and he realized that the only thing that could fill it was art.
So he devised a plan to become a patron of the arts — and not only a patron, but one of a stature exceeding his legendary reputation in industry. He would power this achievement with the same strength of character that overcame all his rivals and put him at top of the top. He would utilize the same set of virtues that made him the wealthiest man in the world — but this now these virtues would win him a place at the apogee of culture.
His innovative approach to art patronage would be remembered as the crowning achievement of his life.
So he budgeted one-third of his vast fortune to fund a single great masterpiece. One third of his fortune — two and one-third zillion dollars — channeled into one painting! Whoever was chosen would become mindbogglingly wealthy. Never had any artist in the history of humankind been incentivized to this extreme of excellence!
The patron knew he would have to proceed very carefully. A third of his fortune was at stake. There was no room for mistakes. To ensure the desired result, he issued a Request for Proposal.
At the center of this RFP was a very demanding ask: Provide a matrix describing the proposed painting, at a granularity of quarter inch squares. In each specify number of brush strokes, and, per each, color pigment, brush stroke size and path.
Only by visualizing at this level of precision, could the patron understand what each painter planned to deliver, enabling him to compare proposals and to select the best option.
This was his plan, and he executed on this plan with the effectiveness that made him the man he was . Hundreds of the best painters submitted proposals. The patron carefully compared them all, and selected the best one. The selected painter painted the painting, flawlessly and exactly as described, and delivered the painting according to the FRP response timeline.
It was the best painting ever produced.
Because the best design is often invisible, when design leaves us, it escapes our notice.
When I was younger I was “philosophical” in that casual way people are when they enjoy reflecting on life, but still don’t see much benefit in reading other folk’s difficult technical reflections. Maybe we want to keep our own original vision virginally pure. We think to ourselves: “You might need to get your ideas from books and teachers, but I have my own ideas and I don’t need to learn what to think from other people.” Or we read, but just to find others who also know what we know.
It was only a desperate existential need to defend my way of working — the conditions I need to design — that eventually drove me to do philosophy.
In my world, working as a designer, if I cannot make clear sense fast, I get chained to tasks that drown me in anxiety, boredom and despair.
If I hadn’t needed help wherever I could find it, I would have gone to my grave mistaking my very unoriginal notions of originality for pristine, untouched intuition. Naw… we learn from authority to exalt this complacently rebellious arrogant nonsense.
I am still desperate. But I have more inner resources for explaining what is happening to me, when people force me to work in ways that make design impossible.
I still get anxious and I still get bored, but I never despair.
I refuse to despair, because I know better.
But know and insist… and smile? That’s the next goal.
Susan teaches this: Warm demander.
I feel like a chef working in the cafeteria of an anorexia hospice facility.
I read Bruno Latour very much as the best kind of Catholic.
I read him as a radical Marian (and the furthest thing from a “Sophiologist”).
I read Latour as the most rigorously devout disciple of Mary Mater.
And Latour knows better than anyone that, just as no woman can be reduced to what some man thinks of her, matter is not reducible to scientific fact — that is, what “the” scientific community thinks of Mother Nature.
Nietzsche, the devoted son of a Lutheran minister, once asked “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”
But supposing truth is absolutely not a woman?
Supposing truth is a self-serving, unfaithful notion of woman?
Supposing this notion of “woman” makes relationship with any real woman — actual or metaphorical — impossible?
Now what?
Materialists are the incels of philosophy.
They are obsessed with an ideal object of thought they confuse with real being, and this confused obsession kills all possibility of relationship. The more the materialist obsesses over his object of thought, the more unreal and alienated his notions become. And she can intuit this. She feels it directly: this dude is interacting with some creepy doppelgängeress in his head, not with her. She recoils. Her devastating pronouncement: Ick.
She will open only to those who meet her as real, who converse with her as existent, who live life with her as companion, who become transformed by her, with her, in relationship with her.
She appears as herself only in relationship. She dysappears to those who grasp her as an object of hate or of infatuation or of distant worship.
Believe me, I raised two daughters, and I know an abusive profile when I see it.
The abuser’s tell: He arrives with a defined woman-role in mind, and he demands conformity to it.
“If you were a good girlfriend, you would…”
“If you really loved me, you would…”
Marxism is a collective abuser.
Marxism is an incel driven to psychosis by disappointment and resentment.
The world failed to live up to his high expectations, and he is extremely upset about it.
And he is making that disappointment her problem.
The existent real material order will not play her role, because she is a bad material order, and that is why she is unhappy.
A good material order would behave like a good material order, and then he would happy.
He would toil a little during the day, and write a little poetry in the evening. And the material order would smile sweetly and submissively. She would shelter him for free. She would cook for him for free. She would be an angel of compassionate care when he needs free healthcare. She would fetch his newspaper and slippers. She would perform her wifely duties, and not out of duty.
If she were a good material economic order, she would do all these things.
But she isn’t.
And now she will pay for it.
See what she made him do?
The highest achievements of humanity stand upon mutuality. Mutuality is for the mutual.
Ethics belong to an ethos. Ethics are the participatory norms of those who belong to some particular ethos.
When enemies of an ethos demand ethical consistency from those belonging to an ethos, even as they attempt to undermine, weaken or destroy that ethos, they use an ethic against itself.
Imagine a horde of hooligans flooding the tennis courts of Wimbledon. When the players, referees and spectators try to drive them out of the stadium, the hooligans howl accusations of hypocrisy. “If you really loved tennis, you would adhere to the rules of tennis, and drive us out with better and better tennis playing! See? You are no better than us. You are hooligans, too!”
The rest of the world agrees, but takes it further: The tennis crowd is even worse than hooligans. We expect more from elite athletes and connoisseurs of such a refined sport. Hooligans are just noble savages, doing what hooligans do. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to tell them where they can and can’t be, and what they can and can’t do? Tennis players, though, are like us, and we expect them to live up to our high moral and intellectual standards. Maybe even higher! When tennis players use their rackets as weapons, that is truly a betrayal of the ideals of tennis — and to our own.
So Wimbledon is condemned by the officials of the Olympics, and sports officials around the world. Social media goes crazy over pictures of the brutality of the eviction and on and on. Wimbledon is boycotted. Before long, tennis courts and vandalized, tennis players are threatened, assaulted and abused. Soon nobody even wants to wear tennis shoes in public anymore.
The entire world of tennis suffers because of the brutality of Wimbledon security guards. And the fact that tennis players think Wimbledon is above criticism only makes it worse.
I have no idea at all why I got so intense about this analogy.
I suppose it is because this to me is real. Very real.
Maybe it is because I am a designer who is entirely dependent on how people around me participate in the projects I work on.
When we initiate a projects, we attempt to initiate our client collaborators into a new way of working, and establish a design ethos around the project. If we succeed, we can do great work.
But if we fail at this — if our project participants refuse to participate in design processes — we are no longer able to play the game of design. We might be able to flex and contort and pivot and get some kind of work done, but we are no longer doing what we agreed to do. And this is fine if we are good at doing all these other kinds of work. If we are excellent logistics managers, business analysts, process engineers and so on, this is unpleasant but doable.
But if we are designers who approach everything as design, and this is how we cope with practical matters, we are deprived of what is needed not only to flourish but to cope at all.
And to be told, “just design harder and harder, better and better” is a demoralizing insult.
Just play tennis better and better, be extra, extra punctilious about playing by the rules, and eventually the hooligans will see what we are doing, and choose to clear off the courts. Then they might eventually even learn to love our sport. We must have enough faith in our way that we keep playing even when our courts are crowded with people who loathe tennis and tennis players.
Design is not only a set of design techniques, or a design method for effective use of techniques in concert, or a design theory upon which method is grounded, or a design praxis of reflective practice and applied theory, or a tacit design way resulting from a life of deep design praxis. It is all of these, of course, but more than that design is an ethos, which depends on a set of design ethics.
Whenever I hear designers talk about design ethics it always goes directly toward the same set of environmental and social justice concerns. I have yet to hear designs discuss the behavioral norms required for design to happen at all.
And then designers wonder why we seem unable to get the conditions we need to do the work we do.
Our work is almost automatically rejected out of hand by industrious builders with no tolerance for non-rigorous intuitive fluff. They need to very efficiently show progress toward building the next undesirable, unusable unintuitive thing in their backlog.
Design is only possible where a design ethos (at least temporarily) prevails.
Liberalism only works within a liberal ethos.
Mutuality is for the mutual.
I’ve been mulling over a project involving letterpress printed design wisdom.
Today, I am fantasizing about letterpress printing a chapbook, in an aphorism-reflection format inspired by Jan Zwicky’s beautiful Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor.
Here is my aphorism list so far:
I need more design-related aphorisms. If you have any, please share.
When I introduce myself to clients, I’ll sometimes talk about my “zigzagging career path” through various design disciplines.
The coolest zag was through strategic design. That was a time when I ran around solving “undiagnosed design problems”. Many problems that appeared to be intractable political, management or process problems became far more tractable when approached as design problems.
This has me reflecting:
My most rewarding projects have always been those where we took a design approach to solve a problem that seemed outside the domain of design.
My least rewarding projects have been those where we were prevented from taking a design approach to solve what everyone knows is a design problem.