Category Archives: Design

Synetic branding

Brand, Design, Philosophy

A good brand experience makes an organization’s perspective manifest to its stakeholders.

Some stakeholders are outsiders who have an outsider’s relationship to the organization. (e.g. current or prospective customers, the press, the interested public.) Other stakeholders constitute the organization itself. (e.g. employers, employees, partners, shareholders.)

The manifestation of the perspective takes the form of a sharing of understanding. Some of this understanding is explicit. Certain facts are agreed upon. The most important aspects of the understanding, however, are implicit: what is the significance of the facts at hand? What is the relative importance of each fact? How do the facts connect? What aspects of an offering are essential, and what aspects are less important or negligible?

Every act of design is one of balances and trade-offs. The best designs make its trade-offs feel obvious and necessary, to the point of invisibility. What is marginalized or omitted is what was irrelevant. (A classic example of this kind of trade-off is the London Underground “Tube map”.)

So, within the brand perspective is embedded the company’s standards and rankings of value. Those things seen as most important are given the most attention and emphasis. The less important things are ignored or downplayed, sometimes pointedly. The standards and values determine how an organization behaves, how it presents itself and how it develops and delivers its offerings.

(The classic example: What makes a computer more or less desirable? Low price and high performance? Those who see it that way are unlikely to purchase a Macintosh. However, if you view computers the way Apple does and put a premium on how it feels to use and own a computer, you are likely to consider only a Macintosh when purchasing a new computer. Another example: What do you consider important the most important quality in a car? Style? Performance? If so, you probably won’t buy a Toyota. However, if you see reliability as the single most important quality in a car, it is very likely you will consider Toyota. Boring, but compelling. Consequently, there are many Toyota owners, and very few Toyota enthusiasts. Toyota makes cars for people who don’t love cars.)

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If an organization wishes to have an authentic, compelling brand its leadership must 1) actually have a perspective on what it does that is different from its competition, 2) the perspective must be one that can be shared, 3) the leadership must know how to share its perspective, 4) the perspective must be practically consequential (the perspective changes the way one acts), and 5) the organization’s leadership must have the courage to believe its own eyes and to actually live and lead according to how it sees. It cannot constantly second-guess itself, equivocate, compromise or waffle between its perspective and the myriad other ways of seeing.

This does not mean one denies the existence or validity of other ways of seeing. It does not mean that one does not believe in the possibility that other ways of seeing might turn out to be better. (If you have a taste for such things, allow your mind to boggle for a moment at what it means to see a new definition of better as better than the one you currently hold! Better… how?)

It does, however mean one sees for himself. It means that one listens to others in order to see with them what they are seeing, and to share with them what one is seeing. This listening and sharing — dialogue in the proper sense — presupposes an expectation of seeing for oneself and the insight that one could at any moment see differently, and that difference could be deeply and extensively consequential.

Most of all it means that a leader who wished to lead an organization with a real brand must see by a genuine brand vision.

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Leaders who lack vision rarely know it. They believe an ability paint a vivid, desirable and detailed picture of the future and to lay out a plan for actualizing that picture is having vision. The mistake is understandable — some imagination and ability to visualize and describe is involved. It is a valuable skill for a leader to possess. However, this is not vision.

Vision is seeing what their organization is and does in a distinctive, persuasive and consequential way. This way of seeing makes their organization look, feel and behave differently from its peers.

It is a subtle difference, but a substantial and consequential one. The ability to share one’s ambitions and plans persuasively might help an organization perform better, but it won’t help it accomplish anything new. If this were all vision were, nobody would care much about vision. It would just be another skill.

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There are multiple levels of branding needed in user experience projects:

  1. The company has an articulated brand, its offerings are deliberately on-brand. What is required is framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  2. The company lacks an articulated brand, but has developed its offerings through a tacit brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement)  and b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  3. The company lacks an articulated brand, and has developed its offerings through a tacit and unclear or inconsistent brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement), b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience, c) a establishing a program to communicate the brand articulation throughout the organization and, d) and additionally, developing parallel programs to operationalize the brand – that is, to redesign the organizations processes to produce on-brand offerings and uniformly on-brand customer experiences at every touchpoint.
  4. The company lacks brand altogether, and has developed its offerings strictly through imitation of best practices or inconsistently according to fragmentary individual or factional whim. What is required is a) anthropological study of the organizational culture and the stakeholders it serves  to understand the possibilities, given the organization’s traditions, constitution and contexts. From this foundation a brand strategy consisting of a brand articulation and supporting operational changes can be developed to transform the organization into a coherent culture.

Brand is the outward expression of an authentic, coherent culture. This is why, despite the fact that all companies have logos and most have corporate graphic standards, very few have actual brands.

Most brands are like most people. They try to play a part without really being it. It is hollow and unpersuasive.

Notes on emic versus etic

Design, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

In “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” Clifford Geertz outlines a fundamental concept of anthropology:

The formulations have been various: “inside” versus “outside,” or “first person” versus “third person” descriptions; “phenomenological” versus “objectivist,” or “cognitive” versus “behavioral” theories; or, perhaps most commonly, “emic” versus “etic” analyses, this last deriving from the distinction in linguistics between phonemics and phonetics — phonemics classifying sounds according to their internal function in language, phonetics classifying them according to their acoustic properties as such.

Some thoughts:

  1. The precise meaning of the suffix “-icity” (at least when applied to existential terms) has been unclear to me. The problem has been in that no-man’s-land between registering the presence of light anxiety and actually doing something to relieve it. I know what each -icity word means (facticity, historicity, scientificity, etc.), I just wouldn’t have been able to explain to someone else what it means. The resolution turns out to be fairly simple. The suffix -icity indicates the root is to be considered from an emic perspective. X-icity mean X considered as an interiorized existential condition (which conditions exteriorized facts), rather than as a simple exteriorized fact. (Example: History is the record of past events. Historicity is being inside history as a participant, where each historic moment is understood to have its distinctive way of seeing history, and based on this historic vision, making new history. This condition affects an entire sense of reality, holistically.)
  2. Holism is a quality of the emic, and atomism is a quality of the etic. According to the hermeneutical circle, there is never an etic fact (a part) that is not articulated from an emic whole (a fore-understanding).
  3. Only the etic is quantifiable. The emic as such is discussable strictly in qualitative terms. The emic, however, since it generates an etic vision of reality (in phenomenological terms, its intentionality) will produce quantifiable entities. Attempting to grasp the emic in etic terms (such as statistics) is the factual and moral mistake of behaviorism.
  4. Epistemology knows only the etic. Mysticism and poetry tends to treat the etic primarily as a vehicle for indicating an emic vision. Phenomenology understands the etic in terms of the emic. Hermeneutics understands the interplay between etic and emic and attempts to navigate by etic triangulation other emic visions. Pragmatism might be applied hermeneutics to cultural ends. (Despite the name, pragmatism is much stranger than many showier forms of philosophy. Ever notice how the serious druggies try to look as normal as possible?)
  5. Buber’s I-Thou relationships regards the other as essentially emic. In I-it the other is regarded as essentially etic.
  6. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the practice of listening. It’s not primarily a matter of being considerate and letting the other talk (though that’s certainly a part of it). Real listening requires the entire battery of philosophies I listed above. Listening is inviting the other’s emic vision. One must allow the other to say what he is trying to say and to hear it without trying to force it into one’s own emic schema by stripping out its emic structure (that is, pattern of significance), retaining only its etic content. Then the listener must attempt to apply that structure concretely to his own experience in an attempt to show the other his understanding of what he has heard, and he must be open to the possibility that he has misunderstood. This restatement stage of listening, though, can be non-receptive and aggressive and be used to channel the speaker away from his emic vision toward the vision of the listener. (This is the hardest part of interviews: not asking leading questions or offering leading restatements that derail and rechannel, distort or otherwise damage the emic vision of the interviewee.)
  7. Subjectivity properly understood is emic, but it is so commonly misunderstood to be some kind of interior dimension of a more solid/concrete/real etic world that “subjectivity” has become ruined for all practical communicate purposes. On the contrary, it is the etic that is interior to the emic. The emic “interiority” of each other in our environment is in fact partially shares but largely transcends our own emic and etic vision.

Tree cross (alt palette)

Empathy + Alignment + Realism

Biography, Brand, Design, Philosophy, Synesis

I wrote a manifesto for my company and put it on our intranet:

An attempt at a distillation of [this company]’s culture, in words we frequently use when describing and differentiating our approach:

  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.
  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.
  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

These three principles govern how we relate to one another on our teams, and how we relate to our clients.

Our goal is to help our clients actualize empathy + alignment + realism in their own organizations, both externally with their customers and internally with one other.

We believe that empathy + alignment + realism are core principles of ethical effectiveness. By articulating, championing and exemplifying these principles, and by helping our clients and partners put them into practice [this company] makes a positive contribution to the world of commerce and to the world as a whole.

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These principles do not exhaust the range of values active in [this company]’s culture. However, if you look closely at those values it gradually becomes clear that they all grow out from the root principles of empathy + alignment + realism.

A helpful analogy: the root principles are the DNA of our culture; the core values are the genetic traits of our company – which is the starting point for our brand.

Our brand is developed continually through collective self-cultivation (iterative clarification, accentuation and application of our principles and core values, alongside the company traditions that support them) and collective self-presentation (our formal brand guidelines – visual identity, voice and tone, interaction style). The latter can be seen as a sort of grooming: We present who we authentically are in the best possible light.

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[This company] will strengthen its brand externally, partly through explicit branding efforts, but more because [this company] has a powerful internal and semi-internal (our clients and partners) brand community.

This is something we also can perfect internally and then package for our clients: internal brand community as the key to authentic and powerful external branding. It is grounded in a simple idea: the most effective way to be perceived as something is to actually be it.

Branding can be seen as the practice of compellingly and authentically externalizing a company’s culture. Internal branding is the conscious aligning of a company’s culture to its external brand, so the two mutually reinforce.

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  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.

Empathy is not figuring other people out; it is not discovering what they are after, or knowing how to manipulated them to get them to do what you want them to do.

Empathy is, in Aristotle’s language, synesis, or understanding. Synesis is like sympathy, but involves the entirely of another’s subjectivity – cognition, language, moral priorities, hopes, fears, symbol-system, his aesthetic sense, his social environment… it is not a theoretical, externalized theory, but a holistic vision of life in which an understander is involved. Synesis turns parallel talking into dialogue.

Empathic understanding is the deepest form of respect.

  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.

Alignment is not stalemate or compromise. It is not accomplished in a battle where each party pushes as hard as it can for its own interests until it has won as much ground as it can. Alignment can only happen when all parties have a stake in the other parties’ well-being. All parties must desire and aim for a solution that satisfies everyone involved. This aim has an abstracting effect: what concern is embedded in each conflicting solution? What solutions are possible that satisfy all concerns and dissolve the conflict?

Alignment presupposes pluralism: that there can be multiple satisfactory solutions. It is not a question of which solution is viable, and which solutions are not viable. It is a question of which viable solution can be agreed upon by all parties in the deliberation.

Alignment is, in Aristotle’s language, phronesis, or prudence. Phronesis is what turns churning debate into productive deliberation.

For alignment to work, all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others, but in the end, the focus of the deliberation must be, not on the parties in the deliberation, but on their shared problem.

  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

Realism is not functionalism. Realism is also not being resigned to “the way things are”.

Also, realism is not factoring oneself out of the picure in a misconceived attempt at objectivity.

Realism means being scientific. It means cheerfully putting your ideas to the test, and letting them go if the test shows the ideas are not viable. It means cheerfully adopting another’s ideas as one’s own if they are shown to be better.

Realism means that you stay subjectively, personally involved in the problems you are deliberating, but in such a way that you are open to change.

For realism to work (and to not devolve into the poverty of functionalism or complacent pseudo-conservatism), all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others and enlarge their understanding of the problem at hand to include the concerns of the others. The group must collectively turn toward the problem itself, and work toward solutions that satisfy the concerns of everyone involved. Finally, the solutions must be subjected to test, whether that test is a formal experiment or some other criterion or standard for success.

Techne, phronesis, design and innovation

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesis

A passage from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, illuminates a problem I have encountered innumerable times working as a user experience consultant: the need for predictability in innately unpredictable situations.

Before I quote the passage, I should provide some background, which involves the role of process in the practice of design, and how the need for predictability and preconceptions about process play into it.

What clients want is an established, proven process which can be applied to their business problems in order to lead them step-by-predictable-step to a predictable outcome. The ideal is maximum predictability throughout the process.

Predictability, though, can apply to many different aspects of a process. For instance, predictability can be applied to the specific form a solution will take, or it can apply to the general effectiveness of a solution to solve defined business problems. It can apply to the specific functions a solution must perform or it can aim at achieving more general goals (and leave open the question of what specific functions are needed to accomplish those goals). It can apply to varying granularities of time, ranging from the time it will take to complete the whole process, to the time it will take to complete each particular step within the process, all the way down to the number of minutes it will take to complete each sub-task in a project plan.

The question of which particular things must be predicted is very important because predictability comes at a cost. Every point of predictability necessitates a trade-off of some kind.

For instance, predictability in regard to the form a solution will take limits innovation: it means the form is pre-defined. The kind of solution available to this kind of pre-definition is most often an assemblage of “best practices”, which is a euphemism for “imitation”. An assemblage of existing elements is easily pre-visualized and implemented methodically and predictably with easily predicted results: a competently executed best-practices frankenstein will perform well enough to earn an employee a shiny new resume bullet and maybe a year’s job security. When a client comes in white-knuckling a feature-aggregate “vision”, nine times out of ten what looks like fixation on an idea is in truth only a side-effect of severe risk aversion.

Genuine innovation requires a different and slightly more harrowing approach. It requires a higher tolerance for open-endedness. Innovation entails, by definition, the discovery of something significantly new: a possibility nobody has yet envisioned and considered. Until it is discovered, the innovation cannot be shown to or described to anyone. (Innovation: ORIGIN Latin innovat– ‘renewed, altered,’ from the verb innovare, from in– ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’, from novus ‘new’).

Innovation does not necessitate radical unpredictability, though, and it also does not entail an undisciplined or purely intuitive approach. The locus of the unpredictability is in particular points within the process where discovery and the need to innovate are concentrated. At the micro-level, a solid innovation process is still mostly constituted of predictable activities, but wherever open-endedness is needed, the demand for predictability is relaxed or suspended. At the macro-level, at the overall success of the solution a solid, user-informed innovation process is predictably effective in its results, even if it is unpredictable in matters of form.

Most companies fail to innovate, not because they lack ingenious, inventive, creative people capable of innovation,  and not because innovation is unavoidably risky, but rather because the thoughtless demand for predictability at all points precludes innovation.

A big contributing part of this problem is that for many people, practice means predictability. It means pursuing closed-ended goals, and evaluating ideas with pre-defined criteria. The notion of an open-ended process, where evaluation involves human deliberation and multiple satisfactory outcomes are possible seems antithetical to “best practice”.

Here is where Bernstein becomes useful. It turns out that the Greeks were aware of this distinction, and had names for the types of reasoning  involved in each process. According to Bernstein, one of the most fundamental and damaging philosophical blindnesses of our time is the identification of techne (of technical know-how) with method. We tend to impose our conception of techne on understanding and practice in general, and in the process we lose something very important and central to humanity, a type of reasoning Aristotle called “phronesis”, generally translated as prudence or “practical wisdom”.

 The chapter from which this passage is taken is excellent from beginning to end, but here is the most directly relevant part:

…Phronesis is a form of reasoning and knowledge that involves a distinctive mediation between the universal and the particular. This mediation is not accomplished by any appeal to technical rules or Method (in the Cartesian sense) or by the subsumption of a pregiven determinate universal to a particular case. The “intellectual virtue” of phronesis is a form of reasoning, yielding a type of ethical know-how in which what is universal and what is particular are codetermined. Furthermore, phronesis involves a “peculiar interlacing of being and knowledge… Understanding, for Gadamer, is a form of phronesis.

We can comprehend what this means by noting the contrasts that Gadamer emphasizes when he examines the distinctions that Aristotle makes between phronesis and the other “intellectual virtues,” especially episteme and techne. Aristotle characterizes all of these virtues (and not just episteme) as being related to “truth” (aletheia). Episteme, scientific knowledge, is knowledge of what is universal, of what exists invariably, and takes the form of scientific demonstration. The subject matter, the form, the telos, and the way in which episteme is learned and taught differ from phronesis, the form of reasoning appropriate to praxis, which deals with what is variable and always involves a mediation between the universal and the particular that requires deliberation and choice.

For Gadamer, however, the contrast between episteme and phronesis is not as important for hermeneutics as the distinctions between techne (technical know-how) and phronesis (ethical know-how). Gadamer stresses three contrasts.

1. Techne, or a technique,

is learned and can be forgotten; we can “lose” a skill. But ethical “reason” can neither be learned nor forgotten…. Man always finds himself in an “acting situation” and he is always obliged to use ethical knowledge and apply it according to the exigencies of his concrete situation.

2. There is a different conceptual relation between means and ends in techne than in phronesis. The end of ethical know-how, unlike that of a technique, is not a “particular thing” or product but rather the “complete ethical rectitude of a lifetime.” Even more important, while technical activity does not require that the means that allow it to arrive at an end be weighed anew on each occasion, this is precisely what is required in ethical know-how. In ethical know-how there can be no prior knowledge of the right means by which we realize the end in a particular situation. For the end itself is only concretely specified in deliberating about the means appropriate to a particular situation.

3. Phronesis, unlike techne, requires an understanding of other human beings. This is indicated when Aristotle considers the variants of phronesis, especially synesis (understanding).

It appears in the fact of concern, not about myself, but about the other person. Thus it is a mode of moral judgment…. The question here, then, is not of a general kind of knowledge, but of its specification at a particular moment. This knowledge also is not in any sense technical knowledge…. The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (TM, p. 288; WM, p. 306)

For Gadamer, this variation of phronesis provides the clue for grasping the centrality of friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics.

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…for Gadamer the “chief task” of philosophic hermeneutics is to “correct the peculiar falsehood of modern consciousness” and “to defend practical and political reason against the domination of technology based on science.” It is the scientism of our age and the false idolatry of the expert that pose the threat to practical and political reason. The task of philosophy today is to elicit in us the type of questioning that can become a counterforce against the contemporary deformation of praxis. It is in this sense that “hermeneutic philosophy is the heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy.”

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To put it in Bernstein’s and Gadamer’s language: a solid, innovative design methodology requires an intelligently coordinated blend of techne and phronesis, guided by phronesis, itself. It is an immenently reasonable process – meaning that the participants in the process make rational appeals to one another in order to come to decisions – but what is being arrived at is not predetermined, and the decision-making process itself is not determinate. Many good outcomes are acknowledged as possible. The innovators are not looking for a single right solution, but rather a solution that is among the best possibilities.

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Incidentally, innovation is not needed always and everywhere (any more than predictability is). Unrestrained innovation is not a desirable goal, as fun as it may sound.

Design thoughts

Brand, Design, Etymology

Solution – A product or a service that is used because it is wanted, needed, or otherwise required.

Solution provider – An individual or collective entity with a solution to offer.

User – The consumer of a solution; for example a customer, an employee, a member of an organization, an operator.

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Usefulness – A useful solution satisfies a user’s known and/or unknown functional needs. Usefulness is a solution’s functional value.

Usability – A usable solution removes functional obstacles that discourage a user’s acceptance of the solution. Usability is a solution’s ease-of-use value, or more accurately the absence of pain-in-the-ass anti-value. Ideally, usability is imperceptible, being essentially the absence of negatives.

Desirability – A desirable solution fosters a user’s goodwill toward the solution, emotional inclination to accept the solution. Desirability is a solution’s subjective value.

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User experience  – A solution viewed from the perspective of the user. It signifies a user-empathic perspective on design: that the proper locus of design is not in the artifact itself but between the artifact and the one who uses it, in the experience the user has interacting with the artifact to satisfy a need or want. (In this sense user experience is form of practical idealism; see definition below.) The experience is not confined to the duration of the interaction, but also in how it is remembered and anticipated; nor is it confined to the artifact itself but into the user’s life, particularly to the effects of the interaction and to the entities perceived to be responsible for the effects, both good and bad.

On-brand user experience – On-brand user experience thinks not only about the design of the experience of a solution but also about how the experience with the solution will affect the experience of the provider of the solution and ultimately the enduring relationship between the user and the provider.

Experience is the conducting medium through which the brand flows. Brand is made visible through the graphic identity, articulated through messaging, expressed through voice and tone, demonstrated through prioritization and structuring of content and function, embodied through the feature set and given conduct and character through interaction design (a kind of body language).

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On-brand usefulness – An on-brand useful solution satisfies a user’s known and/or unknown functional needs in a way that enhances the usefulness of the solution provider, and naturally reinforces the user’s perception of the provider’s indispensability.

On-brand usability – A on-brand usable solution removes functional obstacles that discourage acceptance of both the solution and the provider’s other solutions, (ideally together as a single integrated system), and naturally reinforces the user’s perception that the provider is easy to deal with.

On-brand desirability – An on-brand desirable solution creates goodwill toward the solution that naturally extends to the solution provider.

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Empathy – The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. ORIGIN: Early 20th cent.: from Greek empatheia (from em– ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’)

Context – The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. ORIGIN: late Middle English (denoting the construction of a text): from Latin contextus, from con– ‘together’ + texere ‘to weave.’

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Idealism – Any of various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind. ORIGIN: late Middle English: via Latin from Greek idea ‘form, pattern,’ from the base of idein ‘to see.

Pragmatism – An approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek pragma, pragmat– ‘deed.’

Perspectivism – The theory that knowledge of a subject is inevitably partial and limited by the individual perspective from which it is viewed. ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘optics’ ): from medieval Latin perspectiva (ars) ‘science of optics,’ from perspect– ‘looked at closely,’ from the verb perspicere, from per– ‘through’ + specere ‘to look.’

Empiricism – The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. ORIGIN late Middle English : via Latin from Greek empeirikos, from empeiria ‘experience,’ from empeiros ‘skilled’ (based on peira ‘trial, experiment’ ).