I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.
If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.
In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.
Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.
Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.
If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.
Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:
In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.
One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.
As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.
The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.
These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.
Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.
And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.
These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.
These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.
It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.
Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.
And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.
When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.
Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.
And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.
Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.
What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?
Faith.
Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.
Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies
The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.
Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.
A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.
Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.
That is our mission.