When a person loses their soul, the very soul who could intuit the loss is absent. All that is left is unreality feeling the unreality of unreality.
I’ve quite a bit on ethnomethods — those mostly intuitive behavioral conventions that permit us to participate in some particular social setting. To belong to a culture is to know how to produce and how to interpret a repertoire of meaningful behaviors. We learn how to understand other people’s behaviors and to make ourselves understood by them; then we adopt them as habits; then we internalize them and they become second-natural, and eventually we forget them entirely and they recede into nature.
Many ethnomethods are never explicated. We learn them mimetically — by direct intuitive mirroring. We just pick them up.
Very few people can deliver a lucid lecture on the ethnomethods they use. Nor can they be relied upon to talk about them, mainly because it would not occur to an interviewee to bring them up, since they operate outside of linguistic direction. Understanding ethnomethods — a sociological approach known as ethnomethodology — requires direct observation and experiment.
But also, and I am sure I am nowhere near the first to say this: language is ethnomethodic. Cultures adopt a shared active vocabulary. And they speak in certain ways about their shared world. This relationship between words, communicative behaviors, referenced realities and speech acts produce mental ethnomethods. Through ethnomethods, people adopt cognitive behavioral habits, and become “inwardly” likeminded through their outward conformity to the intricately inter-related heterogeneous outward norms.
Why do I bring this up? Several reasons:
- Ethnomethods are the meaningful substructure of organizations, and organizations are the material service designers shape. When we do this shaping, ethomethods are a huge, elusive and difficult part of that shaping.
- Scholars who have studied how designers work and teach new practitioners (like Nigel Cross and Donald Schon) have observed that design practice differs in distinctive ways from other professions. When these practices are taken up by communities and become a disciplinary field, and are intentionally transmitted through education, training and apprenticeship they become an ethnomethodic tradition. Cross invented an adjective for indicating belonging in the repertoire of behavioral, linguistic and cognitive ethnomethods: “designerly”.
- Design practice has, since the pioneering design research work of Lucy Suchman, adopted ethnomethodic practice — but ironically has adopted and transmitted it purely ethnomethodically! Very few designers have any explicit knowledge of where our methods came from. Ethnomethodology is embedded in many of our methods, and when we use those methods we function ethomethodologically. If the ethnomethodological tools happen to cycle out of our work, the ethomethodological ethnomethods disappear with them. And designers, who are nine-nine parts technician, and maybe one part intellectual, are ill-equipped to notice.
- Service design, as a field, has its own evolving set of ethnomethods. Of course, like all fields we have our methods (tools) and our methodologies (systematic use of tools), and when people ask us about how we work, these are what we talk about. But beneath all this is a layer of ethnomethods that guide how we do our work and even how we think about it. I suspect many service designers see themselves as more intellectual than other designers. It is partly because we are required to explain ourselves, our value and our methods to so many different stakeholders. And it does require a degree of articulateness beyond that required of other designers. But this is not intellectual articulateness, but, rather, a technical articulateness.
- And, perversely, for this very reason, I think service design has lost almost all its designerly ethomethods. It started with “meeting business halfway” and learning the language of business in order to communicate the value of service design in meeting business goals. Then it became mastery of that language and fluency in speaking it, which means learning to think in it. Then it became immersion and active participation in business practices. Then it became learning new methods and approaches to managing journeys and products within journeys. Designers began meeting business halfway from the previous halfway point. And then halfway from that… then that… then that, until eventually, Zeno-paradoxically, our service design stopped being designerly at all.
And this brings me to the thesis I have been working and reworking, which I just summarized to one of the few service design intellectuals I know:
I’m coming to you with a growing suspicion about the field of service design that I think cannot be discussed by most practicing service designers.
I believe that the tacit philosophy that underlies and unconsciously shapes and animates service design practice has never been fully adequate to the problems service design is meant to address. The whole field has always stood on a shaky intellectual foundation, and this has weakened our disciplinary praxis.
But in the last several years, I think even that foundation has eroded away, until that now service design has devolved to total submission to that tacit philosophy that shapes and animates business management — a vulgar subspecies of what Heidegger called technik.
The intellectual foundation upon which service design was erected needs to be dug out and re-laid, so service design can bring design to the business world.
As it stands, service design offers nothing to business that is not new-and-improved business management consulting. And it is this non-designerly sameness that sets dull eyes aglow with recognition when service design gurus speak their language. Service design now sees eye-to-eye with business because it is no longer design, but utterly safe, unchallenging, non-disruptive business as usual. It is no more revolutionary than corporate progressivist activism, and just as phony.
Service design has gone native in the world of business. It has, in the process lost its soul and cannot even sense it.
A methodological note:
I’ve joked that brimstone is my fossil fuel, and that rage is my muse.
I’ve waxed bad-poetic about my daggerscalpel. Something bothers me dreadfully and gets me all murderously angry. I grab my dagger and lunge at it with full intent to kill. But as the weapon tip plunges toward the heart of the matter, it changes midair into a surgical instrument of healing. And now I know something that releases me from resentment.
Most recently I’ve spoken humorously about my philosopher’s stone as a bludgeon — I smash it into some leaden stupidity and watch it transmute into golden insight.
And so on.
Let me see if I can transmute all this ragey negativity into something beautiful.
Design is a very different way to enworld our world. It is not meant to replace other enworldments, but does retune them so we can all collaborate in harmonious difference to solve shared problems.
Design wants to solve these shared problems in some distinctive ways.
It wants to bring things into existence that people value, and which makes life in general more valuable. That is, it wants to offer things that people freely choose and want to have in their lives.
It wants these things to be beneficial to all involved. In the case of a service, the service should not only be beneficial to those who receive the service but also those who deliver that service on the front lines, or who support the service behind the scenes. The service offers opportunities to serve and to be served in ways that are meaningful and rewarding and make people thank their lucky stars that this service exists.
It wants this rewarding involvement to be true of its own services. Anyone who gets staffed to a service design project should immediately feel a palpable change for the better. Anyone who works as a service designer at a service design agency should feel this as well. They should feel that they are bringing a gift to their client. If they do not feel this in their hearts, the designer and the agency need to look into the design of their own service and get right with their craft.
It wants to do what all design does: make things that are useful, usable and desirable. Useful is the easy part. It is about what the design does for whoever uses it. Usable means we can use it intuitively, without massive cognitive effort. It means working with simple gestalts and purely intuitive interactions. And desirable means reinforcing a person’s values and overall sense of value. It means inviting relationship.
It wants to shape a reality that can be enworlded but shared in a variety of ways by a variety of participants. Each participant approaches the artifact in a different way, experiences it differently and responds to it, interacts with it, and changes it from their own point of participation. The single reality is actualized by the distributed agency of participants, each of whom experiences the reality in their own way. In Christopher Alexander’s words, a service is a semilattice experienced by a plurality of participants, not a tree-structure experienced in one way.
Design wants to create a world where a diverse range of people who might inhabit the same world very differently all feel at home and grateful to be here together.
This is why I design.