It all really just keeps coming back to Liz Sanders, doesn’t it?

Our working philosophies are color-blind to meaning.

Our philosophy has What and How receptors, but lacks receptors for Why.

Through this Whyless philosophy we look at something that is useful and usable and otherwise functionally valuable, and are unable to distinguish it from something desirable. It’s the same dull blue-gray color, whether we are drawn to it for mysterious reasons or because it is more convenient, effective, efficient or reliable.

We cannot help thinking that Why is another What-How function. We ask “why?”, expecting an in-order-to. Why isn’t like that. Why doesn’t ask, because it knows. It intuits value spontaneously, directly. It is like perceiving a color.

I have actually had designers say: “If it is useful and usable, doesn’t that make it desirable?”

I think we know better. We just don’t know what to do with it.

Notice, I dont say that we are color blind to meaning, only that our philosophies are.

This means that we can intuit meaning, but when we try to talk about it, or think about it, or account for it, or justify it we find ourselves unable to do justice to our experience. And many of us are in the habit of invalidating these things we cannot talk about.

Years ago my friend Jokin told me a Basque saying “what has a name is real.” The corollary to that is “what lacks a name is unreal.” One of my job functions as a philosopher is to find concepts and language to do justice to our experiences so they can have names and the dignity of reality.

I can do this job because, for whatever reason, I refuse to deny any of my experiences reality, just because my philosophy is inadequate to it. My inclination is to take these experiences seriously and explore them to see what they’re all about. In some ways, I love philosophy because I am more independent from and less dependent on my philosophy, so I can tinker with it, without becoming too horribly schizophrenic for prolonged periods of time. Instead, I become moderately schizophrenic in short bursts, maybe most of the time.

And our meaning-blind philosophy has a way of disposing of unreal experiences. We relegate them to an unreal domain we call “subjectivity.” That is a fantastic place to put it because this same philosophy has no idea whatsoever how subjectivity works, nor how it relates to objectivity. Subjectivity is a realm of pure mistake, distortion and arbitrariness that interferes with our ability to perceive the objective world, which is more or less the exact eversion of what subjectivity is.

These strange analytical problem-solving design disciplines I keep drifting into — first UX design, then strategic design, then service design — all seem to attract practitioners with meaning-blindness. Back in the day, UX was overflowing with project managers, who saw the work as a conceptual closet organizing endeavor, and cognitive scientists, who thought the job was a matter of schema-matching between a user’s understanding and navigation structures.

It seems I’m always fighting for desirability as an irreducible element of design against people who don’t even seem aware that it is core to their job.

But I find design to be pure drudgery if desirability is not a part of it. Or, I guess I could say that only desirability makes design desirable for me.

And people wonder why our lives are so meaningless. Or they don’t wonder, but rather explain it away with one of the prefab diagnoses the Whyless philosophy provides nihilist malcontents.

When our organizations, our services, our products, our spaces are designed only for function, what do we expect to happen?

The service design industry has responded to AI disruption by zigging directly into radical Whylessness.

I am zagging.