Studying the sociology and history of the physical sciences I have learned to see science and technology as inseparable, differing not in kind but in intention and emphasis. Technoscience is not the combination of science and technology but an essentially mingled field of activity that produces both abstract knowledge and concrete artifacts. Both the abstract knowledge and the concrete artifacts may be reinvested in yet more technoscientific activity to produce more of the same. The activity of inventing new concrete artifacts may generate new abstract knowledge. Among invented artifacts are instruments used to generate new abstract knowledge. New abstract knowledge might enable the invention of new artifacts. Generally, scientific knowledge is validated by technoscience itself through applications, both in the general public and in scientific facilities like laboratories and observatories.
This technoscientific validation, as I understand it in my own simplistic lay-scholarly way, is the essential difference between premodern and modern science.
I want to apply this understanding to my own world, the world of design.
I would like to propose a particular subset of technoscience, which, being technoscientific, can be understood on a continuum between abstract knowledge and concrete artifacts — all generated by the essentially mingled field of technoscientific activity.
In this particular subset of technoscience let’s place social science toward the abstract knowledge end of the continuum.
And on the right: design.
And let’s call that blooming, buzzing, semichaotic but rational middle region sociotechnoscience.
Except — surprise! — this is not a subset of technoscience. It is its superset.
Technology is the logos of techne — of making. Science and technology studies has followed in the footsteps of pragmatism, and in some ways has materialized pragmatism, to show how science is, in fact, a social phenomenon, and that social phenomena are largely material.
Years ago, at the peak of “Design Thinking” — when all the most fashionably visionary managerials were running around headquarters holding forth on “designerly” ways of thinking and working — my friend Stokes and I were having lunch on a bakery patio, reflecting on the fervor.
We were both veterans of the dot.bomb era, and had seen design go from chopped liver to divine golden utopian promise and back again to chopped liver. Apparently we were back to divine golden utopian promise, again.
We were both skeptical, but Stokes’s skepticism was better. It was informed by years of formal science and technology studies and anthropological fieldwork. He casually tossed off a remark that blew my mind and permanently changed the course of my life.
He said that there is, in reality, very little difference between how scientists and designers think and work.
He said that the popular view of scientific rationality and rigor is distorted and mostly mythical. It is a misconception of science that could be called “scientism”.
He said that if scientists were made to conform to the image and norms of scientism, they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs anymore. They would be unable to produce new knowledge or devise new technological artifacts. To the degree that they cooperated, they would be paralyzed and rendered unproductive. If they were to succeed, they would do so despite the imposition of “scientific rigor”.
He said that this is basically what happens when corporate managerials get all scientific and rigorous, as they do periodically, when being the visionary guru goes out of fashion and being a hard-nosed, rigorous realist is what wins admiration and prestige. They tighten up their belts and start imposing scientistic rigor on anything that attracts their attention, and everyone trapped under their managerial gaze gets so uptight and preoccupied with producing quantified evidence and ironclad arguments that it becomes damn near impossible to produce much else.
Then came the good part: The only way to escape this scientistic imposition is to be so unimportant that the managerial gaze never gazes upon you. This is why design was able to develop designerly ways of producing good stuff.
Design, according to Stokes, was too unimportant to attract managerial attention and demands for scientific rigor. Because it evaded aggressive management, design was able to work productively. Reflection on how this productive work was done eventually became a methodology and was packaged and marketed by enterprising nerds as “design thinking”.
By the way, this was only the second-most consequential thing Stokes has told me.
…So now managerials had a shiny new thing to grasp onto, distort, mythologize, misconceive and impose upon whatever strikes them as mission critical.
Rigidity, logic, argument, quantification, deliberation, linearity, safety, left-brain rationality are out. Inspiration! Empathy! Insights! Creativitivity! Nonlinear, lateral, liminal, right-braininess! Double-diamonds! Take risks! Sketch! Post-its and paper plastered on all surfaces. Methodic madness. And so on! Everybody’s gotta do fun, silly icebreakers, and do arts n’ crafts stuff with markers and pipe-cleaners, because brain science and innovation and all that. It’s all so zany.
We could, if we want to, call this “designism”. And I do want to.
Designism is every bit as counterproductive as scientism.
Anyone hoping to be productive is better off working in unmanaged obscurity. The minute the managerials pick up the scent of importance, they’ll be after you seeking accelerated production of whatever golden eggs you lay.
After one or two cycles of this, you learn to brace for the hard-nose hangover to come.
I’ve seen three so far. We are in the third right now, and it is the worst yet.
I am weary of this managerialist faith, this technik faith, this instrumental unreason.
I am weary of listening to its various strains and ideological expressions critiquing one another. Corporate capitalism, technocratic socialism, progressivism, “radical” leftism, theocratic fundamentalism — they are all just different flavors of the same poison. When they get radical, they only become more radically managerialist, and managerialism is the root of our problems.
I am savoring my momentary break from managerial attention. I am not sure I can make myself reenter its sphere and subject myself to its icky, icky gaze.
I have some golden eggs to lay, and I can’t waste any more time fleeing KPI-wielding productivity butchers.