Participatory know-how precedes and embodies theoretical know-what.
Existential know-that and moral know-why precedes both, providing material and motivation of embodiment.
Know-what is not the paradigmatic knowing, and to take it that way demonstrates impoverished knowing.
Our being streams out through our senses and limbs, through our tools, into our materials, crafting the enworldment through whom reality is given in this momentary way.
In a speech to Parliament in 1943, concerning the design of the rebuilding of the space where MPs themselves met and confronted one another in debate and deliberation, Winston Churchill famously said:
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
This is one of the wisest things any sensitive consumer of design has ever said about design.
Had Churchill done any of this shaping work himself his insights into shaping — or to put it more neoplatonically, formation — he might have extended and deepened his insight even further:
As we form our materials, our materials form us.
In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer observed how in dialogue, we become participants in a conversation who transcends us; the conversation has itself through its participants.
Craft is material dialogue.
In craft, our being merges with our tools, our materials, and the forms emerging through the craft. The craft reveals-creates itself through us and our materials and our tools and the forms.
Craft instaurates (reveals-creates) craftsman and craftwork.
From Charles Stein I learned the word “artifex”, the alchemist participating in alchemical transmutation, and this affords a prettier formulation — pretty enough, perhaps, for an alchemical text:
Craft instaurates together artifex and artifact.
To be alive to craft is to be alive to world.
In craft, the dense and surprising reality of the world and the dense and surprising reality of one’s own self attune and atone to one another.
We once again belong to the world by taking part, and participating in its being.
For a designer, choice of materials is choice of the self one will become.
In service design, our material is organizations.
Some organizations are people serving other people, circulating value, sharing life.
Some organizations are corporations with nothing but dry dollars in their veins.
Heaven help the designer who attempts to craft such a material, for that designer will fuse with it. When the designer’s crafting hand touches the corporation, the corporation touches back. The corporation touches the designer with its own transmuting corporate touch, and a designer is now human resource, incorporated, corporate. The world is now given in quantities, words, abstractions, techniques, agendas, opportunities, dollars.
Hermetic design is just a truer name for human-centered design, and human-centered design is just a truer name for design.