I have connected design and gifts for a good while.
When I understand the core service design concept of value exchange in the clear light of gift exchange, so that it includes, but also transcends, transaction, and enters the domain of freely given gifts, service design gains importance and universality.
Let us define transaction as any exchange of goods that is purely functional and impersonal. Neither party has any reason to feel any bond of solidarity. All parties performs their respective functions precisely as specified, without deficit or surplus. A transaction leaves a sum of zero in the accounts ledger.
Exchange of gifts is qualitatively different. First, it is bad taste (for it indicates bad faith), to quantify or even sharply calculate the value of any gift exchange.
This is because, (second), gifts always, necessarily and essentially carry an indeterminate, intentionally obscure, surplus.
And that indeterminate surplus goes directly into a mysterious qualitative fund belonging to the relationship itself. The surplus fund of the relationship is felt in various ways by the members of the relationship. It might be felt as gratitude, love, respect, trust, wonder or awe. But it will be felt as some sort of voluntary solidarity.
A relationship is not only, or even primarily, a formal arrangement or social status.
If it is a real relationship, it has a being of its own that transcends the being of any of its members. It is that transcendent third being who “owns” the surplus of any gift exchange.
A person in a relationship who aspires to perfect fairness is a person seeking transaction rather than gift, and that person will be incapable of forming real transcendent relationships with others. They will suffocate inside their own isolated tit-for-tat ingratitude and stinginess.
This does not mean that gift-governed relationships should be unfair or unbalanced. What it means is that the standard for its balance is not calculation.
The standard is an intuition of whether the relationship feels “worth it” to all involved. And that “worth it” is signaled by a feeling of solidarity, connection, goodwill, loyalty, identity and most generally, love, which is what value is.
I had a wonderful talk yesterday morning with one of my oldest, dearest friends. She is working on her brand, and has been preparing a brief for a talented designer who is working on her visual brand identity. She had this brief in mind, as we spoke about how she serves her teams and helps them serve organizations.
We agreed that the kind of brands people care about and feel connected to are collective persons with independent being that transcends particular members. Living brands are egregores.
Egregore is another name for a collective person. They are collective beings in whom we participate, from whom the world is received as given in some particular way.
An engregore enworlds some patch of reality in some specific way, and carries with it explicitly stated beliefs about being, truth, action, morality and maybe even transcendence. Each has its (Nietzsche once asked if gods philosophize, and the answer is, of course, yes — but to varying degrees. Most gods are like people, spending most of their time spontaneously perceiving and acting, and only stopping to reflect and articulate when some bit of their enworldment breaks.
An organization that can only work by stacking up words and calculations and other constructed systems, who rejects the philosopher’s stone of transcendent being, who tracks its transactions in a pristinely balanced ledger, and organization that sells precisely as high as it possibly can a buys precisely as low as it possibly can in order to shunt all surplus into the pockets of anonymous shareholders — that organization might (or might not) have some kind of collective being — but if it does have personhood it will not have be one anyone can want. Whether soulless or mis-souled, the organization don a phony persona and try to run charisma moves on whoever gets involved in it. It will be corporate.
Egregores organize themselves by assembling persons who serve the organization as organs. The life of the organization is a distributed throughout its organs and their relationship, actualized in value exchanges and the givens they receive in common as an organizational common sense. An egregore in its transcendent being can be understood as a materialized faith that receives givens (qualitative and quantitative data), responds in particular ways and instaurates and evolves ethomethods for regulating its internal organ system.
All that.
Engregores for around my friend.
She draws together designers (“creatives”) of various kinds — each with a unique ideal value exchange — and brings them to collective life, exchanging their best gifts with one another, in order to gift clients with their best work. She is weirdly good at this.
Whenever she leaves an organization, people cry. They cry hard. They are grateful to her for giving them the rare opportunity to meet their deepest need in the practical world: the conditions needed to give their best gift.
But clients don’t see this value. The value is concealed as the indispensable subjective container of the objective value it contains and pours forth. The client sees only the objective outputs: the deliverables. Tangible things is all they are willing to pay for.
I told her this reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s cryptic aphorism: “The medium is the message.” Medium, as opposed to what? As opposed to the content conveyed by the medium. According to McLuhan engaging a medium changes the enworldment of a consumer far more than whatever the medium conveys in the foreground. You can watch hours of Howdie Doodie or Masterpiece Theater, and either will transform you into a TV viewer. In the early 20th Century the new medium of radio created a new kind of mass man, which could be molded into egregores of unprecedented size and aggression. Folks who doomscroll all day become doomscribes.
My own experience with a medium being the message was my encounter with Nietzsche. In order to make sense of the content of Nietzsche’s thought, I had to learn new ways of thinking it, and that way of thinking applied far beyond the scope of his books. It didn’t matter what facts he asserted. The message was the medium of thinking in a Nietzschean way, and that message changes literally everything. Pragmatically, what follows from my utterance of “everything” is different from what follows from yours. Everyone knows everything, but everythings vary in size.
This is when I brought up the branding classic, The Hero and the Outlaw. This book is about using Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey to find potent brand archetypes upon which, allegedly, living brands can be modeled.
The Medium is the message. A medium who channels talent and converges it in order to summon the perfect team for a design problem. Medium!
I suggested she look for something approximate to “The Medium” — the summoner of collective being.
I also suggested that the brand itself is not an archetype. The archetype is one organ in a brand’s organ system, not a representation of the whole brand. Brands are not spectatorial, they are participatory. And the brand invites a customer (or employee or partner) into the living brand as a fellow character in the drama.
Often the brand archetype is not even the hero of the story. Sometimes the customer plays the hero.
I used to be obsessed with branding.