Category Archives: Design

Value exchanges, sahib

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Etymology, Love, Philosophy, Pluricentrism

I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.

In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.

At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.

As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.

To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.

To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.

I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.

I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.

I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.

When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.

“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.

But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.

(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)

Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.

And value? Value is just some portion of love.

Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.

Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.

We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.

But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.

If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.

Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”

Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.

Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.

Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.

And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.

It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.

But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.

Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.

Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.

Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.

This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.

Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.

And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.

We all need this so much more than we know.

Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.

Instauratio

Design, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Taoism

One face of all is material.

This material is not a materialistic material of science, politics or society.

This material is the stubborn resistance and graceful pliability of the world around us. It is the world we inhabit, in and among whom we live, in and with whom we participate as part, and to whom we belong.

One face of all is spirit.

This sprit is not the spirit of spirituality, religion or culture.

This spirit is awareness and oblivion, revelation and veiling of what matters most — infinite value in which all life, ourselves included, is rooted, on which all value subsists. Value is love.

Between these two faces is self — materially given, spiritually receiving, spiritually giving, materially shaping.

This self is not the self of psychology, economics or romanticism.

This self instaurates. The self discover-creates and makes sense of everything. It create-discovers and makes inspired works. This self is instaurated. As the self makes sense of everything and makes inspired works, the self begins to make inspired sense.

Instauration of material and spirit is instauration of self.

This self is singular and plural, I and We. Any singular self, of whatever scale, from intuitive spark to universal solidarity is e pluribus unum.

Material, self and spirit are traditionally known as Earth, Man and Heaven, the Great Triad.

Translating it for my family: Assiyah-Yetzirah, Yetzirah-Beriah, Beriah-Atzilut.

The concerted effort to convene Earth, Man and Heaven for the betterment of the world, with no attempt to reduce any one to any other, nor to allow any one to dominate or predominate over any other — but rather to find the right momentary constellation for present place, the present selves in the present time — this wants a name, but whatever has a name invites lust and conquest.

Perhaps the name “design” was as good a name as any.

Polycentric and pluricentric design

Design, Pluricentrism

I have used the word polycentric to mean two different things.

The original meaning, used by Michael Polanyi and later by Elinor Ostrom, referred to things (usually social things) having multiple agential centers. Only by understanding the semi-automous operation of these centers within an irreducible system can a polycentric phenomenon be comprehended.

The other, less orthodox meaning came from design industry resonances. Starting with Don Norman, design has decentered the designed artifact in order to recenter it on the people for whom the artifact is intended. User-centered design, then, more generally customer-centered, employee centered, patient-centered, student-centered, citizen-centered, name-your-role-centered design. These have been generalized into human-centered design. I’m not sure what we call what Temple Grandin did…

To my designer ear, polycentric described a key difference between the old one-person-at-a-time-centricity design I had done in my former life, and the new focus on interactions among multiple persons in service design.

But the more I practice service design the more these two meanings diverge and seem to need two separate words.

Service designers are vitally concerned with the polycentricity ?of social systems. How do polycentric systems (which include but transcend project-sponsoring organizations) produce various outcomes, or fail to produce them? ?How are all these agential centers (“service actors”) interacting to strengthen or weaken the organization?

But that is only the objective third-person behaviorist understanding of the system. It gives us the What and How, but it does not give us the Why, which is the key to influencing the behaviors that produce the outcomes. To get at the Why we must understand the view of the system from within, from the perspective of each of the service actors who participate in it — who, based on what they experience, respond one way or another, supporting, undermining or abandoning the service.

I have been experimenting with using the word polycentric in its normal sense to describe in the third-person, the objective, emergent phenomenon of systems with multiple agential centers.

To describe the subjective, first-person interlapping experiences of multiple persons participating in an interactive social system (service or otherwise) I am using the word pluricentric.

As I’ve mentioned a half-zillion times before, service design considers the experience and agency of all participants in a service. We consider not only the people who receive the service, but also those who deliver the service, and those who support them. And of these who deliver and support the service, we consider more than just employees, but people outside the organization who partner with the organization. And often we consider indirect recipients of service, for example, members of a household, who influence the experience and actions of the direct recipient.

Every one of these service actors has a different experience of the service. A nurse, for example, almost certainly has a different overall life experience from many patients. When a patient and a nurse interact in a medical setting like an emergency room, that encounter is very different for the nurse, for the patient and for the patient’s spouse. Each wants different things from the interaction and experience it very differently. Part of what they all experience is what they perceive everyone else’s experience to be, so there is a feedback dynamic among participants. The nurse responds to the patient’s pain and the spouse’s fear, and both patient and spouse are keenly sensitive to the response and what it indicates about the person on whom they are suddenly so terrifyingly dependent.

The field of design is early in its development researching pluricentric dynamics and responding to them with design interventions capable of producing favorable polycentric outcomes.

The trends suggest retardation or regression rather than progress. So far, the emerging field of journey management has been monocentric. It is possible to hack it into a semblance of polycentricity, but doing so requires vigorous upstream swimming. Product management, after subjugating designers, and forcing them back into aesthetic and usability servitude, has rediscovered discovery to its great hubristic delight. Service design is whipped along at a trot too brisk even for adequate monocentric approaches. Economic hard times always hit designers first. But everyone says that ecomonic hard times are when the best investments can be made.

Confessions of a hedgehog

Autobiography, Design

“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.

Its been over a decade since I read this essay, so I cannot remember, but wikipedia assures me that Isaiah Berlin said Tolstoy was, by nature, a fox, but by conviction a hedgehog.

Maybe I need to reread it.

I wonder if he offers any examples of poor souls who were, by nature, a hedgehog, but by circumstance, the foxiest of foxes.

There is a fine and blurry line between cognitive impairments and a sense of purpose in life.

Behind one species of hedgehog — let’s call it the involuntary hedgehog — there is a small set of highly developed abilities, organized as a methodology. Part of the methodology is seeing the world that reveals applications for the methodology.

This hedgehog can do all sorts of things with this methodology — as long as he is allowed his methodology. Take the methodology away, the hedgehog’s quills are plucked and he looks like a shaved runt fox. Tragically, one of the methods in the methodology is not providing itself the conditions needed to apply the methodology. If the hedgehog’s quills are plucked, the hedgehog cannot defend itself long enough to restore or regrow them.

I can use design to solve all kinds of problems — but only if I have conditions to design.

If I am prevented from designing, I am well and truly fucked.

The thing about design

ANT, Design, Philosophy, Politics

Latour, from “A Cautious Prometheus”:

Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc. But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these. In other words, you in design as well as we in science and technology studies may insist that objects are always assemblies, “gatherings” in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, or things and Dinge, and yet, four hundred years after the invention of perspective drawing, three hundred years after projective geometry, fifty years after the development of CAD computer screens, we are still utterly unable to draw together, to simulate, to materialize, to approximate, to fully model to scale, what a thing in all of its complexity, is.

So little design writing pays attention to the social reality on both sides of design — design-in-the-making and design-in-use.

Whenever designers wax political, they fall in line with politics-as-usual. They talk about all the ways design should serve the political goals shared by all good people, opposed by bad people.

It is as if they have never designed.

It is as if they have never aligned any diverse group of people around a goal before.

It would be so much better if, when politics comes up, people would wax designerly,

We do not need to politicize design. We need to designize politics.

Smiling insistence

Design, Love

When I was younger I was “philosophical” in that casual way people are when they enjoy reflecting on life, but still don’t see much benefit in reading other folk’s difficult technical reflections. Maybe we want to keep our own original vision virginally pure. We think to ourselves: “You might need to get your ideas from books and teachers, but I have my own ideas and I don’t need to learn what to think from other people.” Or we read, but just to find others who also know what we know.

It was only a desperate existential need to defend my way of working — the conditions I need to design — that eventually drove me to do philosophy.

In my world, working as a designer, if I cannot make clear sense fast, I get chained to tasks that drown me in anxiety, boredom and despair.

If I hadn’t needed help wherever I could find it, I would have gone to my grave mistaking my very unoriginal notions of originality for pristine, untouched intuition. Naw… we learn from authority to exalt this complacently rebellious arrogant nonsense.

I am still desperate. But I have more inner resources for explaining what is happening to me, when people force me to work in ways that make design impossible.

I still get anxious and I still get bored, but I never despair.

I refuse to despair, because I know better.

But know and insist… and smile? That’s the next goal.

Susan teaches this: Warm demander.

Ethos, ethics, mutuality

Autobiography, Design, Judaism, Politics

The highest achievements of humanity stand upon mutuality. Mutuality is for the mutual.

Ethics belong to an ethos. Ethics are the participatory norms of those who belong to some particular ethos.

When enemies of an ethos demand ethical consistency from those belonging to an ethos, even as they attempt to undermine, weaken or destroy that ethos, they use an ethic against itself.

Imagine a horde of hooligans flooding the tennis courts of Wimbledon. When the players, referees and spectators try to drive them out of the stadium, the hooligans howl accusations of hypocrisy. “If you really loved tennis, you would adhere to the rules of tennis, and drive us out with better and better tennis playing! See? You are no better than us. You are hooligans, too!”

The rest of the world agrees, but takes it further: The tennis crowd is even worse than hooligans. We expect more from elite athletes and connoisseurs of such a refined sport. Hooligans are just noble savages, doing what hooligans do. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to tell them where they can and can’t be, and what they can and can’t do? Tennis players, though, are like us, and we expect them to live up to our high moral and intellectual standards. Maybe even higher! When tennis players use their rackets as weapons, that is truly a betrayal of the ideals of tennis — and to our own.

So Wimbledon is condemned by the officials of the Olympics, and sports officials around the world. Social media goes crazy over pictures of the brutality of the eviction and on and on. Wimbledon is boycotted. Before long, tennis courts and vandalized, tennis players are threatened, assaulted and abused. Soon nobody even wants to wear tennis shoes in public anymore.

The entire world of tennis suffers because of the brutality of Wimbledon security guards. And the fact that tennis players think Wimbledon is above criticism only makes it worse.

I have no idea at all why I got so intense about this analogy.

I suppose it is because this to me is real. Very real.

Maybe it is because I am a designer who is entirely dependent on how people around me participate in the projects I work on.

When we initiate a projects, we attempt to initiate our client collaborators into a new way of working, and establish a design ethos around the project. If we succeed, we can do great work.

But if we fail at this — if our project participants refuse to participate in design processes — we are no longer able to play the game of design. We might be able to flex and contort and pivot and get some kind of work done, but we are no longer doing what we agreed to do. And this is fine if we are good at doing all these other kinds of work. If we are excellent logistics managers, business analysts, process engineers and so on, this is unpleasant but doable.

But if we are designers who approach everything as design, and this is how we cope with practical matters, we are deprived of what is needed not only to flourish but to cope at all.

And to be told, “just design harder and harder, better and better” is a demoralizing insult.

Just play tennis better and better, be extra, extra punctilious about playing by the rules, and eventually the hooligans will see what we are doing, and choose to clear off the courts. Then they might eventually even learn to love our sport. We must have enough faith in our way that we keep playing even when our courts are crowded with people who loathe tennis and tennis players.

Design is not only a set of design techniques, or a design method for effective use of techniques in concert, or a design theory upon which method is grounded, or a design praxis of reflective practice and applied theory, or a tacit design way resulting from a life of deep design praxis. It is all of these, of course, but more than that design is an ethos, which depends on a set of design ethics.

Whenever I hear designers talk about design ethics it always goes directly toward the same set of environmental and social justice concerns. I have yet to hear designs discuss the behavioral norms required for design to happen at all.

And then designers wonder why we seem unable to get the conditions we need to do the work we do.

Our work is almost automatically rejected out of hand by industrious builders with no tolerance for non-rigorous intuitive fluff. They need to very efficiently show progress toward building the next undesirable, unusable unintuitive thing in their backlog.

Design is only possible where a design ethos (at least temporarily) prevails.

Liberalism only works within a liberal ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

“What is Design?” chapbook

Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve been mulling over a project involving letterpress printed design wisdom.

Today, I am fantasizing about letterpress printing a chapbook, in an aphorism-reflection format inspired by Jan Zwicky’s beautiful Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor.

Here is my aphorism list so far:

  • “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” (Winston Churchill)
  • “Design is everything. Everything is design.” (Paul Rand)
  • “Design should be invisible.” (Beatrice Warde)
  • “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars” (Heraclitus)
  • “The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “You can’t decide the way forward. You have to design the way forward.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “Compete to be unique, not the best” (Joan Magretta, channeling Michael Porter)
  • “Usefulness, usability, and desirability: A useful design is one that people need and will use. A usable design is one they can either use immediately or learn to use readily. A desirable design is one they want.” (Liz Sanders)
  • “We think with our hands.” (Tim Brown)
  • “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” (Anonymous)
  • “Behind a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” (John LeCarre)
  • “Conflict divides the world into four halves.” (Anomalogue)
  • “Craft is material dialogue.” (Anomalogue)
  • “A problem well put is a problem half solved.” (John Dewey)
  • “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” (Albert Einstein)
  • “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” (Bertrand Russell)
  • “Start anywhere.” (John Cage)
  • “Nothing happens without a plan. Nothing happens according to plan.” (Anonymous)
  • “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (Carl von Clausewitz)
  • “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
  • “The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” (Willfred Sellars)
  • “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “What has a name is real.” (Basque saying)
  • “Never mistake motion for action.” (Ernest Hemingway)
  • “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Alan Kay)
  • “The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning.” (James Clear)
  • “It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.” (Adlai Stevenson)

I need more design-related aphorisms. If you have any, please share.

Best and worst projects

Autobiography, Design

When I introduce myself to clients, I’ll sometimes talk about my “zigzagging career path” through various design disciplines.

The coolest zag was through strategic design. That was a time when I ran around solving “undiagnosed design problems”. Many problems that appeared to be intractable political, management or process problems became far more tractable when approached as design problems.

This has me reflecting:

My most rewarding projects have always been those where we took a design approach to solve a problem that seemed outside the domain of design.

My least rewarding projects have been those where we were prevented from taking a design approach to solve what everyone knows is a design problem.

Service design as a way

Design, Politics

A good service designer should be an observant connoisseur of services. This is not easy. The best designed services are unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, appearing only at carefully choreographed moments of “service evidence”. The best part of a service goes entirely unnoticed and unappreciated.

Services are most noticeable when they break down — when they are not good.

This is why, when people ask me what service design is I answer with a question: “When is the last time you were truly infuriated with an organization?”

Everyone has a story. Five to five hundred minutes later, when the story subsides, I say: “My job is to prevent that from happening.”

Answering the question “When is the last time you received truly good invisible service from an organization?” is a question only true service designers can answer with the same energy.

It almost takes prolonged exposure to absence of a service to appreciate its invisible presence.

So many little things must go well to notice little infuriating things that don’t.

We live in blessed obliviousness to innumerable luxuries, noticing only the flaws.

Not to get political, but if we ever succeed in dismantling “the system”, we will discover innumerable services we never knew were sustaining our lives and our very selves, in ways we never detected or even suspected.

Job description

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

I do not aspire to be an expert, even in fields of expertise of my own invention.

If you need expertise, go find an expert.

But if no expertise exists to address what ails you, I’m here for that.

I’ll approach it as a philosophy design problem of the form “Here I don’t know my way about,” with the aim of reaching a common understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. I’ll design you a little localized philosophy that enables you and your collaborators to define and share a problem so it can be solved.

It will be messy and inefficient and unpredictable. But it will be interesting, if you can handle it.

It’s practical “beginner’s mind” without all the bullshit westernized Zen, with all its blissed out peace and escapism.

Pluricentric Maxim

Philosophy, Pluricentrism

Two quotes from my last post deserve to be separately framed:

Sarcasm is what we do when another neglects their ironic duty, and we must do it for them.

And

The Pluricentric Maxim — Always remember: “I am not the only center of the universe.”

Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation

Ethics, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Politics, Polycentrism

Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.

As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.

Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule.  A patch, if you will.

Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.

It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.

And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…

Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.

They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.

When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.

You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.

They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.

Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.

They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.

According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.

Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.

Unlike us.

Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.

Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.

Respect acknowledges that when we look at another  and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.

Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.

Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.

Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.

So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.

Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.

Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.

Ward Farnsworth

Design, Ideas

I learned of Ward Farnsworth reading his book on Socratic method. I knew nothing about him, but his delivery was so striking I found myself asking “Wow! — who is this person?” So I started digging around. It turns out he has written extensively on style, rhetoric and argumentation. And philosophy. And law. And chess. And soon, Latin.

What I admire most about his writing is how every word overflows with respect for the free judgment of his audience. This respect is conveyed not only in the content, but through his use of language. It is palpable in how he addresses you as a reader, and you feel it before you comprehend it: the choice to accept or reject is your own.

I believe this is not only talent or know-how, but the fruits of a life shaped by persuading juries, judges and negotiation partners.

Ward Farnsworth is a genius of liberal virtues.

I want these liberal virtues for myself. They cannot be faked. I have work to do.

I learned of Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” from Peter Sloterdijk:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Ancientspeak

Judaism, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Politics

Orwell famously invented the idea of an artificial language semantically engineered to destroy the possibility of thought beyond a set ideological horizon.

For a Newspeaker, any notion with potential to interfere with total cooperation with Ingsoc would be mentally inconceivable. Such an idea would require no suppression. Not only would it be impossible to communicate to other people, it could not form as an intelligible concept in the first place — even a concept requiring rejection and condemnation.

As I have said before, realia we can intuit as relevant, but which we cannot conceive and understand within our overall understanding (our metaphysic) induces perplexity and intolerable dread. Such realia stands at the outer edges of intelligibility and threatens the shimmering migraine mirage membrane separating us from infinite annihilation.

Within this membrane of intelligibility is everything — the totality of the known and knowable universe.

Beyond the membrane of intelligibility is unspeakable evil, toward which one feels inexpressible angst, hatred and terror. Such angst is radically objectless (as Heidegger noted in Being and Time) — and this lack of object itself creates yet more angst, because the very concept of angst stands beyond the membrane of intelligibility. Such angst always finds an object, into which it can discharge itself and find temporary relief. Ingsoc wisely provided such objects and occasions for discharge (Two Minutes Hate). Emmanuel Goldstein (an all-purpose political villain) or some enemy state or another were provided as lightning rods to direct this hate along politically useful channels, producing a sort of cathartic post-coital devotion in its exhaustion.

A Newspeaker indoctrinated in Ingsoc would live inside an intentionally, systematically narrowed horizon of intelligibility, surrounded by intense, pervasive evil, which was conveniently embodied by enemies, who stood in for any reality or idea unthinkable in Newspeak. Who isn’t precisely with us, is absolutely against us. Docility within. Hostility without. Two sides of the same totalitarian existence.

Of course, the above account blends Orwell’s thought with my own.

I’m presenting it Newspeak as an antithesis of an opposite ideal, that everts every feature of Newspeak.

The angst of transcendence is interpreted not as inexpressible evil deserving infinite hatred but as ineffable goodness inviting and emanating infinite love. The language is not centrally engineered but organically developed polycentrically across a community of radically non-uniform unique individuals among whom wisdom is distributed.

Of course, whoever speaks and things and exists in this language would be a special target of totalitarian hatred. It wouldn’t be discharged in a mere Two Minutes Hate. You’d need something closer to a Two-Thousand Years Hate.

Despite the risks, though — and these do exist even in an intellectually expansive free society like ours where young people are trained to think critically and unanimously embrace the value of diversity (“diversity is conformity”) — I would very much love to learn such a language.

Instauratio ex nihilo

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

When I first learned the word “instauration” from Latour’s magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, I was thunderstruck. Latour described precisely how it is to find the kinds of truth we discover-create in design research.

But now, I am thunderstruck all over again, recognizing that the creation and revelation essential to Beriah is sublime instauratio ex nihilo.

Desperate philosophizing

Autobiography, Design, Existentialism, Trefoil

Nietzsche is not the What of his thought. He is the How of his thinking, and his How opens up a blinding flood of Why.

For What-bound epistemological souls thinking is pure What. For them only How if it is “how do you know whether what you claim is true? How do you infer it, argue it, prove it to be true?”

But if you allow a Why with a How to show us new What… they converge into Who. “Who is this, and now — Who am I?”

What originally forced me into religious modes of thought was a total inability to answer people’s questions about What Nietzsche thought. I couldn’t answer, as asked, perfectly reasonable questions. But I had a How ready if a need for Nietzschean thinking arose. That How knew how to respond to the need for understanding or intelligent action.

Sadly, 90% of my knowing is still like this. I know how to respond to all kinds of design problems. Explaining what I will do ahead of time draws on a completely different kind of knowledge that is only tangentially related.

It is easier for everyone — both them and me — if people just learn by participating.

I have a slide I show clients.

I usually say something like, “If someone tried to explain Monopoly to you by reading you the rulebook, you would feel complete overwhelmed and you wouldn’t want to play. But if you just jump in and try to get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun, and soon the rules start making sense.”

Tragically, the more important design gets — the more expensive the project and the more executive scrutiny it gets — the more no one lets you do it until you explain ahead of time exactly how it will be done.

They all think this is being thorough and thinking things through. They think it is being thoughtful.

Fact is, this very process of verbally modeling it and explaining it out with words falsifies and complicates what happens in design. It prevents design from doing anything ordinary executive cranial labor can’t do. The whole reduction of reality to what can be said explicitly (and briefly) and measured is what makes executive turn whatever they touch into sterile, empty, corporate soullessness.

This is the misery of my life. This misery drove me to Nietzsche.

My experience with Nietzsche is what allowed me to understand McLuhan.

The crippling despair I experienced in the wee years of the new millennium — just before my encounter with Nietzsche — was entirely tied up with the need to explicitly communicate things I only knew deeply through intuition — and the terrible consequences I suffered if I was unable to explicitly communicate.

Because what happens every time is the same: I get forced to work in ways that alienate my intuition from the work, which makes the work impossible, and deeply depressing to execute.

But here is one consolation: If you can at least account for that pain — if you can point at it and talk about what is happening very clearly — 61.803398875% of the pain just… evaporates.

Perplexities are hellish enough. But if the very fact of a perplexity also perplexes you, now you are exponentially perplexed, and the angst is exponentially painful.

I never would have spent a minute thinking about any of these things, had I not been forced to.

I thought out these ideas out of sheer existential necessity. They were never interests of mine. (Or at least they didn’t start off as interests.) They’re also not things I gravitated to because I was good at them, or thought I could make a living from writing teaching, blogging, podcasting or youtubing about it.

I thought about them because I would die of despair if I didn’t figure them out.

This is why I scorn trifling souls who frolic about in philosophical content, who consume other people’s idea and see nothing but delightful play in philosophy, and who deny the role of pain in creativity-revelation.

My pain, fear and angst has been my best muse, and so I always find myself blessing my fate, even as I curse it.

I am going to make something very pretty from all this hell.

Confessions of a material misogynist

Autobiography, Design, Kabbalah, Letterpress

As a kid, I was a bad painter.

While painting, whenever a brush stroke offered me something interesting or beautiful to me, I would be slightly offended, because I hadn’t envisioned and ordered it myself, and then I’d go in and try to make it my own, snuff out whatever had been coming to life with my explicating brush. In Gen-X playground parlance, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”

And that, precisely, was what made my paintings bad and boring and dead to the eye. Good painting is precisely collaboration with the paint’s own ideas. It is a dance of activity and receptivity and reciprocity.

Each medium has its own optimal center of gravity, which is the heart of its own craft — what draws an artist to work in that medium, rather than in another.

So, I was much better suited to pen and ink. I listened better to what ink images suggested to me — maybe because those images emerged from materials more obedient to my hand’s will. These suggestions came from something that felt under my control. Paint defied control, and I was too materially misogynist to accept that kind of resistance. I wanted a nice submissive material, not a raging mood-swinging lunatic with a headful of intuitions of who-knows-what ambushing (ambrushing) me with her visions.

(Damn. Maybe I should try painting again!)

But all this is preface to another idea.

The same thing can happen with ideas — especially symbolic ideas with visual origins.

It is entirely possible to “have” thoughts with their own agency — ideas who can collaborate with you, or who might refuse to collaborate — or who can haunt, mock or reject you. Visually inspired ideas can sit, silently watching, waiting for you to wake up.

There is still the bad painter’s impulse in me. Something intellectually misogynistic in me wants to control my more autonomous ideas with explication — to hold them until they are clearly, explicitly understood — to not stop short at poetic opacity.

But is poetry really opaque? Maybe poetry is unclear because instead of transmitting ideas, or reflecting them, they emit living light of their their own. Poetic speech is autonomous speech.

I feel that this strange dialectic Sefirot I drew is trying to tell me all this.

She started out with someone else, but with me, she started intimating new truths.

I think I will print this new Sefirot.

The plate arrives today.

Some quotes I’ve quoted before:

Bob Dylan:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
But there are no truths outside
The gates of Eden

Nietzsche:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.

Latour, a good Mary-adoring Catholic boy:

We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing?

Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

Nietzsche, again:

Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices — you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!

A last sad reflection on the professional work I am trying to do.

I too love to play with materials, and they are some very strange materials.

The materials I love are perplexities — that soul-wracking migraine liminality, hovering like a heat mirage on the outer edges of intelligibility.

Organizational conflict, chaos, anomie, dysfunction generate collective perplexity. So this is where I go.

My job — though nobody knows it, or even knows how to know it — is to air-drop into perplexed organizations, figure out the lay of the land, waters, forests, and navigate my way out by finding new ways to understand — all the while mapping what I find.

Meanwhile, I am dodging both hostile and friendly fire. I am shouted at: “Show us where you are going! You are supposed to be an expert, so where is your map? What is your route? Show your turn by turn directions!”

Some clients figure it out, and become travel companions.

Some refuse to come along until you’ve shown them what can only be shown when the work has been done.

Some frag you in some muddy ditch somewhere on the edge of a frozen forest. “You are drawing a map as you navigate in places you don’t even know. Not only do you not have the answers, or a solution — you don’t even have questions. You don’t even know the problem!”

ack ack ack ack

One last quote, perhaps my most overquoted quote of all, Wittgenstein’s definition of a philosophical problem:

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

You cannot say this, so I do say it to anyone with ears that hear.

My life sucks, and it is glorious.