Category Archives: Autobiography

Kvetch

Autobiography, Design, Esoterism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have a genuinely original vision that I need to get out, but it is hard to communicate.

There’s a little for everyone to love, and a lot for everyone to reject, and much for people to claim as their own domain of knowledge, and therefore a domain to which I have no claim at all.

Mystics sneer at my philosophy. Philosophers sneer at my mysticism. Both sneer at my capitalist servitude, and servile capitalists sneer at my impractical interest in mystical and philosophical matters!

I can’t win!

And everything I know about is generally considered matters of opinion. We all have philosophies. We all have beliefs about religious beliefs. And “design thinkers” spilled the beans on design: Everyone designs! Everyone is a designer!

I am no longer interested in talking to people who know better than me on the things I know best.

I sit silently waiting to get back to writing.

I’ve stopped counting but surely I’m at the end of the third trimester.

St. N.:

Ideal selfishness. — Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!

This is what you deserve if you allow Nietzsche to convert you from Western Buddhism to a bizarro dysfit judeochristian esoteric Judaism.

David Sedaris inscription

Autobiography

Davia Sedaris has a policy. He won’t sign your book until he learns a little about you. He interviews everyone and writes a personal inscription on each book. His book signing lines move slowly.

They move so slowly, in fact, that several years ago, when Helen and Zoe went to a David Sedaris book signing Zoe ran out of time and had to leave her book with Helen to get it signed.

When Helen finally got to the front, David asked her “What was your first love?”

She told him about her first high school sweetheart, Cai.

She went on to complain about how after they broke up none of us could get over it, because we all loved Cai even more than she did.

So, he signed her book

Then she gave him Zoe’s book to sign. He asked “and this Zoe — was she a part of this?”

The next day, when Zoe opened her book, she found this inscription:

Enough about Cai.

— David Sedaris

Cosmic collapse inspo

Autobiography, Esoterism, History, Philosophy, Religion

I have momentarily shifted attention from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Dodd’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Both books discuss the human condition after the fall of the Second Temple, in the years between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. This was also the time when ideas emerged that would eventually converge, coalesce and crystallize into Kabbalah.

Why this book? Because that time feels uncannily similar to now. It was a time of political instability, social dissolution and personal alienation. It was a time of intense, pervasive anomie. Public life could no longer serve as a source of meaning. The few who sought meaning, sought it within themselves and in small communities of others who did the same. The rest lived lives of quiet, noisy or violent desperation, delusion or predation.

This was the time that developed new forms of religious culture which have become so second-natural to us that we find it difficult to conceptualize religion or culture any other way. It dominates even our imaginations. And I think this time resembles that one in that both are ends of apparently eternal orders suddenly revealed as mortal, fragile, rapidly expiring. The main difference is that what is ending now, is what started then. I am — at least in my own imagination — recollecting our cradle from our deathbed, remembering how that cradle was, too, a deathbed. The books I am reading now are intellectual histories of that time, that give samples of how some of the seminal geniuses of the time experienced, interpreted and responded to a cosmos in collapse.

I suppose you could say I’m collecting cosmic collapse inspo and “best practices”.

A career in four-and-a-half presentations

Autobiography, Design, Shit theory

I’ve done four pivotal presentations in my career, and I’m getting the itch to update them all together to reflect my latest thinking.

The first presentation “Dialogue”, was from 2008. It was a dense summary my thinking up to that point on the importance of gestalts in design, and the power of dialogue to generate sharable gestalts, which I associated with brand.

Since this point, I’ve developed a theory of psychic multistability that understands gestalt shifts from one perceptual stability to another, and hermeneutic shifts from one conceptual stability to another to be the result of what I’m calling a gestell shift — a shift from one subjective state to another, which changes the spontaneous sense we make of things. And brands are stable gestells.

I did the second presentation “Spiral Process” in 2010, and it was also about the importance of gestalts in design, but this time taking a practical approach.

I started by laying out a theory-space based on two contrasting ways of approaching composite things: 1) a parts-first systems approach, and 2) a wholes-first gestalt approach.

Like the good consultant I am, I laid these approaches on a 2×2 matrix. Like the bad esoterist I am, of course I had to assign gestalts to the vertical axis and systems to the horizontal one.

I defined domains in each quarter. The quarter where there is no gestalt and only system was assigned to Engineering. The quarter where there is only gestalt and no system was assigned to Art. The quarter where there is neither system and  nor gestalt was labeled “perplexity”; had I assigned it to a domain, that domain would have been Philosophy, for here we truly “do not know how to move around.” Finally, the quarter where there is both gestalt and system was assigned to  Design. Design seeks systems that are taken together as gestalts.

Then I outlined a process for getting to both, which I contrasted to engineering processes and creative processes. The engineering process more or less curves straight into systematizing. After the system is finished, the team claps some style, value claims and “story” onto it in order to make people care about it. Art (creative) goes the other way. It starts with a nice bright blobby nebula of meaning, and then tries to build a system that more or less approximates and embodies it. The creative concept is fleshed out in features so it at least appears to deliver on its conceptual promise, and organized to provide some logical bone structure.

Design takes a much less direct route. It dives into perplexity and experiments there to find a gestalt that can be built out into a system that corresponds with the natural facets and articulations of that gestalt. This permits a team to systematize by the logic of a gestalt and produce design magic that is both meaningful and logically clear.

Since I made the “Spiral Process” presentation, I’ve improved the vocabulary. I continue to use the word conception for the process of instaurating and understanding a gestalt. But I now use the word “constructing” for the activity of building out a system, and “construing” for making sense of it.

I have also developed a more nuanced understanding of the experimental tacking process designers use to tentatively construct systems that might suggest a gestalt (or not) and to conceive possible gestalts and test them for feasibility. In design, construction and conception processes rapidly, informally alternate and are brought into dialogue together in iterative trials of multiple kinds.

The last two presentations are from my latest life in service design. The first, from 2019, wasn’t but should have been called “Service Design for UX researchers”. the second, from 2024, was called “Six Sensibilities of Service”.

“Service Design for UX researchers” was meant to clarify the relationship between service design research and UX research, but approached it by way of clarifying the precise relationship between the disciplines of service design and UX. In this presentation I described service design dimensionally.

One-dimensional design is design within one single service delivery channel. UX is a common example. Or industrial design. Or print design. Most design has been one-dimensional, single service channel touchpoint design (for example digital, in-person, voice, etc.. I pointed out, though, that a good single channel designer always makes a point of understanding other channel paths their user might take or need. This is part of the design context.

But in two-dimensional design the context becomes part of the design problem. Here is where omnichannel design, CX design  and experience design proper occurs. Here the designer takes full responsibility for all service delivery channels and shapes an end-to-end omnichannel experience for a user, customer, patient , employee, etc — whoever’s experience the team is focusing on improving. But in order to do a good job at this, the design team will need to understand the organization’s capabilities to deliver this experience, to ensure it is feasible.

In three-dimensional design, we have service design. In service design, an organization’s capabilities are no longer just constraining and enabling context but part of the design problem. Designers are now responsible for shaping the organization’s delivery of a customer’s experience (or the experience of whoever is receiving the service) in the “front stage” where they experience what is happening, and backstage where the service is supported but not directly experienced.

I explained that ultimately service design frames a whole system of interconnected problems. And it is these interconnected problems that UXers and other touchpoint designers. Service designers help UXers understand the full experientical service context in which their touchpoint will be experienced and will play a part in the customer’s journey, or the journey of the one delivering or supporting the experience.

Not be a damn braggart, but this made clear sense of a very unclear situation that many others had bungled and continue to bungle because they keep trying to flatten the space into domains of responsibility or overlapping toolsets, and other dead-end approaches to dividing up the work.

But this presentation also needs some updates. First it underplays the polycentric aspects of service design. It still privileges the recipient of the service over the people who deliver and support it. These latter service actors end up fading into the organizational capabilities, when in fact, service design tries to afford them the same importance and focus as the service recipient.

I also think it doesn’t need all the research content. That turned the presentation into a cognitive overload atrocity that no person could absorb in a single sitting. How do I know? This brings me to the fourth presentation

“Six Sensibilities of Service” was my final project for a course design course I took in 2024. One of the things this course taught me was that I was guilty of trying to teach too damn many things all at once in most of my presentations. I needed to simplify everything drastically.

“Six Sensibilities of Service” took as its point of departure the very goal of service design: good services. Many services are pretty terrible. I hypothesized that this is because many people faced with service problems misdiagnose them as other kinds of problems, and proceed to treat the wrong condition with the wrong methods. But by sensitizing ourselves to issues specific to services, we can better recognize when something is specifically a service problem that is best treated as such with a service design methodology.

As a gimmick, I warned everyone that if they cooperated with this lesson and acquired any of these six sensibilities, they would never stop noticing service problems, and that this would turn them bitter and crazy. I made them sign a form releasing me from liability if they were to suffer mental problems as a result of what I was about to teach them.

This presentation is more recent, and I think it still hold up pretty well. I’ve begun to think about pluricentricity as a separate issue from polycentricity (the former is first-person and experiential, the latter is third-person and behavioral, but I am not not sure this hair-splitting is worth the additional cognitive load. Something to ponder as I do the revisions.

I think I might see if I can revise these presentation and then record myself presenting them.

Oh, I forgot another presentation I made in between 2009 and 2019. It was basically a rude version of the “Spiral Process” presentation that called construction without concept “chickenshit” and and concept without construction “bullshit” and claimed that successful design is the shit. I presented this pottymouth material to a team at Coca-Cola in 2019, and I won’t pretend I’m not proud.

If I ever make a site dedicated to my design work, I think I will enable multiple languages and make it trilingual. The visitor can select the language of their choice: English, Esoteric and Pottymouth.

Actually, I am blurring things a little on the “Bullshit/Chickenshit” presentation. It did not map as cleanly to the conception and construction as I suggested. Bullshit was actually meaning without practice. Chickenshit was practice without meaning.

But it still roughly maps, because chickenshit is almost always construction of practices, done with little consideration for anything beyond process mechanics. Chickenshit is the mass of codification — policies, procedures, standard practices — for how things are to be done that accrete within organizations, especially ones without any real mission (that is, with a bullshit mission). Chickenshit is “executable code” of social engineering, performed mechanically, directed by verbalized directions, in conformity with specifications, with no need whatsoever for such nebulous woo-woo notions as inspiration or spontaneity.

Yet, chickenshit work tends to hollow people out and make them feel unnatural, then alienated, then dehumanized, then inhuman, and then, eventually altogether unreal living in unreality. So then social engineers identify a functional need for supplemental meaning. This meaning is manufactured and distributed for the sake of morale or marketing or brand perception or what have you.

So bullshit is prescribed and administered like a vitamin pill — a dose of humanoidal values to supplement a diet deficient in humanity. It is very similar to how we take a dose of art or religion or spirituality on weekends, evenings or vacations to revive us after dry stretches of grinding cranial labor — and perhaps it isn’t only similar.

Technicity — the foundational faith of all industrial ideologies, even supposedly opposing ones like “capitalism” and “marxism” — is the reflex of answering questions of meaning by asking ” what is it for?”. This pragmatic presequence of presuming a functionalist implicitly leading question behind Why, treats morale, meaning, value, love as something that has a motivating function in life, and which can be added onto something otherwise meaningless to give it market appeal or motivational oomph or other powers to control, motivate or manipulate human behaviors.

They assign Why to design and call that “desirability” and then assign designers the task of fabricating desirability and putting it onto their chickenshit so people will adopt it, or accept it or at least comply with it for some span of time.

Pluricentric design is understanding the driving Why within all people involved in an organization and serving it from start to finish, because the What and How of the world is supposed to serve Why — and not the reverse, despite all conceits of technicity. Right now bullshit-coated-chickenshit — also known as that species of cynical artificiality derided as “corporate” — is so ubiquitous in both the private and public sphere that it rarely occurs to organizations to compete on being palpably human. Perhaps someday, organizations might, by the logic of technicity, for technicic purposes, invest real effort into transcending technicity.

The central insight of my designerly life is a simple one. Design cannot be what it is, and designers cannot play their role inside the narrow functionalist, behavioralist, In-Order-To logic and practices of technicity. Design does not fit inside engineering. Design is not an engineering function. Engineering development processes cannot accommodate design practice. Design cannot conform to the norms of engineering and technicity-minded practices. Designers who try to force design into the constraint-jacket of technicity in the name of empathy (meeting our masters halfway), or because they have succumbed to values of being realistic and go hard-nosed, do not serve design but betray it.

The reverse is, in fact, true. Engineering is a part of design’s bigger picture. But if engineering, management and other technicity-oriented practices take their place within a Why-directed design practice, their work will also become more meaningful, “impactful”, memorable and valued.

To overstate it with maximum obnoxiousness, every C-Suite should build a penthouse onto the roof of its headquarters. The penthouse should be staffed with designers responsible for advising executives in matters of meaning — so things don’t immediately devolve back into the brutal power machinations of technicity. You want to be the Apple of your industry? This is the secret of Apple: Crown your glass tower with a D-Suite.

Design kapos

Autobiography, Design

My frustration with the field of design right now is that its doctrine and practices keep getting “replatformed” on inadequate faiths. It is this frustration that is dyspiring this endless stream of semi-schizophrenic design rants. I am so tired of my field getting ripped out from under me every decade or so, and I am sick of designers helping turn the wheel of this cyclical subversion.

As I’ve said a half-zillion times in myriad ways, a faith is not a magnitude of belief, but a particular configuration of Why and How that does the believing. It is qualitative first — intuiting, caring, seeking, noticing, perceiving, conceiving responding — and only from here is something understood and believed or disbelieved to some degree. Faith is a specific concave form a soul assumes, and that concavity is a capacity for receiving some experiential content and filtering what it cannot accommodate.

When I call something designerly, I indicate a particular faith which is behind design practice or theory or, better, praxis (a virtuous feedback loop of theory-guided practice, practice-informed theory). This faith wants a more palpably meaningful world — a world where we spontaneously experience things as intrinsically meaningful and valuable. There is not a trace of need to figure out the value or to justify it, and explanations dramatically fail to do it justice. We just like, desire, love, je ne sais quois, and respond with equal spontaneity, with minimal or no linguistic intercession.

Design seeks direct intuitive contact with reality and reality’s intrinsic goodness. Design works intuitively for the sake of an intuitable world.

But tragically, it is easy and common for one faith to appropriate the theories and practices developed by another. They take possession of their culture, symbols and style, and much more. They even sometimes claim to be a new and better version of the original that supersedes it! And then they compete for ownership and attempt to displace the originators of what they’ve assumed as their own.

When this happens, the theories and practices and lose their original purpose and meaning and are pressed into service of an alien faith, often against the old faith.

This in fact, is happening to design right now.

Adherents of technicity — that faith behind the maniacal drive to utilize resources to achieve objectives, which always themselves generate more resources utilized to achieve yet more objectives in an endless chain of In Order To’s — want to utilize design to acheive business objectives in order to, in order to, in order to… ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nihilo.

Designer professionals who accept a business-centric, ops-centric replatforming enter this technicity faith loop and, in participation, are gradually reshaped by it. Eventually, they become hard-nosed design consultants, who make a point of agreeing with nondesigners that all resources must serve business and only business. They agree, in the name of design, that design must fall in line. They become what an intensely angry, rude and slightly careericidal designer might call “design kapos”.

Design kapos still mouth humanisms, wear hipster uniforms, produce charming sketches and perform design theater for executive managerial audiences, but beneath the designwashed exterior, they now serve an entirely different Why. And the new Why gradually bends and twists How (“design tools and methods”) until the old Why is not only no longer served, but lost — altogether annihilated. The work feels soulless and empty because what used to make it alive, vital and meaningful has been evacuated and replaced. The discipline of design has been bodysnatched.

Of course, the world of language is ruled by the law of the jungle. Anarchy always favors the strong. So what design is or isn’t is an arbitrary matter of opinion in a world where some opinions are more equal than others. Never forget that in the world of technicity, the golden rule is: “he who has the gold makes the rules.” And he who makes the rules can define whatever they wish however they wish, and do so with increasing aggression.

Managerialism — unopposed, unopposable technicity taken to its natural extreme — wants a constructed totality with no reality beside or beyond it, where people believe what they are told over what they see, hear, smell, taste, touch or otherwise intuit. It wants a world where an alpha technocrat can decree that 1+1=3, and subjects see that and only that. It thrives on intuitive alienation and numbness of soul.

Design kapos sell their designerly souls for business acclaim and social prestige, and so their designless redefinitions of design carry more weight than those who have refused to make such deals. “Who are you to tell an important design personage such as myself what design is and is not. I have been coronated by the head-pats of the executive elite! I am the very embodiment of design.”

But arbitrary redifinitions and constructions aside, 1+1=2, designerliness is a real thing, and the word design still denotes it, even when that meaning is buried under a mass of technik bad faith, TLAs, dirt, filth and permafrost. Designerly design might (once again) go underground, and design kapos might dominate design for a time. But as long as a germ of design lives, there is hope. The soil will thaw, and the design kapos will pretend they were always designerly, and they will even believe their own story, and I suppose that will be okay.

Tacit vs pre-explicit

Autobiography, Design

Maybe I shouldn’t say things like this on my company slack:

…And this only counts the knowledge that could be documented in principle, but isn’t.

Even more lost — submerged in the oblivion of double-ignorance — is the kind of knowledge acquired only in apprenticeship — all that purely practical, entirely tacit know-how passed down from craftsperson to craftsperson.

Design craft is 75%+ intuition.

Wherever words are forced to intercede between hand and artifact, things get stilted and, dare I say it, corporate.

Or this:

AI not only privileges explicit knowledge. It filters out everything except explicit linguistic knowledge, and makes everything outside the wordworld seem nonexistent. If you can’t say it clearly, it is not real.

But as designers know better than most, it is precisely what cannot be said that is most real — and most interesting.

Or this:

Fun fact: The philosopher who coined the term “tacit knowledge” is the same one who coined the term “polycentric”.

Michael Polanyi is one of the philosophers I recommend to designers who want to learn enough about what designers do, to be able defend our practice against conditions that undermine our work and after a point, make design work impossible. He’ll arm you with words that will help you ineffectively but vigorously fight the obtrusion of words. Of course, nobody’ll bother understanding a word of it once they catch a whiff of philosophy and start automatically dismissing it as irrelevant. But you’ll at least have the satisfaction of speaking truth to power, albeit a deaf and numb one.

All this was in response to a pretty okay LinkedIn article “The Ground Remembers: Tacit Knowledge in the Age of AI”.

I say okay, although the author’s explanation of why we use cinnamon and cloves in apple pies exemplifies wordworld theorizing running amok. Really? The taste considerations were only a pleasant side-effect of the antibacterial function of spice chemicals? We keep using apple pie spices when baking apple pies primarily by force of habit? We follow apple pie recipes out of brainless conformist momentum?

Only a business consultant who’s gone intuitively numb from too many decades of peddling disruptive innovation could make such groundless claims without embarrassment. Ironically, the brainless momentum of conformity in the author’s own habitual application of constructionism and functionalism seems to illustrate his own point better than the baking of apple pies.

Gone native

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Trefoil

What does it mean to “go native”?

According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”

She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:

Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.

Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.

Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.

Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.

Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.

This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.

I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.

My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.

It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.

For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.

Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.

We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.

We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.

We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.

And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.

We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.

Service design has gone native. We are corporate.

Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.

And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.

When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.

It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.

It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.

But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.

Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.

Navel gaze

Autobiography, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Letterpress

A simple blind spot demonstration reveals the scotoma, a patch of pristine sightlessness where the optic nerve joins the retina, at the very center of our field of vision.

Most people will walk away from the demonstration excited to have discovered that the object occulted by blindness was actually there all along, hidden, now revealed. The revelation is the image.

Some will be astonished at the ground of revelation: the nothingness from which a concealed image could be revealed, ex nihilo. Precisely because nothing was present, nothing was missing.

It is out of this same nothingness that moral shocks issue.

It is like this: I am absolutely right, and my wrongness is inconceivable. Then a word or gesture or expression strikes me, and a judgment is issued, directly from the scotoma at the heart of my soul — precisely where my one finite self conjoins with infinite One. My guilt, my repentance and my spontaneous urgency to atone conceive themselves ex nihilo.

And now comes an ontological aftershock: A new world is given: a world where nothingness is the furthest thing from dead absence, but living, omnipresent more-than-everything, vibrant with anticipation of inconceivable surprise from an inexhaustible source.

Astonished at this nothingness — this nihiltude from which more revelations can irrupt any moment ex nihilo — we are unable to take nothingness as dead absence, but rather as nihilitude, eternally pregnant with unborn possibility.

This can happen to anyone at any moment.

The scotoma at the heart of sight is the navel of perception, and the optic nerve is the umbilical cord. This a navel worthy of eternal gazing.

(To say it in Kabbalah: where Chokhmah penetrates Binah is an unseen infinitude, which can, nonetheless be seen, and this seen unseeing is called Chesed.)

I will be letterpress printing scotoma revelation cards very soon.

Idea execution

Autobiography, Design, Fables, myths & parables

I have spent my entire design career laboring to bring ideas to life.

When I use the expression “bring ideas to life” I do not mean this metaphorically.

When “bring ideas to life” is said metaphorically, which is exactly how most designers say it, it means the opposite of what I mean. It means bringing ideas to their execution.

Any organization that thinks as a means to execution will have no use for me or my kind.

Please excuse the apocalyptic excess, but here’s you a vision: The crown of the glass tower is studded with chieftains, busy officiating over executions. The tip of the crown pierces a heaven level with the sea. An artery runs through the tower, connecting the crown’s seven heads to the heart of the structure; this artery pulses with sticky pitch. The sap goes up, lifted high, consumed; it returns to the ground sapped, depleted. Ten-thousand rowers are arrayed in galleys below, rows and columns of cubic cells, stacked to the basement. They buy none of what comes down from on high, but none of it is sold for purchase, so on they row, on and on, to the end of their shelf life.

Material fate

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Participatory know-how precedes and embodies theoretical know-what.

Existential know-that and moral know-why precedes both, providing material and motivation of embodiment.

Know-what is not the paradigmatic knowing, and to take it that way demonstrates impoverished knowing.

Our being streams out through our senses and limbs, through our tools, into our materials, crafting the enworldment through whom reality is given in this momentary way.

In a speech to Parliament in 1943, concerning the design of the rebuilding of the space where MPs themselves met and confronted one another in debate and deliberation, Winston Churchill famously said:

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

This is one of the wisest things any sensitive consumer of design has ever said about design.

Had Churchill done any of this shaping work himself his insights into shaping — or to put it more neoplatonically, formation — he might have extended and deepened his insight even further:

As we form our materials, our materials form us.

In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer observed how in dialogue, we become participants in a conversation who transcends us; the conversation has itself through its participants.

Craft is material dialogue.

In craft, our being merges with our tools, our materials, and the forms emerging through the craft. The craft reveals-creates itself through us and our materials and our tools and the forms.

Craft instaurates (reveals-creates) craftsman and craftwork.

From Charles Stein I learned the word “artifex”, the alchemist participating in alchemical transmutation, and this affords a prettier formulation — pretty enough, perhaps, for an alchemical text:

Craft instaurates together artifex and artifact.

To be alive to craft is to be alive to world.

In craft, the dense and surprising reality of the world and the dense and surprising reality of one’s own self attune and atone to one another.

We once again belong to the world by taking part, and participating in its being.

For a designer, choice of materials is choice of the self one will become.

In service design, our material is organizations.

Some organizations are people serving other people, circulating value, sharing life.

Some organizations are corporations with nothing but dry dollars in their veins.

Heaven help the designer who attempts to craft such a material, for that designer will fuse with it. When the designer’s crafting hand touches the corporation, the corporation touches back. The corporation touches the designer with its own transmuting corporate touch, and a designer is now human resource, incorporated, corporate. The world is now given in quantities, words, abstractions, techniques, agendas, opportunities, dollars.

Hermetic design is just a truer name for human-centered design, and human-centered design is just a truer name for design.

Cutoff

Autobiography

The problem with narrow genius: Everything you try to say divides into two categories: the already-known and the not-worth-knowing.

For a genius of this kind, listening is torture.

Either he already knows where you are going, and waiting for you to get there yourself is unendurable. None of what you are saying is new, and waiting for you to arrive where he’s been (for years now!) strains his patience.

Or you are going in the wrong direction and waiting for you to reach the wrong conclusion is unendurable. None of what you are saying is relevant, and listening to you pointlessly ramble on is a waste of time.

Either way, what you are saying is less than unimportant.

You will be cut off mid-sentence.

I am bleeding from ten-thousand cut-off sentences.

Another problem with narrow genius: The knower is in love with his own knowledge and the intelligence by which he knows it, and he hates whatever defies his intelligence and stands outside his knowing.

Such a person is averse to mystery.

But we humans are, above all else, mysteries to one another.

An aversion to mystery is an aversion to the reality of people.

The Midas touch of self-infatuated smarts values only what it can transmute into cold, gold, self-reflecting mind-treasure — but it cannot touch anything living without stiffening it into mind and mine, me and my I.

Trilingual

Autobiography, Design, Shit theory

Back in the day, I had a business with my dear friend Vanessa.

Vanessa and I are both profoundly and intensely Gen X, and sometimes (~90%) we communicated with one another in the native language of our generation. If our client happened to be Gen X, and was sufficiently unshitty, sometimes we would speak to them that way, too.

Our little business was as bilingual as Canada. We were prepared to express every one of our key ideas bilingually. We spoke in Business Casual to uptight people, and in Pottymouth to cool people. If you made us nervous, we’d give you an FAQ on the importance of design research. If we trusted you, you got an FUQ that enumerated the horrible things that befall omniscient dumbasses who leave Frequently Unasked Questions unasked. If you asked us what we did and you seemed like an asshole we said usability and innovation. “You know, ” we’d say, with sphincters well-clenched, “Making the right thing, or making the thing right. Ha. Ha. Ha.” But if we liked the cut of your jib, we explained that we’re always either “fixing some seriously fucked up shit” or “fixing to seriously fuck some shit up.”

I mention this now because I just wrote a post in a third language, which is my first language, Flakiness. That language is infinitely less socially acceptable than either Business Casual or Pottymouth. This is a crying shame because Flakiness is the only language that does any justice at all to design. Flakiness is the language I use when I am speaking to myself about things that matter most to me.

If my last little post on hermetic design left you cold, confused or irritable, maybe try this Pottymouth post on bullshit and chickenshit, which says more or less exactly the same thing.

Fresh mintage

Autobiography, NOTA

I had to own the domain kabblahblah.com. Obviously.

Also I committed an excellent Freudian typo yesterday: postportum. Postpartum smushed with postmortem. I guess this is Paul’s signature operation.

This kind of thing is the price of deprioritizing sanity. I hope it sparked inspiration, amusement, entertaining horror or some reward for the effort.

Another meditation on meditation

Autobiography, Esoterism

For thirty-four years I inhabited one world as one self.

I say inhabited, but I dwelt nowhere, in an unreality of habitual inhibition. I was a pious heretic, an obedient radical, dedicated to satisfying the criteria of being a good person — and, even more importantly, of avoiding being a bad one. School had equipped me with critical toys for dissecting alleged beliefs of the past, still held, believe it or not, by contemptible fools still stuck there. I had it on good authority that authority was to be questioned, interrogated, tortured until it broke. In school I’d also received a beautiful set of broken idols, and I enjoyed subjecting them to ritual reshattering. But the greatest gift of my education was a headful of disdainful ideas about the commercial world, a disdain reinforced by all my entertainment heroes. But despite all these cynical thoughts about the rat race — and all those careerist rats scrambling beside me, and, hopefully slightly behind me — in my heart (and, come to find out, also in my hands and feet) I preferred death to being a bad employee.

But one deep-frozen Toronto winter, I exited. I vanished into nowhere, and returned as a new self in a new world, as crazy and wordless as a newborn. Nothing was different, but everything had changed. Urban petrichor whispered dog wisdom into my opened nostrils, in concurrency of ammonia, maple syrup, motor oil and wet gravel. The subway was overflowing with international angels. I rode my bicycle everywhere, singing and babbling nonsense, poems flowing around me. Everything was here, real, superphysical, important.

Somehow, though I was here, capable of welcoming myself into this new world. Somehow, I reparented myself, sometimes patiently. Somehow, I retaught myself speech. New meanings remapped themselves to old words. Ironic bilinguality was set like a wafer on my mother tongue, investing each word with humming, glowing irony. The daughter tongue of Pierre Menard, reauthor of the Quixote became legible in my ears. Somehow, I could still use the old meanings of the old words to communicate whatever I needed to say, provided it was nothing anyone could possibly care about.

From the outside, nothing much was different. I was the same guy — maybe happier and definitely more cryptic.

I raised this baby to a second adulthood, with a few minor rebirth setbacks along the way.

But everyone knows everything.

Meditation on meditation

Autobiography, Esoterism, Exnihilism

We sit in meditation awaiting spectacular apotheotic experiences. This distracts us from receiving the incessant gift, offered, re-offered, again and again: the insight of distraction. Who, exactly, decided to seek spiritual orgasms, flashing divine lights, the face of God? Who, exactly, decided to depart the seated now to revel in magical ambitions or to struggle with past sufferings? And who, exactly, summons us back to now, to feel the faint tickle of breath on nostril and lip, the aching or vibrating body? Nobody did. Nobody does. It is the same nobody who flees the here and now and sees me from a nonexistent elsewhere, most minutes of most days, between birth and death.

Weird coincidence!

Autobiography, Design

I went down a set theory rabbit hole this morning.

Charles Stein (in his book Light of Hermes) was discussing infinine divisibilty and transfinitive sets. This reminded me of the weird math we Gen-Xers learned as kids. We were taught set theory in like 2nd grade. We were learning rudimentary Boolean logic. I’m convinced that this is why all designers of my generation are always making Venn diagrams. I found a cool book in the political history of new math — the origin of all the set theory curricula. That inspired a long and odd post on my bizarre relationship with math.

So lately I’ve working on a top secret project concerning product management practices, especially Teresa Torres’s “opportunity solution trees”. I am interested in what product management tends to exclude, and what service design might be able to reintroduce. And suddenly the word “tree” jumped out at me, and I recalled this old Christopher Alexander paper “A City is Not a Tree”. And I thought — Wow, maybe opportunities and solutions are also not a tree! And maybe these tree structures are the kind of thing that makes silo-ization inevitable in organizations. And of course, silos fragment services and introduce discontinuites, gaps, inconsistencies and all the other stuff of bad experience.

So I start reading “A City is Not a Tree”… and here is how it starts:

The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction.

I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been deliberately created by designers and planners artificial cities.

Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.

It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

Both the tree and the semilattice are ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems goes to make up a large and complex system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets.

In order to define such structures, let me first define the concept of a set. A set is a collection of elements which for some reason we think of as belonging together. Since, as designers, we are concerned with the physical living city and its physical backbone, we must naturally restrict ourselves to considering sets which are collections of material elements such as people, blades of grass, cars, molecules, houses, gardens, water pipes, the water molecules in them etc.

When the elements of a set belong together because they co-operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.

I think what I’m trying to say is this:

Screenshot

Math weirdness

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy

I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.

It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.

I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)

I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.

It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.

The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.

My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.

An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:

James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.

When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.

All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.

I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.

For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.

In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.

Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.

There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.

I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.

I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.

I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.