The expression “make a living” seems to me to signify more than just earning money to live. “Making a living” can be seen as a creative project of designing a productive, sustainable social existence.

Putting entrepreneurship within the reach of all Americans — which means more than maximizing availability of investment funds, but also to remove artificial amplification of risk (I’m thinking specifically about healthcare), and also to educate citizens in a way that stimulates rather than suppresses the entrepreneurial drive (which means helping students connect their own talents with the existing or potential needs of the community, and perhaps prioritizing specialization over standardization) — is perhaps the highest (reasonable) goal of politics.

It is good to have amazing ideas, but better than that is to induce others to have have amazing ideas — and best of all is to collaborate in groups in such a way that amazing ideas happen.

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If the creative community were to internalize this ideal, the world would be a better place, partly due to the abundance of ideas, partly to the experience of ideation — but most of all because of the relationships that form in creative gatherings.

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In most dramatic examples of group ideation (which is the very opposite of “group think”), nobody can pinpoint where the ideas originated. Individualists are disturbed and cannot stop wondering: “Didn’t I have something to do with what just happened? I think I did, but I cannot say what…”

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We do not normally tolerate the kind of distress required to arrive at a real creative gathering. There’s a moat of anxiety encircling it, which each person must cross in order to participate.

Nobody does this voluntarily. There’s got to be high stakes, considerable pressure and no easy escape route.

Creative gathering requires specific conditions. These conditions are more likely to be found in your professional environment than anywhere else. Except maybe marriage.

In the course of my career I’ve found that some people value conceptual frameworks and know how to use them to direct both their thinking and their practice.

Others, however, have no use for conceptual frameworks, and value only momentary sparks of inspiration which arise in the moment and which are realized in a concrete idea for something which can be done — or they vanish in a tiny puff of ions. (If don’t mind being scorned by people with scientific scruples, you can call this a radically “right brained” culture.)

There are also many professionals who have limited use for conceptual frameworks and who do not experience the full infectious effects of inspiration, and who (consequently?) think primarily in terms of factual combinations (sometimes fastidiously glued together logically, or found embedded together in concrete chunks of experience), and who tend to work algorithmically according to explicit plans, composed of sequenced techniques. (This would be a radically “left brained” culture.)

Here’s the thing to remember: all of these cognitive styles ultimately converge on any successful endeavor. The question is one of sequence. Which lead and which follow? This will practically determine the way an organization works and the type of brand relationship it offers its employees and customers.

To be frankly partial, my belief is that the evolution of brand has moved it from a stage where “left-brained” organizations hire “right-brained” organizations to clothe their carefully constructed offerings in sparkling campaigns that change customer perceptions, to a stage where an organization itself is designed to holistically produce conceptual coherence between product, service, message and presentation, because its entire activity system is guided by a conceptual framework, which does not spell out all the details of how an organization runs, but rather provides generative insights which compel details to unfold in organic compatibility with its surroundings.

But obviously, I’m a conceptual framework guy, so decide for yourself.

According to Luc Boltanski, Adam Smith envisioned a market economy that was essentially empathic.

It is important to remember that the Wealth of Nations was written prior to the Industrial Revolution. Smith did not build his understanding of the market on the metaphor of machines or factories. He did not take self-interest to be some kind of natural and mindless force like pressurized steam, with one man driving a price as low as possible against another man driving it as high as possible, stabilizing as the forces equalize against one another. That mechanistic vision of the market was an industrial revision manufactured to the specifications of a mechanic’s imagination.

Adam’s market was a deeply pluralistic social network of human beings seeking mutually satisfactory deals with other people in a community of shared interest.

This makes experience design less a revolution than a reformation movement. Assuming we change anything long-term…

Experience design is the methodical concrete application of existentialism to everyday life.

Concrete application is how an idea develops from theory to methodology to second-nature to reality itself.

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The ultimate ambition of a philosophy is to disappear into reality.

Maybe this explains why the United States, the first nation to be explicitly founded on philosophical principles, is famously unphilosophical: to live our way of life we need to our philosophy to be reality itself. To treat our foundation as subject to question is to dissolve the solid ground upon which we stand into liquid.

It is significant that the further one goes in ontology, the more our sturdy nouns break down into gerunds: processes that sustain semblances of stability.

Another reason I keep talking about creative anxiety is I’m rereading Being and Time, which situates anxiety at the very center of authentic existence. But then, the whole reason I am returning to this book after six years was to read about anxiety, and to see how Heidegger’s views on anxiety strike me now that I’ve had six years of experience applying the concept of anxiety to my life, and most of all to my work.

My main modification to Heidegger’s concept of anxiety is this: Dasein (the existential self) can potentially experience something like an existential death and existential rebirth (apart from biological death) by shifting perspectives, re-conceiving life, and subsequently re-perceiving it in a weirdly spontaneous non-interpretive way — and that each instance of “rebirth” (even a relatively trivial instance) induces the same anxiety (though at a lower intensity) as relating ourselves to our impending ultimate death.

The richest source of this anxiety is listening to other people who conceive and live differently from ourselves. As Sartre said “Hell is other people”, except I’d modify it to say “Limbo is other people” — because there is something on the other side of the anxiety that makes it completely worthwhile to navigate it all the way to the other side, never turning back.

This is why experience strategy is — and should be — an anxious process! If we are doing our job, we are actively seeing anxiety by seeking to understand other worldviews.

The job of an experience researcher/strategist is to wrestle with wicked soft-systems problems and to cross over anxiety to unique and superior worldviews created by finding syntheses of conflicting worldviews manifested as kick-ass products that afford kick-ass experiences that make people fall in love with a brand. The reason this happens so rarely is because it freaking hurts to get there.

But I’m digressing. Back to Heidegger.

In this rereading of Being and Time, I have seen nearly no evidence that Heidegger takes anxiety in the face of existential change seriously.

I have also seen ample evidence that Heidegger was in many ways allergic to alterity, especially any form of collective alterity (the They), which is hardly surprising, considering his time and place. (Perhaps he should have been much, much more allergic.) But I do believe in the legitimate existence of collective Dasein in which each Dasein participates, compliantly, activistically, rebelliously, alienatedly, etc.

That being said, this book still blows my mind. And the whole reason I started writing this rambling post was to share a quote, which isn’t even related to what I’ve been talking about, except that it is pure experience strategy gold. Here it is, anyway, and please forgive my complete absence of discipline this morning:

Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial individualization of the reticent resoluteness which exacts anxiety of itself. As something that keeps silent, authentic Being-one’s-Self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying ‘I’; but in its reticence it ‘is’ that thrown entity as which it can authentically be. The Self which the reticence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the Being of the ‘I’. Only if we are oriented phenomenally by the meaning of the Being of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self are we put in a position to discuss what ontological justification there is for treating substantiality, simplicity, and personality as characteristics of Selfhood. In the prevalent way of saying “I”, it is constantly suggested that what we have in advance is a Self-Thing, persistently present-at-hand; the ontological question of the Being of the Self must turn away from any such suggestion.

Care does not need to be founded in a Self. But existentiality, as constitutive for care, provides the ontological constitution of Dasein’s Self-constancy, to which there belongs, in accordance with the full structural content of care, its Being-fallen factually into non-Self-constancy. When fully conceived, the care-structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood. This phenomenon is clarified by Interpreting the meaning of care; and it is as care that Dasein’s totality of Being has been defined.

(For personality type geeks, this is the serum to cure Enneatype Four.)

This morning I’m thinking about the natural birth movement, and some of the things natural birth pioneer Dr. Robert Bradley (yeah, a man) had to say about labor pains — that if you don’t resist the pain and try to eliminate it, but allow it to happen and work with it, labor time decreases and the perception of the pain shifts to a perception of hard work. And anesthetization, which necessitates contraction-inducing medicines such as Pitocin, prolong labor and decrease the body’s autonomy and ultimately increase the physical and psychological pain-level, necessitating more anesthesia, producing more numbing which necessitates more artificial induction, and so on, in a vicious circle. Bradley also mentions that ignorance or misconceptions about labor contribute to perceived need for anesthesia. The fear of the unknown makes women can cause women to tense up against the contractions, or they might rush the labor, or follow what they believe is “proper technique” and make themselves hyperventilate like we see on TV.

Comparing all this to ideation, the metaphorical possibilities seem pretty vast.

I’m playing with the idea of presenting about this pain-affirming approach to creativity as a sort of “natural birth for ideation” movement.

We should stop trying to hard to manage pain out of creative ideation. We should stop relying so much on ideation techniques designed to artificially induce ideas from groups. And we should instead concentrate on ways to help teams go deeper into problems, which means to maximize their problematic nature, make them as wicked as they truly are.

Occasionally I’ve worried that my emphasis on the uncomfortable aspects of creativity might strike some people as dwelling on things that are best underplayed or endured silently, and then I ask myself if it might be prudent to suppress this truth or to tone it down or sweeten it by overemphasizing the fun and rewarding aspects.

Then it occurs to me that my favorite and most exciting projects were ones that were allowed to run their course through the painful stretches and to come out on the other side to breakthrough. And the less satisfying ones, the ones that felt predominantly unpleasant (thankfully, few), were the ones where well-meaning (or nervous) people interfered and tried to shut down doubt and dissent, anesthetize the pain of (as yet) incompatible perspectives and establish an instant superficial peace.

So I am going to continue to hammer on the importance of embracing perplexity and anxiety as a means to innovation. I believe it is terribly important to get real about what is involved in our work, so we can support it, work more effectively and avoid wasting energy fretting needlessly over “things going wrong”, when in fact they are going right.

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From a 2007 Fast Company article profiling Yves Béhar:

Most really potent music has a strain of pain running through it, and this pain is the music’s active ingredient. The pain can be expressive of itself — but it is most interesting if it is sublimated. Some examples: Nick Drake’s best work has sublimated depression as its primary ingredient. The Kinks at their 1966-71 peak was rich in sublimated nostalgic sadness immediately recognizable to any parent of older children.

The active ingredient of psychedelic music is sublimated dread in the face of infinity.

We aren’t all that in love with old ideas.

And we don’t really hate new ideas.

It’s that space in-between old and new that gives us hives.

Continue reading Navigating the in-between →

Some people want art that reconnects them to primordial feelings any primate can have.

Some people want art that connects them to primordial feelings only a human being can ever have — and perhaps feelings for which he has only very recently acquired a capacity to feel, or is on the cusp of acquiring.

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Isn’t it strange that we have words for most of those feelings we can recognize in our wordless siblings, the animals? Rage, sadness, peacefulness, affection…

It is where we are uniquely our own species, dominated by language, where, strangely, language fails us.

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I’m going my take a crack at the “humans are the ______ animal” formula…

Humans are the naturally artificial animal.

We humans have biologically co-evolved with culture for so long now, that the notion of a human being liberated from culture is an absurdity. Human beings are essentially the interplay of essence and accident. Human being, being human, is corrupted when purified of accident.

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I want art to give form to the primordial experiences we have come to have, not to re-express the feelings we have had all along, feelings that everyone one of us can have, feelings that have enjoyed the benefit of language for hundreds of millennia — common feelings.

I want art that shows us a future some of us can feel, and many more will come to feel, as geist finds form. I want future-oriented art that participates in human being’s perpetual self-creation.

It is a mistake to believe the most common primordial experiences are the only primordial experiences.

The more common something is, the more likely it will be recognized, named and afforded full status of “really real” — even if it lacks material reality. Nobody doubts the existence of joy, anger, arousal, love, power-lust, peacefulness, sadness, resolve, and other named emotions and states-of-mind, despite the fact that these “things” aren’t really things. A material thing that cannot be commonly perceived would be understood to be supernatural or a hallucination. What matters is not the constitution of a thing, but whether its existence is commonly acknowledged.

The canon of common “primordial experiences” is a small subset of something larger and weirder.

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Whatever is truly uncommon is likely to languish in formless isolation.

A capacity for an uncommon experience might be intrinsic to particular human natures. Or a capacity may somehow develop, but despite its nurtured origin still awake and emerge from behind the soul, spontaneously and immediately as nature itself, and for all practical purposes is primordial (even if it is not biographically “first in order”). But these experiences lack both names and expressive language, because these experiences flare up and die out in individuals before they can be bestowed with language or form of any kind, which is the precondition for recognition by others, and even recollectability in the individual. The experiences get imprisoned in individuals, or solitary cells of moments.

All this makes these capacities and experiences no less primordial, and no less deserving of artistic expression. I would argue it makes them more deserving. For such uncommonalities, art is the only salvation, and perhaps is their rightful domain.

After all, good weather can make you joyous, an enemy can anger you, a body can arouse you, etc. Art is redundant when it stimulates a common experience that can happen elsewhere. Maybe that’s why art that stimulates these feelings is so easily appreciated. It can be seen as representative art that represents recognizable feelings instead of images.You can look at it and to be able to say “what it is”. There’s not that much difference between “that’s Marilyn Monroe” and “that’s sad”.

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For the uncommon, art is a scarce gate into reality.

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Uncommonness and objective rarity are two different concepts. A thing that occurs infrequently or even only once, but which occurs always in a way accessible to all people is still common, however infrequent or unique the occurrence. When a comet flashes through the sky once every ten thousand years, every eye pointed at the right place at the right time will perceive it.

Uncommonness is a capacity for experience, which, whether innate or acquired, will cause one person out of one thousand to respond differently to a thing from the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.

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Genre art excites common primordial experiences. Blues. Country. Classic Rock. Metal. Punk. Reggae. They’re all designed for common appeal. Sometimes these genres reach into the uncommon, but that is not the basis of their popularity, and it is not for the sake of the uncommon that these genres have developed their formal conventions.

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The art I care about is art that draws out feelings that apes cannot have.

The art I care about calls to the remote corners of humanness and momentarily keeps mutely isolated spirits of loneliness. It hushes the noise of the primordial commons so something quiet and wordless can speak and for once be heard.

Such art is essentially groping. It “does not know its way about.” It “feels around in the dark until it gets the idea.” Once it loses this quality and this characteristic it ceases to be uncommon. That is its end, and that is the end of it.

Hubristic youth believes the world has been made needlessly complex, and that “I” alone, by some miracle (perhaps that same miracle that also placed me in the dead center of my own experience and not elsewhere?) have insight into to the simple heart of the matter…

Clearly this is an unstable state of affairs that is going to end one way or another. Most of the time it will eventually tip over into in its antithesis, a bitter-saccharine docility that accepts deportation to the outer regions of existence to play a far humbler role that’s become good enough for a new, much smaller, less central “me”.

There are other routes beyond of youth. There are better, far more desirable visions of maturity. But to have it, one must take alternate routes, and those routes are not highways (even when those highways are labeled “Alternative”).

Christopher Alexander has been on my mind lately. My company just moved locations, and improved its environment a thousand-fold. Everywhere I look I see examples of densely interconnected living patterns, and it has exactly the effect on me Alexander describes. I feel more alive here.

Yesteday, entering the studio space it occurred to me how different it is to work with patterns when one is a participant in the effect of the pattern. With Alexander’s patterns, the self is always inside and an intrinsic participant in what is happening. This is entirely different from how design patterns are employed in an engineering context. The formal aspects are retained, but the kernel of the problem that moved Alexander is entirely absent. You could say the problem got flipped inside-out, and in the process was transformed from a uniquely existentialist approach to design to a far more mundane system for organizing puzzle-solving heuristics.

If I were to write a book today its title would be Part and Participant, in the grand tradition of existentialist X and Y titles.

1) I am uncertain I am right about this, but [early] Heidegger appears to view death and demise as separate, but essentially linked in that both refer to the end of life. Whether he means “impossibility of Dasein” to refer primarily to something coinciding with biological death or simply emphasizes it, I think the emphasis is misplaced. Any deep change in Dasein’s orientation to being-in-the-world is a kind of death, and it is here that the religious conceptions of death-and-rebirth have their sense. Anxiety occurs whenever Dasein is faced with a future transformation that it cannot foresee with any degree of specificity, and the anxiety intensifies with the degree of impossibility of foresight. An impending religious rebirth is existentially equivalent to biological extinction.

2) Heidegger (appears to) see Dasein in strictly individualistic terms. I believe Dasein exists collectively, and that even an individual comprises a plurality of Daseins. And I believe what can be said of individual Dasein can be said of supra-individual Dasein. Most importantly collective Dasein can be authentic or inauthentic. Heidegger’s factical situation misled him to believe collectivity is essentially inauthentic, and therefore always “the They”. It might be that any Dasein will eventually discover a limit to the being in which it can participate, and all beyond that point it will encounter They, but I deny this boundary is necessarily that of the individual. Unfortunately, this denial is based entirely in faith, and not in experience. My personal experience confirms Heidegger’s views.

Both of these points have deep practical consequences for how I live in the mundane world, the hopes I hold for it, and my strategies for acting in it.