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Design research is often split into generative research and evaluative research.

Generative research is conducted before the design is begun and helps designers segment their users into groups with similar goals, needs, behaviors, attitudes, language, and mental models. Knowing this information helps designers understand what to design and how to design it.

Evaluative research is conducted once there are design artifacts to test with users. The designed artifact can be the completed design, or the underlying concept for the design, or some isolated aspect of the design, such as its taxonomy, or its use of words or imagery.

To this point, the perspective I have offered on research is strictly objective. The researcher is working entirely in the realm of gathering factual information about users (or about the user’s response to artifacts).

But these same research methods can be used to produce subjective insights in the researcher and the design team which can be even more valuable than the informational content.

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Before I describe the benefits, I will will first need to explain the difference between objective information and subjective insight, because the two are frequently confused and used interchangeably.

Information about characteristics of a person’s subjectivity (for instance, descriptions of attitudes or feelings,) is still objective information, even if it is about something that lacks physicality or cannot be directly proven scientifically. The one acquiring the information still regards its object from a distance, and is not directly subjectively affected by acquiring the knowledge.

Subjective insight is such that it directly changes how one perceives. Insight is not about a subject, it is about the world the subject experiences. For the researcher (and design team) he insight takes the form of seeing one’s own world differently. This does not mean that the researcher begins to see in exactly the same way the research participant sees, but it does mean that the way the researcher sees changes in response to what he learns in an attempt to understand the participant.

(For this reason an insight is always to some degree disruptive to the one having it. Insight is not for the faint of mind or for the dogmatist. It requires tact, imagination, flexibility, openness and resilience. These qualities are not terribly common in the business world, which is why researchers and empathic designers can sometimes feel misunderstood.)

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Another way to see the difference: Objective information refers to the 3rd person. Subjective insight appeals to the 1st person.

First person, always means “I”, that is, the researcher, or the designer. The insight must come out of the “I” having the insight, in the form of an immediate experience — a shift with an “ah ha!” Anything less is not an insight.

The difference between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge is the difference between hearing the details of a plot versus becoming absorbed in a literary novel or poem, or learning about history in the traditional way versus seeing a historical film. In the former the emphasis is on the facts. The latter provides facts, but more emphasis is placed on how the facts are related and perceived as meaningful for a particular person.

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When generative research is understood to contain not only factual information — which is very important — but also contains subjective insight, generative research is revealed to be even more valuable than it first appears.

Not only does the research provide the design team with the material it needs to make smart design decisions (what to include, how to prioritize it, what nomenclature will make the most sense, what kinds of imagery the user will respond to, etc.) — it also provides an opportunity to shift the perspective from which the problem is seen and approached. This has two benefits:

1) Accessing this perspective is the same as “knowing where the user is coming from.” Knowing where someone is coming involves much more than knowing how the other feels, or what he is interested in, or knowing what words he uses. It is something that must be demonstrated, and the judgment on whether the demonstration is authentic or not is highly intuitive. To have objective information about the other, and attempting to use it without really understanding the other’s perspective is a sure-fire way to sound inauthentic and manipulative.

2) Acquiring a perspective for seeing a problem is creatively productive. When we get creatively blocked, most often it is because we try to solve a problem with our unexamined and unconscious habits of thought. Think about how breakthroughs happen: We suddenly conceive of a new way to think about the problem, and once we view it in this new way all sorts of possibilities open up to us, and we have a breakthrough.

A similar change occurs in the evaluative research when it is understood to test not only the artifact (as a sort of experiential quality assurance), but also how well the design team has learned to see where the research participant is coming from, and to demonstrate that understanding through designing an artifact that addresses that perspective. Full understanding of a research participant enables a talented design team to design in a way that demonstrates deep understanding.

This kind of deep understanding — insight — combined with thorough understanding — having all relevant information — is the foundation for cultivating the strongest kind of brand relationship.

This passage from Clifford Geertz’s essay, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” has been become a landmark for me:

In short, accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. … Whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like … comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems. …  Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

This presents an alternative both to the scientific understanding of human beings (objective observation and measurement of individual and collective behaviors and responses), and the romantic “empathic” ideal of learning to see from the informant’s perspective, or to “go native”.

What if everything a solitary mind can think or accomplish has already been thought and accomplished?

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Most of the meetings I have been in have been an aggregate of solitary minds. It goes one of two ways, depending on whether the group is more intuitive or analytical: Either 1) one or more intuitive individuals conceives a unified vision and attempts to win support from the group for that vision as conceived , against competing visions, or 2) a group analyzes a problem into component parts and makes decisions on each part, disregarding organic unity of vision, in favor of rational unifying devices, typically systematization (for integration) and standardization (for consistency).

Neither autocracies nor committees, however, are capable of giving rise to truly collaborative unified visions — ideas with the inner coherence of individual thought, but exceeding the limitations of an individual mind.

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My faith (a belief I hold solely by personal inclination) is this: All human beings are finite. Every human being stands beyond every other human being in some respect. If we experience as divine that which is beyond our own finitude, then every other human being’s eye radiates a bit of beyond.

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I told my daughters this about seducers: If you think you are organically invulnerable to seduction, you are vulnerable. Only by knowing you are vulnerable to seduction and consequently taking it seriously enough to learn about how it works and how to resist it do you actually become immunized.

Something similar holds for truth. If you think you are organically blessed with knowledge of absolute truth (a.k.a. “Truth”), you will remain ignorant — not only about particular regions of the truth that others know and that you do not, but worse, of the peculiar characteristics of ignorance, which is the most important thing to understand if you are serious about knowledge.

To follow someone’s line of thought is a form of mimesis. It is how one learns to think new kinds of thought.

But we want summaries. Conclusions. Bottom lines.

In this way we fortify our intellectual horizons.

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We read philosophical works to figure out what the philosopher really believed. We agree or disagree with those beliefs.

Or worse, we read surveys: books that sketch out the conclusions philosophers drew from their thinking. We agree or disagree with those conclusions.

But philosophy uses thoughts to show us new ways of thinking and to induct us into new ways of experiencing reality. We have to follow the thoughts, and learn how the thinking is done. Then we have to apply what we learn about thinking to have the thoughts ourselves. If we read for the sake of reaching the conclusions we fail to experience philosophy.

To learn the beliefs of a philosopher is like eating peanut shells.

To learn a What from someone is to acquire a new fact.

To learn a How from someone is to acquire a new skill.

To learn a new Why from someone is to learn to see the world differently.

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Sometimes when we find it impossible to comprehend a fact it is because we lack the How required to understand it.

To understand this new What, one must learn a new intellectual How ¹.

But sometimes we cannot see the point of bothering with it: “Why would I go to the trouble to make sense of this abstract, complicated stuff?”

So, not only do we lack a How that enables us to understand — we cannot feel any Why that might motivate us to learn this How, which in turn would enable us to learn this What.

And if you point this out to someone, the question arises: Why would I want to learn this Why you claim to know?

And there’s really no answer to this question.

Once this question is asked, the answer is excluded.

(Only love or great need makes a person want a Why beyond their own. This is why Socrates called himself a philo-sopher (not a sophist) and it is also why he was a great seducer.)

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Simon Sinek says it explicitly, but he does not know how to live out its implications: Only the What is explicit and lends itself to language. The How and the Why are tacit. What they are essentially is not conducive to language, at least not by itself, and employed directly.

But we cannot seem to internalize this fact and live according to it.

We keep trying to reduce How to methods, techniques, policies, or instructions.

We’re constantly attempting to reduce Why to doctrines, statements, manifestos, slogans, or images.

And we become frustrated and angry when this fails to work. It makes us feel crazy and occasionally lonely.

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So Sinek tells us Apple’s Why is: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo.  We believe in thinking differently.  The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make computers.” And he finishes with a coup de gras: “Wanna buy one?”

That is gross simplification. When Apple launched its “Think Different” campaign, most people didn’t wanna buy one, unless they were already thinking differently. They preached to the choir, and it made the choir start singing again, which was important at the time of the campaign, but it won few converts.

What has brought Apple its new mass success is not that it is different, which is a negative definition, but its particular, superior, differentness which cannot be understood until one participates in that differentness it by using one of Apple’s products. One experiences How using an Apple product is different, one also might experience the importance of this differentness and feeling Why people become Apple fanatics and find most other electronic products unsatisfying. We can talk all about the qualities of the experience, try to articulate what that difference is, but only someone who already knows it will understand the language. To everyone else it is fanboy raving, or evidence of a cult.

I would argue that Apple’s first truly successful advertisement was the iPod. Not the advertisements for the iPod (which were very good), but the iPod itself. The iPod involved unbelivers in Apple’s vision and converted them. The key was its relative uniqueness (at least to consumers) and its affordability. Had they been aware of a cheaper alternative, they might have bought it. But Apple smuggled its vision in a slick and affordable consumer product. When unbelievers bought an iPod and concretely participated in and experienced Apple’s positive differentness, they were initiated into Apple’s How and Why. This new wave of converts and their testimonials carried far more weight among the unbelievers, it made Apple (and enthusiasm for Apple) respectable. These were not fanboys, but persuaded, skeptical normal folks.

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The iPod story points to why experience design has eclipsed and subsumed advertising.

Advertising has its roots in communication. It still drags its legacy behind it in how it approaches problems: “What’s the story?”

Mere communication, even if it is outfitted with dazzling cleverness, charm or elegance, etc., even if it tells a good story, lacks the persuasive force of participation. Telling is not enough — everyone knows that — but neither is showing. And neither is “interacting”. Don’t just tell, and don’t just show, and don’t just interact.

When revealing a new How and Why, one must draw the other into participatory involvement. Social media barely scratches the surface of possibilities.

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Brand is rooted in Why and its immediate manifestation in in How: in how an organization approaches problems, how the organization manages itself and how it relates to its stakeholders. Some of this How is formalized in process and policy, but much of it remains tacit. The results of this Why and How is the What of the company: its offerings and its marketing. But clinging to the concrete What is the tacit Why and How that brought it into existence, and it is these that make a brand compelling or repellent.

The problem with 20th century branding is what is wrong with everything from the 20th century: it overvalued the explicit and dismissed the tacit. The objective manner of thinking sterilizes institutions by killing off what cannot be explicitly formulated, most of all tacit traditions, leading to that very neutral nothing feeling we call “corporate”. 20th century branding actually killed brand by trying to systematically construct what can only be cultivated, cared for, grown and shared.

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NOTES:

1. This is what is meant by a subject being difficult. One must learn how to learn it before any of its material makes sense. It is also why the more profound philosophers resort to the analogy of dance to describe that of which their philosophy consists, as opposed to its positive assertions and its arguments. A dance is describable in terms of steps, but it is not merely steps, and until the steps fade out and only the dance remains, the dance is not essentially dance. A profound philosophy is a new way of experiencing life. Philosophies produce thoughts, but they are not reducible to the thoughts they produce. Yet, the philosophy’s thoughts are the medium by which one is inducted to the philosophy, through the struggle to comprehend.)

Social being can be experienced:

• From within/participatorily as a We — to which I am subject and reflected to myself, faithfully;
• From within/participatorily as a They — to which I am subject but from which I am alienated and reflected to myself, unfaithfully;
• From without/objectively as an Us — to which I belong, but seen reflected, at a distance, in the eyes of Them, unfaithfully;
• From without, as a Them — to which I do not belong, which I/We see distantly and directly, unfaithfully.

Present — ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French from Latin praesent– ‘being at hand,’ present participle of praeesse, from prae ‘before’ + esse ‘be.’

The metaphysical continua of time, space and spirit (a.k.a. mind) converge in what some have called the metaxy, or middle — as here, now and I. It is striking that the word “present” can be used to designate any of the three. This point in time is called the present. The things around me are present. And when I am aware and available in the moment, I am present, not absent.

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Some species of spiritualism claim that here and now is all there is. Others claim that here and now is a means to a posthumous end.

Some people attempt to appropriate whatever others have. Others renounce whatever they do not already possess.

These apparently opposite attitudes share a deficit.

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To accept the reality of metaphysics means to give relevance to the surrounding unknown and validity to the unknowable.

To accept the relevance of the surrounding unknown means not only to acknowledge the fact that others exist differently but, but to live according to a faith that one can be taught and can learn to exist differently. It is by teaching and learning that reality is shared.

But what is the substance of the teaching and the learning? Most people think of teaching and learning as transfer of facts or skills. Some are able to see it as the transmission of vision. But does sharing mean giving another that which one possesses — whether this means handing it over, or duplicating it or dividing it? Sometimes, but not always.

In fact, what is sometimes taught and learned is a relationship to that which is beyond. And when this occurs, what is shared is belonging to something common that is greater than its parts. One feels the beyondness, but one feels the importance of one’s own participation through playing a part in an exceeding whole.

Then, without rejection of the other’s otherness, and without attempting to appropriate the other’s otherness, one says: “I subsist in our We.”

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Two quotes:

“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.’ ”

“Love and duality. — What is love but understanding and rejoicing at the fact that another lives, feels and acts in a way different from and opposite to ours? If love is to bridge these antitheses through joy it may not deny or seek to abolish them. — Even self-love presupposes an unblendable duality (or multiplicity) in one person.”

We question reality: we are skeptics.

We find multiple visions of reality: we are pluralists.

We choose one vision to advance: we are pragmatists.

We forget the difference between vision and reality: we are conservatives.

Some quotes on the sense of smell…

One by Benjamin (From “The Image of Proust”):

No one who knows with what great tenacity memories are preserved by the sense of smell, and smells not at all in the memory, will be able to call Proust’s sensitivity to smells accidental. To be sure, most memories that we search for come to us as visual images. Even the free-floating forms of the memoire involontaire are still in large part isolated, though enigmatically present, visual images. For this very reason, anyone who wishes to surrender knowingly to the innermost overtones in this work must place himself in a special stratum — the bottommost — of this involuntary memory, one in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way as the weight of his net tells a fisherman about his catch. Smell — that is the sense of weight of someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu [lost time]. And his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the whole enormous effort to raise this catch.

Two by Nietzsche:

“The mediating sense. — The sense of taste has, as the true mediating sense, often persuaded the other senses over to its own view of things and imposed upon them its laws and habits. One can obtain information about the subtlest mysteries of the arts at a meal-table: one has only to notice what tastes good, when it tastes good, what it tastes good after and for how long it tastes good.”

“Odour of words. — Every word has its odour: there exists a harmony and disharmony of odours and thus of words.”

Two by Heraclitus:

“In Hades souls perceive by smelling.”

“If all existing things were smoke, it is by smell that we would distinguish them.”

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Here is the bit from my Dictionary of Critical Theory that compelled me to read Benjamin:

Benjamin is a fascinating writer, but he is not an easy one, mainly because of his conviction that theory cannot be expounded in isolation… and that factuality is already theory. One-Way Street does not expound any theory, but its constellations of images, aphorisms and juxtapositions are intended to be a form of thinking-in-pictures (Bilddenken) from which understanding emerges without having to be expounded. Benjamin claimed that he had nothing to say, ‘only to show’.

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The unifying thrust of all my various interests, both private and professional, is the pursuit of the background philosophies that unconsciously shape our worldviews, and bestow on them unifying and particularizing meaning. It is the background philosophy that projects a sense of relevance on the world and causes us to perceive phenomena around us in some particular self-evident way — and to miss completely alternative ways to perceive. And perceptions are understood in conceptions, and the conceptions affirm and reinforce the perceptions, in a circle. And our responses are formed by our conceptions, both in the ideals that direct the responses as a whole and the strategies and tactics we employ in pursuit of our ideals, and this also moves in a self-affirming, self-reinforcing circle. And finally, how we feel pervades our perceptions, conceptions and responses, animates them, and is the momentum driving the cycles and epicycles of the soul. Our perceptions and conceptions mutually and centripetally attract; our erotic attraction to otherness drives us outward centrifugally, and we whirl out loops and circles and spirals as we move in infinity looking for the comfort of some definite truth, some universal definitions, some definity. Yet, once we have definiteness we immediately yearn for infinity…

And how do we learn about these background philosophies? There is nothing to study directly. We study the forces as they act on particulars. We listen to how the other articulates, defines, connects meanings. We observe behaviors — both bodily behaviors, but also intellectual movements. Our background philosophies draw chalklines around us, and our minds and bodies obey their invisible limits. And we key into the logic of meaning — attune to moral priorities — resonate consonantly for and dissonantly against, nodding, smiling frowning with the other like two women mirroring gestures in a restaurant. Is there a fixed technique? There are techniques for uncovering certain illuminating particulars, but on the whole, the researcher must proceed by instinct — almost by sense of smell.

When I read the authors I love, what I am searching for is this background philosophy. I read, knowing the language by which I understand my authors, is precisely the site of change. How is he using this word? How are these thoughts connected? When I understand this word in this slightly shifted sense, what happens to all my previous understandings, understood by way of the shifted word? And what happens to all the thoughts I ever had, limited by my old use? What does this new definitional possibility open to my thought as a whole? And as I read, pursuing limits outside my own, I expand and change and my world changes. And my world changes because I have allowed the author in. I offer the author my life, and many have taken it. I read philosophy to enlarge that background from which I think.

When my work is good, I am researching people to discover their background philosophies, which reveal the unities and particularities of their worldviews, and where they may desire some clarity, some definition, some definiteness where it is lacking, or some reinforcement of some notion that has become exposed and questionable — or perhaps where a grain of infinity might be welcome… What foreground images, words, ideas, behaviors will serve the background of this person’s being?

And brands — those are also background philosophies. We would love to bring them into the foreground and make them concrete and definite. We want to define them, possess them. But what I love about brands is precisely their defiance of reduction in any foreground terms. Brands generate foregrounds. They manifest, in the proper sense: manifestare, from Latin, ‘make public,’ from manifestus ‘obvious’. But what makes brands fascinating is their ability to work out of the background to produce works of unsystematic coherence, unpredictable inevitability, and unformulaic continuity — in other words, it has the properties of genius.

And of course those who know religion know also that the explicit doctrines, the moral codes, the formal customs — as much as they are the manifestation of religion are not the religion itself.

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I’ve talked about background philosophy, but even that is not at the core of being. It isn’t even close, but it is closer than the thoughts we have when we think. Behind the background is more background, and it fades from merely unintelligible to inexperienceable blindness. Metaphysics says existence continues much further. Phenomenology says, “maybe, but so what?”

Whatever it is that stands behind background philosophy, it seems to generate diversity seeking unity, and unity seeking diversity, so it seems to me that seeking a unified background we all can share is equally futile and necessary.

Many words have been used to indicate this background that all of us carry about us that projects out around us an intelligible universe, but as fast as the words are used, they are reduced to definition and drained of their meaning. They take objective form — become entities with defined edges, that our minds can wrap their comprehending fingers around and hold-together. But the background is not definite. It is not finite. It is the infinite penetrating the finite. Because the infinite must penetrate the finite to be infinite.

We need a word that undefines definitions and changes them back into their proper infinite form.

The infinition of soul would be: the world that envelops every point that beholds it.

Some other words that need infinition: religion, tradition, culture, brand, author, human.

When we learn to think in infinitions as well as definitions, then we can discuss atheism.

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One more from Nietzsche:

In the writings of a hermit one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year’s end to year’s end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave — it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine — his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odor, as much of the depth as of the mold, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passerby. The recluse does not believe that a philosopher — supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse — ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us? — indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher can have “ultimate and actual” opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss [Abgrund] behind every ground [Grunde], beneath every “foundation” [Begrundung]. Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — this is a recluse’s verdict: “There is something arbitrary in the fact that he [the philosopher] came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he here laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper — there is also something suspicious in it.” Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask.

I don’t care about designing and building cool stuff.

I don’t care about inventing ideas for cool stuff that can be designed and built.

This is boutique bullshit.

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I don’t care about messages and images, in isolation or combined in a coherent and compelling whole.

I don’t care about communicating to customers and changing their perceptions and behaviors.

I don’t care about channels, media, or demographics.

This is advertising bullshit.

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I don’t care about making highly functional stuff.

I don’t give two shits if something is useful and usable if it is just a refinement of what everyone else is doing.

This is user experience bullshit.

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What I care about are insights and their practical consequences.

I care about understanding particular people and particular brands, and discovering possibilities of relationship.

Then… consequently, I become interested in ideas that help start, develop and substantiate that relationship.

Then I care about messages, images and function… and about channels and media, and the best way to use them in concert.

Then I become urgently concerned with the details of design, because those details are faithful to the relationship, or ignore it, or betray it.

And I want to see that design built, because I want to see the relationship work out.

I want to play brand matchmaker.

If you have no use for someone the last thing you should do is assign a use.

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Confusion can arise from confusing circumstances or from a confused mind. In both cases, the circumstances are confusing.

Clarity can arise from understanding circumstances or from misunderstanding them. In both cases, one understands.

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When one is clear on things, one doesn’t understand everything — only what is relevant.

When one is confused, what is relevant and what is irrelevant has not been clarified.

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To come to an agreement with another person means to agree on what is and is not relevant.

In the late 90s I went to work for an IT consulting company that had just acquired a renowned design shop, and was attempting to integrate the two cultures. I joined at the precise point where the honeymoon ends and life together begins, and was privileged to witness a universal trauma of human life. (Young fiances think they will append the happiness of togetherness to their respective lives. Perhaps later they will add the happiness of offspring to their couplehood. The metamorphosis of child to lover, lover to spouse, and spouse to parent, etc. is psychologically violent and painful, and for good reason. [* See note below.])

The software engineers were excited about the addition of creatives and what later came to be called “user experience (UX) professionals” added to the mix. They knew their user interfaces could be made more user-friendly, and were eager to collaborate. But then the reality of the situation hit.

The addition of UX did not constitute an addition at all, but a challenge to the whole vision and practice of IT. There was no way to maximize the value of UX in the software development process by simply adding capabilities to an existing process.

The whole enterprise had to be rethought, from top to bottom. First there was a distressingly deep change in how the product of the work was conceived. Many of the software designers thought of what they were producing as code, and the code needed to function solidly. Others placed more focus on the user interface, and thought of what they were producing as software that had to some degree a quality of usability. The UX vision, however, shifted the focus away from the artifact. What was being created at the most radical level (as it appeared at that time) was an experience, and not only the code, but the user interface were just means of delivery of this experience.

The entire field of software development was shifted from an ontic vision (conceiving truth in terms of things) to a phenomenological one (conceiving truth in terms of subjects encountering and making sense of phenomena). This shift did not invalidate the importance of code or of good user interface design, but it certainly put it in a new context with new considerations and new priorities, and to address these consideration, the processes of software development had to be reconsidered.

This is what is meant by paradigm shift. The way things are seen changes on the whole, this new vision makes new, previously unnoticed or dismissed considerations relevant; to accommodate the new vision and new considerations, new practices become necessary, and these new practices force a reordering of the overarching approach, which in turn changes existing practices. And of course, this also changes where each role fits into the work.

[Note for nerds: It could even be said that UX represents the emergence of  a pop phenomenology, a practical echo of an earlier poetic popularization, existentialism.]

Of course, these types of shifts are complex and slippery. The human mind finds it extraordinarily difficult to transcend an ontic perspective. We prefer to think about discrete, definable things we can point to and say “this word signifies that.” When a super-ontic perspective gains cultural power, the power itself becomes attractive especially to ontic minds which wish to acquire some of that power. So what tends to happen is the language of the movement is adopted and remapped to the old, unchanged ontic perspective, which gains some exciting new synonyms. So now, when you think about the user interface that you’re designing, you don’t call it a “user interface”, you call it an “experience”. When you do your requirements gathering, instead of just talking to people inside the company you also interview people outside the company and gather “user requirements”, and this activity is called “user research”. Not only that — you can also QA your new user interf… er, “user experience” with usability testing. And all this new vocabulary and techniques distinguish you from competitors who still don’t know these new words and techniques. They have not experienced the “paradigm shift”.

What happens in these cases, is you have a set of people who have some to see by the new vision, and use the new vocabulary and methods because these are the logical and practical extension of seeing this way, and you have a much larger group who become also “fundamentalist” converts, who change opinions and behaviors and become among the most fervent advocates of this new way, but who remain at bottom unchanged in their vision and values, and unaware of that fact.

And this process happens constantly. The whole notion of emotional design and brand experience is in collision with the UX world, and has put UX practitioners in the position software engineers were put in a decade ago. In 1999, everyone wanted to be the one who got to do the wireframes. There was great prestige to doing them: you were a jewel in the crown of the New Economy. (The romantic intensity of this position was a hundred times that of social media today, as hyped as it is. Social media borders on mania, Information Architecture was full-on manic.) People talk about wireframes very differently now, and those who do them have gone from feeling pride in their task, to being tasked with something slightly onerous. They may love designing experiences, but they hate what it means to be a designer of the specifics of experiences, and so they seek to escape it (into “strategy”) for the sake of social status, and further, anyone else who pursues something beyond experience design is also seen as a status-seeker. Everybody wants to be a strategist, because that is “higher”. If only it were lower so only those fit for the role would want it.

I remember a friend explaining to me that coders were becoming like plumbers. Now experience architects are plumbers.

But why do we have so little respect for plumbers?

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Why do we respect plumbers so little? (And don’t say you do respect them, then become angry if someone calls you a plumber.)

But also, if our standard for prestige is to function at the most radical level of understanding, why do we have so little respect for philosophy? Philosophy, after all, is precisely the discipline of discovering and settling the most radical level of understanding!

We want to avoid doing philosophy. But we also want to feel superior to philosophy. But perversely, we want the status of one who has philosophized.

We want to work like plumbers, refining a known discipline and excelling at it, but the status of craftsperson is too low for us.

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But it is easy to know when you have transcended another perspective. You can see the limitations of the other’s thinking almost like edges, in the form of what they fail to consider. (This is known in phenomenology as a horizon.) However, what does this look and feel like from within the horizon of one transcended? It looks like a bunch of irrelevant and complicating concerns being imposed on a situation that is already well-understood. It looks like theoretical hair-splitting. It looks like obfuscating language. It feels like venturing into undefined territory for no good reason. It feels irritating and anxious. It feels like pointless frustration.

It is the feeling of popular conservatism.

*

Reading philosophy is the discipline of confronting superior perspectives and rising to know them and in the process deepening one’s vision of the world. In the process one plays the part of lower in relationship to higher, and then higher in relationship to one’s former lower self. One can then speak etically of one’s former emic existence, which means to acquire a new emic existence to transcend. And one acquires a taste for surpassing greatness.

*

Thomas Kuhn, the popularizer of the term “paradigm shift” effected a paradigm shift in our understanding of scientific progress. Before him, science was understood to be a linear accretion of scientific facts. The body of knowledge was supposed to grow in spurts, and the spurts were scientific revolutions. Kuhn showed that, in fact, science progresses rapidly, stalls and stays stalled until significant and deep conceptions of current scientific thought are questioned, challenged and finally rejected. The body of knowledge needs frequent pruning to keep growing. Perhaps because we are mammals we look upon a pruning of the body of knowledge with horror as if it were amputation or castration. At any rate, we are hostile enough this state of affairs to rewrite our science books after each revolution to maintain an appearance of steady, additive progress.

Nobody minds learning new facts. It is the unlearning of facts that we hate, especially facts that orient us to our world, constitute our sanity, and endow us with the aura of expertise. We have to die to an old reality, forget what we know, wander through darkness suffering the darkest perplexities, faithfully resisting the compulsion to look back, until we come out the other side with a new way of seeing the world.

We want to acquire a new vision without suffering the pain of doubting, then losing then living without the old one. But “only where there are tombs are there resurrections.”

*

[Note: I remember as a kid reading a review of American Werewolf in London, where the reviewer remarked on the insightful treatment of the transformation experience. 29 years later, I am still fascinated that  the reviewer remarked not on the technique of the special effects, but on the significance of the intention and the success of the attempt.]

I keep repeating this idea, but I want to say it right:

We remember in wholes. Some fragment is identified as a member of a whole memory which comes back to mind as a whole out of memory. Within the remembered whole the details become available to us, almost deductively.

We recall feeling and mood associated with a memory. An event occurred in the past, and at that time we responded with feeling and mood. But our response itself is not in our memory, only the images and facts of the event — and among them is the fact of our response. But when we remember, if the quality of the remembrance is sufficient the memory calls to the same feelings, and the feelings are re-had.

We recollect in parts. We rummage through memory, and collect fragments hoping that if we gather enough of them we will remember the memory to which they all belong, and perhaps also recall the feeling and mood of the memory.

When a mood is recalled, or occurs in response to life, within that mood we sometimes reminisce. Our present mood resonates with our memories and moves us to recollect details of our lives at the time when the mood predominated.