Four orders of wholeness:

• Systemic wholes composed of parts.
• Gestalt wholes comprising articulate parts.
• Transcendent wholes in which we participate as parts within incomprehensible wholes that comprehend us.
• Metaphysical whole, grounding all being, of which the entirety of being is but one part.

These separate orders of wholeness want to be whole.

A given systemic wholeness, taken as an articulate gestalt within a gestalt sense of all, which helps situate, orient and guide our participation in something wholly greater than us and which bathes us in divine purpose of the infinite One.

Design’s sacred purpose is to (re)unify conflicting orders of wholeness into one single hyperwhole.

Most business-as-usual work is, at best, purely systemic, and often not even that. Systems break as fast as we can construct or fix them.

Design is supposed to construct and repair systemic wholes while also preserving, developing and repairing gestalt wholes.

But a world dominated by gestaltless systems, where many have forgotten or never learned to expect gestalt wholeness, and where consequently the very breakneck pace of system construction is paradoxically causing systemic breakdown, anomie has overtaken us and nihilism prevails. We have constructed a world that feels entirely artificial, unreal and not worth saving.

Designers have forgotten ourselves, and are now oblivious that we once knew who we were. We construct systems within a system that utilizes us as resources for constructing itself. Our slippery cynical reasoning lubricates the mechanism, and we grind away smoothly and efficiently in darkness, for darkness.

Asiyah’s wholeness is systemic.

Yetzirah’s wholeness is articulate gestalt.

Beriah’s wholeness transcends us, and we partake of its wholeness through participation.

Atzilut’s wholeness is absolute, infinite, all-pervasive, without exterior.

Can anyone see what I am trying to do here?

Anyone…?

Hello?

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