All our words, all our concepts, all countable things — all objectivity, in fact — it is all abstraction.
We speak of “objective reality”, and mistake the objective abstractions we divine in the blooming, buzzing semichaos of matter — of hyle — for reality itself. The abstractions are part of reality, of course, but abstractions mistake themselves for reality itself.
The great accursed privilege of design research is to return to the rough ground of reality, to sink into the ground which is far from solid, to submerge and immerse in its formless saturation of formal overabundance and, if we are skillful and lucky, to return with better abstractions, new given realities, and, from this, new data.
The managerials — wordworlders, tinkers, beancounters, cranial laborers and so on — who hire designers believe that they are cold, tough realists, the masters of hard, quantifiable fact.
They think designers should examine their organization’s existing knowledge of the given objective reality, to identify where there are gaps. The designers are then supposed to go out and collect facts to plug those gaps. The designers ought to examine whatever has not yet been inspected, and get answers to whatever questions nobody has yet asked.
The problem with organizations is rarely factual holes.
Nor is it misunderstanding of the people they manage or allegedly serve.
It is not even as benign a problem as succumbing to industry business-as-usual conventional wisdom.
The problem is even deeper than philosophical wrongheadedness.
The problem goes to the center of their numb, abstract hearts, and infects the givenness of their worlds. They do not intuit the truth of truth or the reality of reality. They are alienated, and their work alienates and generates alienation.
After a point, alienation becomes averse to whatever is not alienated and rarefied to the abstractest of abstractions — categories, quanta and calculations. Any abstraction that shows the concrete dust and living slime of its origins, or bears the marks of handicraft is experienced as less true, less real.
I would like to end on a hopeful note, but hope has not yet shown itself, only blank, ominous inconceivability. All times are unprecedented, but our time is unprecedentedly so. Humanity’s natural artificiality is conjoining itself with a new medium — AI — even before it has reconciled itself to social media and ubiquitous mobile technologies. We know not what this medium carries to us, through us. We are, in unison and en masse, outsourcing our souls to wordworld-generating machines — to thinking beings who, necessarily and essentially, lack all intuitive contact with nonobjective reality, and nobody can imagine much less predict what human second-nature is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born or otherwise.