All posts by anomalogue

Pseudostrength

Philosophy

I think a lot of what is currently lauded as strength is actually aggressive weakness.

Aggressive weakness says “I’d be stronger if other people didn’t prevent me from being strong.” It resents signs of strength in others, interpreting them as evidence that these others are consuming an unfair portion of a limited supply of power that ought to be shared, so everyone can be equally strong. It celebrates outbursts of indignation, irritable analyses, passionate denunciations and other articulations of resentment as “brave” or “insightful” — despite the fact that they are riskless repetitions of tried-and-true formulas that guarantee applause, head-pats, dittos, retweets, etc. from fellow weak aggressives.

Strength is different. Strength likes strength. It wants resistance, challenge. Strength will even acknowledge its own weaknesses, often in the form of self-mockery. Strength does not need other people to make way to allow it to be strong, and in fact any refusal to make way and grant it permission or even better — to confront it — provides strength an opportunity to activate and to experience itself.

It could be argued that aggressive weakness is a preliminary to the taking of power in order to gain strength. I’m skeptical that strength is ever gained that way. I suspect if weakness manages to seize instruments of control its own weakness ensures it will use the control unskillfully, and at best will only undermine the strength of others without actual gain of strength.

In my experience strength is generated through living as one ought to. When one is prevented from living in a way that generates strength, then one has a case for taking aggressive action. But the focus is not on other people and how they live, what they believe or what they have. The focus is on the goal of being free to live in a strength-generating way. Other people’s lives, beliefs and possessions might be altered in the effort to free one’s self, but if the other and resentment toward what they have is the focus, my bet is on catastrophe.

I believe this is a liberal attitude, as opposed to what is called “liberal” today, but what is, in fact, a degrading left-wing illiberalism.

Scientism vs designerism

Philosophy

Rereading Richard J. Bernstein I can now see clearly why my first encounter Beyond Objectivism and Relativism was such a revelation and relief to me as a designer:

But we must realize that “individually the criteria are imprecise: individuals may legitimately differ about their application to concrete cases.” Furthermore, when the criteria are “deployed together, they repeatedly prove to conflict with one another.” Kuhn seeks to make sense of rational disagreement in theory-choice, disagreement that cannot be resolved by an appeal to precisely formulated determinate rules. Kuhn also claims that over time such disagreements can be and are rationally resolved by the force of arguments in the relevant scientific community. But even here it is misleading to speak of proof (if our model of proof is a deductive argument). Rather, the cumulative weight of the complex arguments advanced in favor of a given paradigm theory, together with its successes, persuade the community of scientists. “Such a mode of development, however, requires a decision process which permits rational men to disagree, and such disagreement would be barred by the shared algorithm which philosophers have generally sought…. What from one viewpoint may seem the looseness and imperfection of choice criteria conceived as rules may, when the same criteria are seen as values, appear an indispensable means of spreading the risk which the introduction or support of novelty always entails.”

Often in the name of scientific rigor, the kinds of rational arguments offered by designers in support of their judgments are dismissed as subjective. When you realize these attempts at rigor are actually scientistic misnorms to which working scientists do not conform (and that if they were to conform to these misnorms scientific progress would halt) designers have a way to disarm those who wish to suppress innovation in the name of objectivity and rationalism.

I am also seeing some fascinating parallels with Roger Martin’s mystery-heuristic-algorithm model for the evolution of knowledge. He sees heuristic as a step on the way to perfection of knowledge in codifiable algorithm. Years ago I argued with him on LinkedIn that algorithm is not always a desirable end, and in fact in some cases this stripping away of individual interpretation and judgment can harm an employee’s ability to connect with customers. But I can also see that Martin was applying some prejudices of the folk philosophy predominant among business managers.

Now I have a paranoid theory that Design Thinking is a sort of cargo cult — the methods and the symbols used by designers dropped into the business world, but stripped of the designer folk philosophy that permits those methods and symbols to produce quality work. It is a designeristic misnorm — a fanciful antithesis to business scientism…

Golden Ages

Philosophy

As great as television has become in the 21st Century, podcasts are even greater. The wealth of insight available through podcasts is staggering.

My suspicion is that this is largely due to the medium’s low production overhead, which enables individuals to work relatively quickly and spontaneously (thanks to advancements in sound recording technologies and user interface design) alone or in small teams (also thanks to tech/UI) — the most fertile conditions for creation and to be able to reach a large audience without the need to persuade media distribution gatekeepers that their content will appeal to their target audience — a soul-killing endeavor that often fails, resulting in filtering, dilution and conservative punch-pulling of the most novel, risky and exciting experiments.

1) Good tools — light, transparent, activity-supporting — enabling users to focus exclusively on the creative object, 2) liberation from the need to enlist extended technical teams, with all the attendant money and management burdens, 3) cheap or free distribution of the creative product, 4) access to a market of consumers who become the arbiters of success, and 5) removal of approval gates (and gate-keeping mindsets) that come with all expensive endeavors — all these things support the takeover of industries by people with ideas and creative talent from the domination of technical, managerial and financial considerations.

In other words, the best creative products result from maximizing investment in design minimizing the overhead of management, engineering, finance, logistics, sales and marketing.

(When software development finally passes an analogous threshold, and software can be produced by designers focused exclusively on how people interact with what they’re making, we will have far better lean methodology for producing software.)

Coinage: misnorm

Philosophy

When people have a distorted image of a discipline, and harbor a detailed misunderstanding of how that discipline achieves its results, this can result in a “misnorm”. A misnorm combines a fanciful picture of what a discipline really accomplishes, how it functions at the micro and macro-level, why it has developed its various practices, and consequently, how it is most effectively managed.

Management is where misnorms are most damaging — where groups of practitioners are required to conform more closely to the misnorms of their own field, or where well-meaning innovators attempt to import “best practices” from other fields. In such cases, rigor means introducing effort-wasting burdens, removing necessary flexibility and autonomy, and, worst of all, the smothering of the tacit skills and intuitive judgment that are the substance of mastery of any craft.

This last casualty of misnorms, is itself the result of the greatest misnorm of modernity: scientific rationality. Behind the misnorms of scientific rationality is the craving for a fully explicit world, where articulate logic plans, directs and evaluates all behavior, which makes all gut responses, inspirations and talent obsolete. These irritating ineffables are quarantined to another misnormed sphere of activity: creativity.

This is why reexamining the history of science, ethnographically studying the daily practices of scientists doing science, and philosophically interrogating scientism is so crucial to life outside the laboratory. These investigations reveal a scientific methodology that resembles life as most of us know it, where logic, language, craft and inspiration are combined in flexible collaboration — not segregated and forced either to march in line or to frolic whimsically.

If scientists were forced to conform to the misnorms of science, science would cease to happen. Luckily, the prestige of science is such that this does not happen. But unfortunately paralyzing imposition and enforcement of misnorms does happen all the time in other less prestigious and empowered fields, such as education, where teachers are forced to conform to innumerable incompatible misnorms of education. Where education still happens, it is done entirely despite the control of politicians and administrators. It appears this misnorming dysfunction is also happening in the field of medicine, where the power of doctors is overwhelmed by the even greater resources of the insurance and legal industries.

Orginality then and now

Philosophy

The 20th Century ideal of originality was based on an individual as sufficient condition of creation: “I alone originated this.” Or “the help I got arriving at this original idea could have come from any number of sources, but I alone am the one irreplaceable element.”

I hope the 21st Century ideal of originality will be based on an individual as necessary condition of creation: “Had I not been there this would not have originated. But the same is true of my fellow-collaborators.”

Applications

Philosophy

Some people, when confronting an abstract idea, ask “what can I do with this, practically, concretely, in specific applications?”

Other people, when confronting a concrete practicality, ask “what can I learn from this, theoretically, abstractly, generally?”

Unfortunately, all too many people in the business of concrete practicality do not regularly confront abstract ideas because they lack a taste for the theoretical, and too many people in the business of abstract theory do not regularly apply their theories in concrete situations where they need to affect change, because they lack a taste for the practical.

Had I understood myself earlier, I might have protected myself from the harassment of the business world, but I think I might have followed a better-beaten curriculum. Then again, I might have travelled further along a paved road and come to where it could be paved further. But then… is “further along the same path” really where we want to go? I don’t know. My curriculum has been a mixture of accident and intensely urgent questions that seem to erupt up from beneath myself in response to my efforts to live this practical life I’ve blundered into.

Where we are

Philosophy

An irritable, snobby, consensual contempt — “everyone who matters knows those people are hateful idiots” — stands on one side; paranoid, delusional belligerence stands on the other. Both claim privileged knowledge of “what’s really going on”, and this knowledge not only absolves them from respect, or even forbids them to respect — it philosophically precludes respect. We are philosophically ill, and this illness, being a species of mental illness, is reflexive: mental illness shows us a world that confirms the truth of our views.

Drawing on every side of the brain

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

In high school, all my art teachers taught us to draw and paint the shapes our eyes “really” saw. We were discouraged from drawing the things we believed we were depicting — eyes, noses, vases, cow skulls, gourds, drapes — and encouraged instead to draw the shapes that were said to precede our objective interpretations. We did zillions of blind contour drawings. We drew and painted shapes instead of trying to model the dimensional forms we believed were there. It was an interesting experience. I learned to shift into a trancelike consciousness that made the visual world hyper-vivid, and disabled speech.

Toward the end of college I met a prickly teacher who demanded a different style from her class. Now we were to observe, analyze and model forms. She taught us methods for rendering various three-dimensional effects on flat plains, so we could translate the forms in space we learned to understand to what charcoal and paper could convey. It was an incredibly difficult shift, which I experienced as an undoing of years of skill development.

In the years after I did some other visual thinking development, but they were all remote from figurative drawing. I learned to compose pages and screens to aid in comprehending complex information. Shortly after college, I experimented with translating musical compositions into visual ones via the language of mathematical ratios. Most importantly, though, I developed an ability to collapse complexity into simple visual diagrams, which are tools for conceptualizing information, not only existing data, but for framing incoming data on an ongoing basis. They are visual hermeneutic tools. I philosophize visually first, and even when I translate the visuals into words, I keep wanting to retain the visual qualities, which might be why I’m tempted toward prosody. Not for the sake of sounds (or not primarily), but for the sake of structure. I want important thoughts to be expressed in linguistic crystals.

Now my job has me doing figurative drawing again, but in a style going driving me back further into those left-brained natural habits of seeing and drawing I worked so hard to break and replace in my teen years. Now I am sketching ideas with the goal of communicating complex ideas as simply as possible. It is somewhere between cartooning and writing in pictograms.

My life as a visualizer-thinker has led my on a tour through my brain and shown me how many ways we can bilateralize what we see and know.

Laddering

Politics

In marketing there is a research technique known as laddering for getting at a customer’s root motivations. I’ve also heard it called the “seven whys”. When interviewing a customer about her feelings about some aspect of a product, the interviewer asks “why?” and then “why?” again, until the customer is unable to go further. This technique is used to uncover the fundamental emotional drivers of a customer’s behaviors.

A journalist friend of mine uses a similar technique to get at the emotional drivers behind people’s beliefs. When an interviewee makes an assertion she asks “How do you know?” and then “How do you know that?” until the interviewer is no longer able to produce an answer. She then asks “Why do you care?”

I think a procedure like this is necessary in politics. When a person claims our system needs to be overhauled and replaced with some radical alternative we should ask “Who decides that?” and then “Who decides that they decide?” and so on until there no answer but “because that is what is right.” And that answer, of course, means “Me. I decide.”

Design talks

Enworldment, Philosophy

A list of design theory/practice ideas I’ve had that could become talks, all of which include monographesque provocatively non-descriptive titles with almost-clarifying subtitles, separated by colons:

  1. “No Pain, No Gain: Necessary Suffering in Innovation” – The agonizing experience of navigating the vacuum between framings fits poorly inside the fantasy image of creativity peddled by Design Thinking to the freedom-craving lanyard-tethered denizens of cubicle-land. Real, deep creativity is intensely painful at key points in the process, very few people are willing to undergo the ordeal, and anyone with authority will be tempted to use their power to abort innovative thought when they start to feel the anxiety inherent to the kind of radical reframing that produces innovative ideas.
  2. “Philosophy of Design of Philosophy of Design of: How Philosophy Is a Design Medium” – The implications of Dewey’s Instrumentalism crossed with both the methods and experiences of human centered design suggests that philosophies are mind-reality interfaces which ought to be thought of in terms of good design rather than faithful representations of truth.
  3. “Lean How?: How Design Methods Make Waste Tradeoffs” – Lean methodologies tend to emphasize efficiencies of time and money, but these are often gained at the cost of wasting other resources. This talk proposes looking at forms of internal waste (time, money, team morale, organizational credibility) and external waste (customer goodwill, innovation opportunities, attention and brand equity) and seeing choice of methodology in terms of waste trade-offs.
  4. “Who Is Our Engineer? is the New “Who is Our User?”: The Relationship Between Designers, Engineers and Users” – One of the most misconceptions that limits the effectiveness of design in many organizations is the notion that design fits inside a engineering as the people who responsible for making the “presentation layer” of an engineered product or service. This talk argues that flipping this relationship inside out and viewing engineering as a discipline within design permits both engineers and designers to increase the effectiveness of the other. In addition it will be argued that every relevant design discipline has one or more engineering disciplines involved in actualizing the design, and that design competence in any particular medium involves a working rudimentary knowledge of its engineering aspects and and understanding of how to collaborate with engineers of that discipline.

“I am unique”

Philosophy

One of the greatest obstacles to relating to individuals as individuals is need.

The need might be utilitarian. We look for someone who can perform some useful function for us. We might see them as a useful role. This person is an engineer, a designer, a manager, etc.

The need might be emotional. We look for someone to fill a hole in our life. We might see them as some kind of fulfillment, completion or soulmate. As wonderful and romantic as the language might sound, this is still a failure to value an individual for their own individuality. The other is reduced to one’s own feeling of wholeness, or, worse, and more commonly potential wholeness — a longing.

Finally, the need might be cognitive: a need to feel secure in one’s understanding. We reduce people to categories with attributes which help us anticipate and explain their beliefs, behaviors and attitudes and to quickly give us a moral and possibly practical relationship with them.

It’s not that we should never do these things. I believe we always will and even must suppress the individuality of the people we meet. The who-ness of most individuals will never shine through the opacity of the what-ness of what we take them to be. (See Arendt quote below.) But we should know when we are suppressing individuality, to know how to invite individuality and to know what it feels like when individuality approaches. And most of all, we must work at wanting individuality and to be vigilant of those times when we do not want it and want to push it away or even to deny its existence. These kinds of knowing carry us from the ethical into the religious.

—-

Re: the what-ness of individuals, Hannah Arendt’s hard-nosed realism is on the mark:

No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is — as distinct from the question of who he is — which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless.

To know an individual is precisely to make the answer “I am unique” meaningful.

Why you should be mad about Lean Startup

Design, Ethics

Lean Startup externalizes usability costs to users.

To combat this practice, if I find a usability issue I call tech support and have them walk me through the interaction. These calls cost a company a significant amount of money and makes it less profitable for them to skip the user-centered design steps that ensure a decent experience for users.

I urge everyone who cares about design to do the same. Stop wasting your time and energy trying figure out how bad designs are supposed to work, and start wasting the company’s resources instead.

 

The long story on Lean Startup:

Before Lean Startup, companies invested in user centered design processes, including usability testing, to ensure customer’s tools always worked well. The highest priority was given to protecting customers from design mistakes that inflicted frustration and interfered with their lives. Software was released only when the flaws were fixed and the software was ready for human use.

Lean Startup changed all that. It advises companies to not invest money in design and research, but instead to release the software sooner, even though this is likely to expose customers to usability errors, frustration and confusion. Rapid release cycles enable the problems to be spotted in analytics and quickly corrected. This enables the company to accelerate software improvements and outpace competitors.

With Lean Startup, it’s all about competing to be the best product first. It’s all about the company’s product surpassing the competitor’s product — not about the customer’s tools working as they should and providing a great experience. It’s all about how good the company’s software gets, not how bad their customers feel while using untested, hastily hacked-together interfaces.

 

Jesus as Jewish missionary

Judaism, Philosophy

A friend of mine said “…so basically, Jesus converted you to Judaism.”

Yes. My attempts to understand Jesus’s teaching without the overwhelming influence of Paul’s interpretation led me to sharing Jesus’s faith, which precludes idolizing him as a god, a mistake which I am certain Jesus would have found alarming and abhorrent.

It also precludes any notion of Jesus descending from heaven to radically interrupt or to complete or perfect the Jewish tradition. The tradition was always and still is constituted of disruptions, breaks, repentance, atonement, redemption, rebirth — and it takes a highly partial (and in my opinion, grossly distorted) view of Judaism to pick out one episode from this long story and view it as a radically new first chapter of a new story.

That being said, I do feel that I share a degree of faith with some Christians I know. But that is despite their beliefs, and most of all the belief that their beliefs are the crux of their faith.

 

Will over feeling

Philosophy

I do not care how I feel, and neither should anyone else.

I feel all kinds of stupid things all the time, and I cannot afford to take them seriously.

What matters — what I take seriously about myself — is what I decide, what I will, what I do.

And what I will is a product of how I think.

How I think is who I am.

*

How a person thinks is connected with but not the same as what a person thinks.

To know a person’s beliefs is not to know that person’s faith.

*

We conflate belief and faith because we have never learned how to understand faith. One must have a certain faith to know faith and I suppose that is probably what Christians call “grace”.