Category Archives: Design

Gorging ouroboros

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Philosophy

Gorging Ouroboros

Every philosophy is a philosophy of some kind of life.

For too many generations philosophers have philosophized about philosophizing to philosophers philosophizing about philosophizing.

This has turned philosophy into something exasperatingly inapplicable to anything important to anyone except a professional academic philosopher.

My belief (or self-interested prejudice) is that being a philosopher who philosophizes a life of human-centered design is a great privilege at this time in our culture.

Human-centered design lives at the intersection of many of our most problematic oppositions: theory-vs-practice, objectivity-vs-subjective, intuitive-vs-methodical, individual-vs-collective, revolution-vs-evolution, symbolic-vs-real, narrative-vs-fact, qualitative-vs-quantitative, holism-vs-atomism, coercion-vs-persuasion, technology-vs-humanities, natural-vs-artificial . . . , etc.

My philosophy feeds on the live problems and anxious perplexities that seize groups of diverse people when they collaborate to improve the lives of other people by changing social situations — physically, practically, symbolically and emotionally — and in this effort become so desperate to succeed that they are willing to stake or sacrifice their own cozy worldviews for the sake of sharing understandings with others.

I am convinced that philosophy can (and will soon) regain its relevance. It just needs a diet of something other than its own self-gorged self.

Overcoming empathy

Design, Design Instrumentalism

A disempathic world view: “We may be accused of lacking empathy, but this supposed deficiency is actually an efficiency, not only because there are convenient statistical workarounds, but because the very object of empathy is entirely useless. People can and should be understood in terms of observable behaviors and attributes. Any invisible “agent” slipped under these observable realities is at best too vague or messy to manage, and in all likelihood superfluous or nonexistent.”

You can’t argumentatively disprove a philosophy of this kind — certainly not in its own terms. With respect to mere argumentation, it is not a matter for disproof; it is a matter for disapproval. But disapproval is not objective. It is subjective, and therefore not admissible as a valid argument to a mind who excludes all but objective criteria. Arguments about arguments will ensue, but objective minds are unable to grasp how this kind of argument is even possible, and therefore it also does not exist. So let’s not.

Luckily, we are not limited to mere argumentation. We are not Medieval Scholastics who must gather around the council table to establish theological truth through logical connections of doctrinal assertions.

We are children of the Enlightenment, and we know that we are not chained to the council table and books and figures and dogmas and arguments. We are able — and obligated! — to stand up and exit the room with all its shadowy abstract depictions Truth — and walk out into the sunlight of reality  to see how our truths perform when we test their fitness in helping us live effectively.

This is where design thinking and social scientific method become gloriously useful. Both take subjectivity as real and testable. This sounds abstract until you realize that the fates of businesses and organizations of all kinds hang on subjectivity.

On fighting well

Design, Philosophy

I’ve been married for 23 years, exactly half of my life. I have two daughters. At times they have asked my wife and me how we’ve pulled it off. My answer has been: don’t try to avoid fights; learn to fight well. Not only is avoiding fights  impossible — fighting may very well be the point of marriage.

My design career began around the same time. And in many ways it has followed a parallel path — especially with respect to fighting. That’s not surprising really. Marriage and design are all about human relationships, and a key part of relationships is fighting.

But learning to fight well has been a long process, and part of the process was revising the very goal of fighting. I will relate the process as it played out with design, but if you reflect the lessons are more general. In fact the lessons are universal.

Early in my design career I believed fighting was an obstacle doing my design work. I had worked hard to develop good design skills and judgment and I was hired to exercise them — so get out of my way and let me work. Fighting well meant taking a stand and defending Good Design. Who knew what Good Design was? “Trust me!”

These fights were no fun, mainly because they were not winnable. The customer is always right.

So, a little later in my career, I came to see fighting as a fact of design work. Learning to fight well was a basic job requirement. It wasn’t enough to design something good, you had to convince others it was good, or it would be shot down. Fighting well meant learning to articulate reasons: why a proposed plan is the best one, why a particular design approach is likely to produce superior results, why a particular design ought to be approved. Fights became civil arguments. “Trust my arguments!”

But in the end, no matter how rational people were, decisions often came down to speculations — especially speculations on other people and their likely perceptions and responses and all the consequences that follow. And, it turns out, people are passionate about their beliefs about other people, rooted as they are in fundamental conceptions of human nature and reality itself… So often competing justifications would end up clashing and become once again, disputes about whose judgement was better.

Usability testing — when you could get the client to buy it — changed everything. Usability did not end fighting, but it dramatically changed the character of fights.  Speculations were now presented as guesses, not as precious convictions to defend against doubters, enemies of progress or taste, etc.  Fighting well meant allowing reality to play referee. Testing was what settled disagreements. “Trust the process!”

But in the last decade or so, I arrived where I am now. I started noticing something new — a new kind of fighting that happens, not despite research, but because of it. (This is due largely to a shift to research methods designed to drive innovation, as opposed to research designed to remove usability flaws.)

Here’s what I noticed. This kind of research was most valuable to teams not when it helps us learn new things, but when it helps us unlearn old things we thought we knew. When a team is stripped of the concepts that help it make sense of and navigate a problem space and it does not have any ready concepts to replace it, the result is a state of perplexity and a distictive existential pain. This pain makes people fight. They are intensely anxious to eliminate the perplexity. Anything that makes the escape from perplexity more difficult must be removed or suppressed, and unfortunately, this is other people and their incompatible ideas. But if you fight through this pain, and stay focused and faithful to your problem and the individuals on your team, something good always happens.

It reminds me of birth classes my wife and I took with our first pregancy. We were taught “Labor is what the term implies: hard work.” If you stay with the process and see the labor for what it really is — not the symptoms of something going wrong, but what naturally happens when things are going right — you can labor through the discomfort and give birth.

So this is where I am now: Fighting well means laboring through the birth of a truly new idea. “Trust the labor pains of creativity!”

I have found that when I am in the throes of conflict with teammates this idea helps me stay in the right idea-birthing state of mind.

And when you labor this way, design becomes more than a process for making ideas and things. It makes relationships.

 

Gewollt

Design, Philosophy

Jasper Johns - The Critic Sees

Gewollt – Ge’-volt (adj.)

  1. deliberate, intentional, intended
  2. (piece of art) contrived, awkward, cheesy

*

Gewollt occurs when art, which is supposed to be the exhibition of concrete, tacit qualities, is produced by explicit and general categories.

Nietzsche said it well: “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.”

*

Corporateness is a species of gewollt — the effect of production by predominantly explicit processes. This form of activity is effective for engineering processes, but as soon as it is applied to anything meant to seem human, anything produce by it will have hollow and soulless ring to it.

What makes a design compelling are concrete, tacit qualities that make it into the design — the capturing of something impossible to convey with language — the je ne sais quoi of the design that makes it irreplaceable by anything other than itself.

It is the art in design that makes it inexplicably resonant and desirable beyond its function and convenience.

*

Artists have an advantage. The work of artists takes place between the individual and the material.

With designers things are more complicated. Designers are usually working in teams, and the work is for others. The only way to infuse a design with art without allowing the design to become the personal expression of the designer and to devolve into art is to allow the designers to directly experience the people for whom they are designing, and their environments, their activities, their language — their world. Tacit empathy that cannot be conveyed through explicit findings reports are key.

The design of research approaches must not be understood solely in terms of data gathering activities, but rather the production of encounters between designer and worlds.

 

 

The Republic of Reality

ANT, Design, Politics

represent |repri-zent|
verb [with obj.]

  1.  be entitled or appointed to act or speak for (someone), especially in an official capacity.
  2. constitute; amount to.
  3. depict (a particular subject) in a picture or other work of art
  4. formal state or point out (something) clearly

“Now that we are no longer fooled by these maneuvers, we see spokesmen, whoever they may be, speaking on behalf of other actors, whatever they may be. We see them throwing their ranks of allies, some reluctant, some bellicose, into battle one after the other.” – Bruno Latour

If knowledge is representative, this sense of representation (4) should not be too closely equated with (3) depicting or (2) constituting. It is better to emphasize its affinity with (1) acting or speaking on behalf of a reality.

Knowledge represents reality by being its spokesman in deliberation, conveying the considerations relevant to that reality, and negotiating for where that reality will figure into whatever is being discussed. If a representative speaks well for a reality, the reality will cooperate and reinforce his claim of representing his constituency. If he misrepresents a reality, the reality will undermine and discredit his representation by refusing to cooperate as the representative promised it would.

Again: our knowledge does not depict reality or make little idea-models that correspond to a reality — with our knowledge we politically represent a reality and conveys what it does and will do with respect to a problem. We are standing in for a reality and representing it in its absence.

Of course, it pays to confer with any reality we are seeking to represent, and be good students of that reality so we can represent it ever more faithfully. When we are representing people we may have conversations with them. Or we may immerse in their lives, interact and participate so we can get first-hand first-person knowledge of what is going on. If we are representing non-human things we might have to watch, form hypotheses, interact, experiment, revise — again, so we can be taught by the reality how to represent it.

And, as Latour never tires of pointing out, every social situation is a heterogeneous collection of human and non-human actors.

Since design is nearly always intervening in some social situation in order to change it, what design researchers really do in the field is confer with the full social reality in order to understand it and fully represent it. And once hypothetical solutions are found, design researchers return to the social situation to confer with it about how it might react to them. Good designers are like good politicians — always shaking hands, knocking on doors, staying in touch, winning support.

 

Deliberation and experiment

Design

The fewer participants you include in a deliberative process, the simpler the process can be. A solitary mind, thinking alone about personal experiences can come to a resolution pretty quickly most of the time.

Each person you include complicates the deliberative process exponentially. Now there is a wider range of experiences, thinking styles, values, emphases and goals that must be considered and satisfied.

When you start including non-human actors in the deliberative process, which means adding experimentation to the mix — now you have something incredibly complex. If the group is trying to understand non-human actors, we now have something like a scientific community. If the question is broadened to include both humans and non-humans combined, we have something a lot more complicated: a society.

And if you try to include all humans and all non-humans, you are now in the realm of the impossible. But it is probably a worthy impossibility.

Douche Theory 2×2 Model (R)

Brand, Design, Ethics, Politics, Symbols and diagrams

douche-theory

I plan to use this diagram to help me explain different approaches to design strategy.

Human-centered design helps Douche organizations become Keepers.

 

Design as gift (edit for 10ke)

Brand, Design, Geometric Meditations

Design is like gift-giving. How?

When one person gives another person a perfect gift, the gift is valuable in three ways:

  1. The gift itself is intrinsically valuable to the one receiving it. The giftis good to have in one’s life, because it makes life easier, more pleasant or more meaningful.
  2. The gift contributes to the receiver’s own self-understanding and identity. The gift becomes symbolic of the receiver’s own relationship to the world — an example what they experience as good, which can signify the recipient’s ideals in concrete form, in ways that explicit language often cannot.
  3. The perfection of the gift is evidence that the giver cares about and understands who the receiver is. The successful giving of a perfect gift demonstrates that the giver was moved to reflect on what the receiver will value and consequently has real insight into who they are as an individual and what they are all about.

Great design experiences are similar to gifts. When a design  is successful the beneficiary of the design gets something valuable, sees tangible proof they are valued and understood, and experiences an intensification or expansion of their sense of self.

Design and democracy

Design, Philosophy

(Here we go again, with another iteration of my engineering vs. designing theme.)

* * *

Design begins with trying to please. This naturally progresses to trying to understand better how to please, and later, trying to cultivate the best possible relationship — that is, a reciprocal one.

*

In situations where people are empowered and have choices, leaders naturally begin to rely on design approaches to persuade people to voluntarily participate in their systems.

In situations where people are disempowered and have few or no choices, leaders naturally begin to rely on engineering approaches to force people to comply to rules of their systems.

*

To engineer is to create systems of involuntary components.

To design is to create systems of voluntary and involuntary components.

To the degree the system relies on compulsion alone, it is engineered.

To the degree the system depends on volition, it is designed.

*

If the success of your system depends on people behaving in some particular way, two basic approaches are available:

  • Engineer it: purge the system of volitional variability so the entire mechanism functions like a well-oiled machine — reliably, predictably, repeatedly. Compel people to participate in the system with the behaviors required to support it. Make it their only viable choice. Remove choices, impose rules that support the system’s requirements.
  • Design it. Build volition into the system. Persuade  people to voluntarily participate in the system in ways that support it by making it their best choice. Provide new options, understand participants’ requirements, desires, attitudes, aspirations, unconscious hopes.

*

If someone tries to engineer you into a system, it might be that they have not yet fully developed an intersubjective consciousness (that is, they are on the autism spectrum).

Or they may think you lack choices, and are forcing you to do what they want simply because they can and there’s little you can do about it.

Or they may have not yet realized that many 20th Century management practices naturally produce autistic institutions, and that things can be otherwise. And that competition requires them to be. That their survival depends on it.

 

Philosophy design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

For the last several weeks I have been trying very hard to care about Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In general, though, (with some exceptions) I have found its problems and approaches to resolving problems too tedious, too inapplicable and too dry to keep me engaged. It is cognitively, practically and aesthetically irrelevant to me.

Or to put it in UX language, for me, the experience is not useful, usable or desirable. I am not the user of this stuff.

I suspect the user of analytic philosophy is other professional philosophers who want to philosophize to other professional philosophers.

*

pirate_flag

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the UNIX of philosophies.

My project is to design a Macintosh philosophy. (A well-designed thing to be used by people who don’t want to be forced to tinker with technicalities, unless they want to. And perhaps a thing that appeals especially to designers looking for tools to help them design better.)

*

Philosophy is a kind of design. It is a mind-reality interface.

Every philosophy permits us to render some aspects of reality intelligible, while confusing or obscuring others; supports us in some practical activities and while muddling others; helps us intensify the feeling of value of some things while devaluing others. In other words, a philosophy makes our life experience as a whole useful, usable and desirable. But like with every design, tradeoffs are necessary, and where to make these tradeoffs is a function of the user and the use context. We can be conscious about it and make these tradeoffs intentionally — or we can be like bad clients and persist in trying to have it all.

And as with all good designs, philosophies disappear.

*

Even bad interfaces disappear, leaving only frustration, alienation, friction, dissipation, confusion.

*

We would laugh at an argument over whether iOS or Android is truer. Maybe it is time we laugh at philosophical arguments the same way. Let other people  sit around and debate whose philosophy does the best job of representing the truth. I will do an experience assessment.

 

Hermeneutical/rhetorical bow

Design, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Symbols and diagrams

This is a redrawing of a diagram I played with in 2009. It is meant to show the relationship of making and understanding and how it weaves between thinking top-down in wholes, and then bottom-up in terms of parts. It was originally inspired by learning (from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism) that the hermeneutical circle was based on a model from rhetoric theory.

hr-bow

Design thinking thoughts

Design

What could be more passe than to define Design Thinking now — now that it has been over-hyped, described in a million ways, implemented very glamorously and expensively, found to not live up to the hype and finally publicly declared dead?

Nonetheless, Design Thinking ought to be defined, as crisply as possible, because it is a real thing with a precise meaning, and knowing its precise meaning is required to approach it in the right way and get those promised results. Without this precision, Design Thinking is really little more than an appearance of systematic creative activity, a style of carrying on, and unwarranted hopes.

So here’s my definition. Design Thinking is an approach to solving problems that involve hybrid systems composed of both objective and subjective elements. By objective elements I mean entities that exist “out there”, as physical objects, virtual objects, environments, services, and anything else a person can encounter in the world. And by subjective elements I mean ideas, thoughts, emotions, decisions, perceptions — all those things a person experiences “in here”.

In its inclusion of subjective elements in its problem definitions, design distinguishes itself from engineering, which treats only systems composed of objective elements.

The 20th Century was obsessed with the creative possibilities of cleansing problems of subjective elements. And in many areas, especially in the physical sciences and the technologies based on the physical sciences, this was the key to progress. However, this systematic elimination of subjectivity was misunderstood by many to be one of the key principles of scientific method. A scientific approach to anything involving human beings  meant treating human beings strictly as objective entities (behaving objects) and removing the messier and more arbitrary elements of human experience — subjectivity.

In fact, the scientific method does not necessitate the objectification of problems except in instances where the phenomenon to be understood is itself purely objective. What scientific method requires is clarification of the problem, inclusion of all relevant factors in exploring the problem. So to understand a social problem scientifically, it is necessary to include not only the objective factors at play but also the subjective ones. This, of course is what the social sciences do in a variety of different ways.

So, another way to grasp what Design Thinking is is to make an analogy between engineering and the physical sciences. To some extent, you can engineer by instinct referring explicitly to theories from physics or drawing on science to test the adequacy of your engineering solution. Or you can harness scientific knowledge, use your instincts to come up with crazy possible approaches to try out, and then test them to make sure they actually work. The exact same thing goes for design, except where engineering uses the physical sciences, design thinking uses the knowledge and methods of the social sciences.

*

Some analogies:

Design thinking is to the social sciences what engineering is to the physical sciences.

Design thinking is to agency “creative” as engineering is to tinkering.

Group capacity to think

Design

To the degree an individual participates in the life of a group, the behavior tends to be formatted according to conventions of speech, concept and procedure. One uses the vocabulary, ideas and behaviors easily understood and accepted by the majority of group members, in order to gain influence within the pace and formatting of group work. To stray outside of the commonalities of the group is to risk frustrating or alienating some members of the group and consequently losing their support, or to slow the pace of the activity and interfere with meeting goals, or to fragment the group into conflicting factions, or to require too much effort or time to understand and risk being interrupted, ignored or otherwise silenced.

With some individuals things can be different — if the individuals do not insist on enforcement of group conventions.

Once again, this connects with Buber’s distinction between “the social” and “the interhuman”.

*

Deep innovation and novel syntheses require new procedures for conceiving and evaluating thoughts, new language to express new thoughts (and to distinguish the new thoughts from older, more familiar ones), a willingness to wrestle with frustrations, unclarity and dead-ends — in other words, it runs counter to everything that makes groups function effectively. This is why innovations tend to be hatched by individuals and why “group-think” has such bad connotations. However, groups outfitted with new conventions — perhaps in workshop settings or in semi-permanent  collectives governed by new codes, processes or cultural values — might produce results impossible in other conditions. (A way to see it is that a workshop or a department or team can be socially programmed to produce different results.) But the novel results achieved are still different in kind from the more flexible conditions of individual or small group work.

 

Engineering and design

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.

Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.

*

When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.

*

Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.

Scientific Method vs Lean Startup

Design, Design Instrumentalism

In his instant-classic The Lean Startup, Eric Ries restores some crucial components of the Scientific Method to innovation processes, long-neglected by “scientific” management.  Among his most important restorations is the the experimental practices that are the heart of scientific discovery. This is enormously important: without experiment, the creative dimension of science is lost and “scientific rigor” of quantification becomes an expensive, time-consuming and intrinsically conservative hindrance to doing anything unprecedented.

However, I do not believe that Ries has restored the entirety of the Scientific Method, and for the sake of setting up an unimpeded engineering-dominated process, has omitted or de-emphasized key non-engineering components that improve outcomes and shorten timelines. Here is a partial list of omissions:

  1. Hypothesis formation. Hypotheses are not just guesses which can be tested experimentally. Hypotheses are informed guesses, and it is on-the-ground-discovery that informs mere guesses and transforms them into hypotheses. Starting with a hypothesis rather than some dude’s random notion can reduce development cycles. Also, some ideas are so weak that no amount of pivoting will tweak it to awesomeness.
  2. Theory. Theory in science is what directs experimentation and lends knowledge a progressive thrust. Without an appropriate theory, experiment devolves into aimless and fragmentary trial-and-error. This kind of aimlessness and fragmentation in a business context translates to confusing and disjointed products. It is not that Lean Startup does not accumulate knowledge, but that its “validated learning” is too product-centric and not nearly user-centric enough. Lean Startups know everything there is to know about their own product and the possible permutations of their product and the customer behaviors and reported opinions about the product, but insights into the user’s inner life and outer context — the things that inspire the best design ideas — will not readily surface using Lean Startup methods.
  3. Crisis. Without the rigor of theory and the discipline of reflection, the kinds of problems that produce revolutionary solutions cannot come into view. Teams will hack their ways right past the crises that and miss the chance to find simple radical product insights. This is the precise point where philosophy can become a competitive secret weapon. According to Wittgenstein “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.  Isn’t innovation  all about finding, posing and solving such problems?

I’m going to read as much as I can about Scientific Method and develop this thought further and support it with some research. But I’ve been sitting on this idea too long, and I wanted to at least sketch it out.

 

Qual, quant, repeat

Design

Qualitative methods help you:

  • Decide what to measure.
  • Interpret the meaning of measurements.
  • Respond to measurements effectively.

Quantitative methods help you:

  • Identify problems to investigate.
  • Observe phenomena precisely.
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of strategies.

These methods thread together:

  • Identify problems to investigate. Where are things not measuring up? (quant)
  • Decide what to measure. What elements in the situation warrant scrutiny? (qual)
  • Observe phenomena precisely. What is really going on? (quant)
  • Interpret the meaning of measurements. What motivates what is going on? (qual)
  • Respond to measurements effectively. How can we act into the situation to change it? (qual)
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of strategies. How does the situation change when we act into it? (quant)
  • Repeat…

It would be lovely if I could get these methods to interleave more elegantly. This is how they seem to me to line up, though.

 

It’s mine

Design

It’s mine: I saw the opportunity.

It’s mine: It was my idea.

It’s mine: I articulated the idea.

It’s mine: I championed the idea.

It’s mine: I translated the idea.

It’s mine: I laid the plans.

It’s mine: I made the case.

It’s mine: I formed the team.

It’s mine: I motivated the team.

It’s mine: I aligned the team.

It’s mine: I coordinated the team.

It’s mine: I fleshed out the idea.

It’s mine: I built it and made it real.

It’s mine: I made it profitable.

It’s mine: I funded it.

It’s mine: I told the world about it.

It’s mine: I made people care about it.

It’s mine: I keep it going everyday.

It’s mine: I improve it.

It’s mine: I find ways to grow it.

It’s mine: I discovered it first.

It’s mine: I use it.

It’s mine: I pay for it.

It’s mine: I rely on it.

It’s mine: It was made for people like me.

It’s mine: It was made by people like me.

It’s mine: It’s part of my life.

It’s mine: It’s part of who I am.

 

Sources of innovation

Design

Ideas for innovation come from many sources.

  • New technological possibilities  can be used to create and evolve new products.
  • New industry developments can create new strategic pressures and opportunities that make new products competitive.
  • New insights into people and the details of their lives can show how new products might fit into and transform their worlds.
  • New combinations of skills in inter-disciplinary teams provided the right conditions and supports can co-invent new ideas impossible for isolated individuals.
  • New innovation tools, techniques and approaches can produce and evolve new products.
  • New forms of analysis can lead to new understandings of situations that reveal new opportunities to innovate.
  • And — at the risk of sounding old-fashioned — inspiration can strike a person at any time, in any place, for any reason or no reason at all.

This is not even close to a complete list. Most people prefer one or another source and sometimes would have their organization cultivate only one or a few sources instead of as many as possible. But why? Perhaps because most organizations already have many ideas and are looking for ways to narrow the list.

But really, what is needed is a way to evaluate ideas and select the best ones. And the majority of organizations rely on one method, which could be called “table-thinking” — people sitting behind desks and tables, presenting, debating and deciding things about distant situations they at best partially understand and largely misunderstand.

The design of truth

Design, Philosophy

What kind of truth do you know? That depends on what kind of reality you inhabit and what kind of life you are trying to lead.

*

A truth relates a knower to some part of reality and allows that knower to participate in that reality in some capacity to some degree.

Two truths can conflict in the same way that two good user interface design approaches can be incompatible with one another. And this is barely metaphorical: truth is a person’s interface with a local bit of reality.

*

A choice of truth can be between truth and falseness: Does it represent accurately, or does it distort or obscure? But a choice of truth can also be between effective and ineffective: Can the truth be used to do what needs doing, or does it lead to paralysis or mistakes? And finally, choice can be between valuable and valueless: Does this truth lead to something good and beautiful, or something depressing and repellent?

Truth is a mixture — and sometimes a designed system — of factuality, actuality and importance.

*

We can design truth, and we are allowed to, but what we design can succeed or fail at what it aims to be and do and mean. Is this relativism? Absolutely — but it is neither purely subjective, nor arbitrary.

(This is what my book The Ten-Thousand Everythings is about.)