To a shallow soul, depth means thoroughness. Precisely because depth is lacking, a squat sphere is packed more and more densely with details — detail upon detail, detail within detail, detail and more detail.

Wherever detail is lacking, “quality” is lacking. There is no reason to refrain from specification, because there is no awareness of the positive value of interpretive space. As gaps close, as details are packed in, as wiggle room is clenched into rectilinear and univocal regularity, there is no room for discretion nor multiple subjects, only for monomaniacal, monotonous monologic.

The elaborating specificity, the six sigmafying precision, leaves less and less room for error, but also removes space for interpretive multiplicity, less airflow for breathing. Everything closes in, de-flares and focuses into determinate double-sparkling diamond-hard unambiguous declarations, specifications, standardizations, determinations.

Flawless, gapless, loveless perfection.

The midas touch adds value by subtracting life.

Engineering eclipses design, again, this time in the name of “design”.

Adopting Christoper Alexander’s vernacular:

The tree-structure is all about monological clarity, monocentric control, conformity to the engineer’s intent, predictability.

The lattice-structure is about pluralistic richness, distributed agency, conditions in which diversity of intent may unfold in unpredictable ways.

In the monologic of tree structures, one monomaniacal trunk covers itself with limbs, each limb monomaniacally covers itself with branches, each branch monomaniacally covers itself with twigs, and each twig monomaniacally covers itself with leaves — monologic within monologic — until the monological ramifications densify into vegetative solidity, leaving no air, no inspiration, no breathing space for any other life to weave itself in. It is a habitat for one, alone. One subject with one objective truth, who will have no other beside it: a petty godlet in a hellish heaven of total omniscience and control, suffocating in solipsistic solitude, is crushed to undeath under its own lead halo.

Depth is not itself a plurality of subjects, but depth does open metaphysical space within which a pluricentric lattice of life may unfold.

In the Alexandrian Library, was a great collection of Torah scrolls. One of them was strange and exquisite, and regarded with suspicion. In this one scroll, the book of Genesis presents a peculiar Eden, in which a Tree of Knowledge of Quality and Flaw grew, and around it grew a Lattice of Life, never to be grasped and consumed, but, rather to be grown into.

When fire took the library, the scroll was burnt to ash and was scattered by the four winds to the seven corners of the ancient world. Legend says it was inhaled by every living thing, lodged in every lung, and that no amount of coughing or throat clearing can dislodge it.

In a commentary of a commentary on this strange Torah was an ungainly nine-line apocalyptic fragment:

At the end of the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood.
And the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
drape upon the ground
like broken branches.

This commentary too was annihilated by fire, and the fragment was burned to a single ash, which was carried across the dome of the sky into nothingness on a column of smoke. There, nowhere, it swirled and churned in boiling chrome blindness, until one day it fell to earth on the back of a snowflake, which melted on my tongue.

Sometimes, if we want to make a leap we must back up for the run.

Sometimes, if we want robust sanity we must open the hand of thought and let that handful of sanity we’ve been desperately clenching fall away.

As a designer, I’ve had design-oblivious masters (some of them “masters of design”) demand that we build on what has already been done. But often this takes more work than forgetting what is known so we can intuit what is really here. What is known can become like thick conceptual mittens on our hands and coke bottle goggles with mirror glass lenses covering our eyes, and headphone blaring deafening expertise into both ears.

When an entire field is built by shallow, hyper-technical, attenuated souls the philosophical foundations of that field can collapse under its own ponderous, dehumanizing weight. The entire goddamn purpose of design — including, yes, even service design! — is to ensoul and humanize business. So what good is it to gain “the world” (that is, a seat at the kiddie table next to the boardroom conference table) if we lose our own soul and humanity in the process?

To mix metaphors: A drowned lifeguard cannot rescue even himself, which is why 75% of lifeguard training is learning break-holds! A designer who cannot break free from the deathgrip of shopkeeping tedia and keep his head above managerial churn will inhale business, will breathe fungible liquidity; business jargon flows into his ears and out his business fluent mouth, and, in the process, he will become so dead and undead to design he will sink beneath “design thinking” to “design talking”: a management consultant in hipster clothing, oblivious to the manifest fact that he influences precisely because he is no longer a designer.

It takes a lot of time and effort to get square wheels rolling over rough ground, and this leaves little time to reinvent anything rounder. But this, precisely, is the one most needful task on our zillion item checklist.