Premise:

Designers philosophize all the time. It is part of our job, and for many of us, it is the best part of the work, and the part of the work that generates the most valuable change.

But it is also the part that is hardest to explain, the hardest to tame and the hardest to protect. This is intrinsic to philosophical work.

This inability to explain and protect — even to gain personal clarity on what is happening — prevents designers from securing the conditions needed to do design’s most important work. And it impedes design’s expansive development into new fertile regions.

“What?” you might say at this point, “I don’t recall doing philosophy at work.”

Most have some notion of what a philosophy is. According to Wilfred Sellars, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Let us adopt this as our definition of philosophy, as thing, as noun.

But far fewer of us understand philosophizing as an activity. We understand it so little — or worse, misunderstand it so much — that we do not recognize what is happening when we find ourselves in a philosophical problem. We imagine that doing philosophy is like arguing or constructing a theory or indulging in abstract speculation. These, however, are merely using a philosophy to do thinking — to produce complex thought systems. Any designer knows, using a tool and making a tool are different matters.

Philosophy means immersing in a philosophical problem, of the form, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it “I don’t know my way about.” Which is to say it is not even yet a problem and what it lacks is precisely form. That is, it is an aporia, a perplexity, also known in the field of design as a wicked problem.

But simply naming it is not the same as knowing it. It locates it on a map, but it does not convey how it is to be in the place depicted on the map. It presents it objectively, in a comfortable third-person perspective. But philosophical problems a subjective crises, experienced from inside it, from the first-person. And this experience is not merely uncomfortable or ambiguous. They are often uncanny, unnerving, infuriating and excruciating. And not when the process is going wrong. They are this way precisely when they are going right.

But people hate this feeling. They feel hellish heat, and if they are in a position to do so, shut down the kitchen.

Design is hard to do because philosophy is hard to do, and we lack norms to help us discern healthy pain (like morning sickness, labor pains, growing pains) from unhealthy pain (infection, malnutrition, organ failure, death pangs). As soon as any pain happens, out comes the anesthesia, anti-anxiety medicine, quarantine, scalpels — whatever makes it go away. And as with many ill-chosen medical interventions, the pain is not alleviated; it is exchanged for some variety of numbness, and often some future health failure. It is not dealt with, head-on and directed toward recovery of health, much less growth and flourishing.

Promise:

By understanding the role philosophy does play and can play in design, design can escape the tyranny of misnorms (application of the wrong set of norms to a situation, which prevent the situation from developing toward improvement), and work more effectively in its current spheres of activity, and, better, expand this its domain to areas where other ways of working have failed to produce positive change, or even failed catastrophically and made matters worse.