Category Archives: Design

Me being leftist

Autobiography, Design, Ethics, Politics

A job offer should include not only salary and benefits but a service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing conditions conducive to effective, rewarding work.

This is especially important for “labor of love” professions, which are typically lower paying.

For such professions, the instrinsic reward of the work is more than half of the value exchange that makes the work feel worth it..

These professions often attract “empathy workers”.

Empathy workers are typically terrible at negotiating decent salaries. A person seeking a good faith win-win will fare poorly facing off against a bad faith opponent seeking a win-lose.

But tragically, empathy workers are also terrible at resisting unreasonable demands and pressures that cheat them out of the non-money half of their value exchange. They are, by nature, agreeable, flexible and accommodating. and this makes them the perpetual path of least resistance for workaday psychos looking to stampede and climb over and crush whatever is between them and the top of whatever hill they trying to be king of.

So empathy workers end up with lower salaries and depressingly impossible work conditions that burn them out and make them even less able to push back on the assholes who mercilessly squeeze, exploit and immiserate them.

Tricky life

Autobiography, Chord, Design, Philosophy

The Trickster persona maintains an ironic dual focus.

The second focus is the workaday foreground we all share with our peers and collaborators.

The first focus — the one that really matters to to the Trickster — is the uncanny background of all activity, the formless formational forces who move, shape and illuminate and obscure the unfolding of events for each person involved.

The Trickster moves in a world inhabited by mono-focused beings, who, lacking that second vision, lack parallax and, therefore, depth-vision. The one-eyed live in a flat world where everyone, even Tricksters, are flat.

Tricksters are tricky because they constantly try to remind the one-eyed that there is much more to life than matter-of-fact flatness. The Trickster winks, to remind people that they still have that first eye that they closed, perhaps to protect its first-eye innocence, one sad day at the dawn of youth.

When the Trickster winks, it is the second eye that closes. The first eye remains open, bathing the beheld in magical sight. If the beheld has any vestigial intuition vital enough to penetrate the workaday flatness, this hermetic winksight is experienced as the opposite of an evil-eye. Most of the time, though, it is experienced as inefficient creepiness.

And now, as always, I am recalling a Nietzsche quote — which always ripples out into a blessed recollection and re-membering of Nietzsche himself:

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ — said John Stuart Mill: as though it were necessary to beg for forbearance where one is accustomed to render them belief and almost worship! I say: let us be forbearing towards the two-eyed, great and small — for, such as we are, we shall never attain to anything higher than forbearance!

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ appears to refer to an essay by Mill on Bentham:

The truths which are not Bentham’s, which his philosophy takes no account of, are many and important; but his non-recognition of them does not put them out of existence; they are still with us, and it is a comparatively easy task that is reserved for us, to harmonize those truths with his. To reject his half of the truth because he overlooked the other half, would be to fall into his error without having his excuse. For our own part, we have a large tolerance for one-eyed men, provided their one eye is a penetrating one: if they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of inquiry. Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers: though whether these new thoughts drive out others as good, or are peacefully superadded to them, depends on whether these half-thinkers are or are not followed in the same track by complete thinkers.

Nietzsche had much more to say about one-eyed being. Here is where my wiki bears fruit. From Human All Too Human:

The cyclops of culture. — When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies — those which are called evil — are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.

Another quote is from from Assorted Opinions and Maxims. Please note the “true-but-not-true-enough” winking acknowledgement of the one-eyed by the two-eyed, which was performed by Mill toward Bentham:

Cult of culture. — To great spirits there has been joined the repellent all-too-human aspects of their nature, their blindnesses, deformities, extravagances, so that their mighty influence, that can easily grow all too mighty, shall be kept within bounds by the mistrust these qualities inspire. For the system of all that which humanity has need of for its continued existence is so comprehensive, and lays claim to so many and such varying forces, that humanity as a whole would have to pay heavily for any one-sided preference, whether it be science or the state or art or trade, to which these individuals would entice it. It has always been the greatest fatality for culture when men have been worshipped: in which sense one may even feel in accord with the Mosaic Law which forbids us to have other gods beside God. — Next to the cult of the genius and his force there must always be placed, as its complement and palliative, the cult of culture: which knows how to accord to the material, humble, base, misunderstood, weak, imperfect, one-sided, incomplete, untrue, merely apparent, indeed to the evil and dreadful, a proper degree of understanding and the admission that all this is necessary; for the harmonious endurance of all that is human, attained through astonishing labours and lucky accidents and as much the work of ants and cyclops as of genius, must not be lost to us again: how, then, could we dispense with the common, deep and often uncanny groundbass without which melody cannot be melody?

Here is an apparent Jew-eyed wink at Jesus. Blessed-but-not-blessed-enough?

A Christian friend of mine one quipped “Jesus converted you to Judaism.”

Yes, true. But whose Jesus?

In my early days as a Nietzschean-on-fire, I thought Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian. But that was only because Judaism was still too far out of reach for me. I lacked landmarks for situating my new self in this new landscape. “Christian” was the closest available match, but it was not close enough. <— wink wink wink. Judaism has depths that supercessionists desperately need to truncate with aggressive incuriosity. And pogroms, if necessary.

Misapotheotics, especially, experience Jewish winksight as burning. This is the true origin of hatred of Am Yisrael, whether it the animosity is religious, racial, social or political — or some new expression, like the newly fashionable antizionism, adopted en masse by every independent-minded, politically-active, self-aware, NYT-believing nyet. Another Nietzche zinger: “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –” Tell a million zeros they are independent thinkers, and they will all believe it in unison.

Another passage is from The Wanderer and his Shadow: and seems to affirm Mills’s forbearance of the one-eyed.

The democratization of Europe is irresistible: for whoever tries to halt it has to employ in that endeavour precisely the means which the democratic idea first placed in everyone’s hands and makes these means themselves more wieldy and effective: and those who oppose democracy most on principle (I mean the spirits of revolution) appear to exist merely to impel the various parties ever faster forwards along the democratic path through the fear they inspire. Yet one can in fact feel anxious for those who are working consciously and honestly for this future: there is something desolate and monotonous in their faces, and grey dust seems to have got even into their brain. Nonetheless, it is possible that posterity will one day laugh at this anxiety of ours and regard the democratic work of a succession of generations somewhat as we regard the building of stone dams and protective walls — as an activity that necessarily gets a lot of dust on clothes and faces and no doubt also unavoidably makes the workers a little purblind and stupid; but who would wish such a work undone on that account! The democratization of Europe is, it seems, a link in the chain of those tremendous prophylactic measures which are the conception of modern times and through which we separate ourselves from the Middle Ages. Only now is it the age of cyclopean building! We finally secure the foundations, so that the whole future can safely build upon them! We make it henceforth impossible for the fruitful fields of culture again to be destroyed overnight by wild and senseless torrents! We erect stone dams and protective walls against barbarians, against pestilences, against physical and spiritual enslavement! And all this coarsely and literally at first, but gradually in a higher and more spiritual sense, so that all the measures here indicated seem to be an inspired collective preparation for the supreme artist of horticulture, who will be able to apply himself to his real task only when these preparations have been fully carried out! — To be sure, given the great length of time which lies between means and end, and given the very great effort of mind and body, an effort spanning the centuries, needed even to create or procure each one of these means, we must not hold it too much against those who are working on the present-day if they loudly decree that the wall and the trellis are the end and final goal; since no one, indeed, can yet see the gardener or the fruit-trees for whose sake the trellis exists.

There is no contradiction between these two attitudes toward one-eyedness. It is a paradox of ironic two-eyedness. In fact, all paradox is the speaking of two views in one utterance — either a lower and higher perspective, like this one, or two lower ones dialectically subsumed in an implied higher perspective that sees them together, unified yet still differentiated.

Soelling it all out: Forbearance between one-eyed and two-eyed is not a mutual arrangement.

It goes one way. It is an unrequited and unrequiteable gift.

Let us not forget: “free gifts” injure.

And this is true even when a gift is stolen.

Supercessionism is mispotheotic ingratitude. It is not enough to steal the gift. The giver is a living insult for ever having what was stolen.

I have got to do something about this rage.

On to the next one-eyed passage. We are going in chronological order, by the way. This one if from the Gay Science:

Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things must be revealed! So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people’s experiences of living together — in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, businessmen, artists, artisans — have they found their thinkers? There is so much in them to think about! Everything that humans have viewed until now as the ‘conditions of their existence’ and all the reason, passion, and superstition that such a view involves — has this been researched exhaustively? To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate — that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral climates (‘why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and primary value-standard shine here — and another one there?’). Yet another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction — an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclops-buildings; but the time for that will come, too.

Now we see a call for a bifocally directed cyclopeanism.

This reads to me, not like a description of the future, but of the recent past. It reads like a description of Cold War academia, before the West lost its best frenemy and collapsed into lassitude, which then deteriorated into the casually suicidal nihilsm of our denatured, dispirited, anomic proclass.

The last quotation is from Beyond Good and Evil:

Pity in a man of knowledge seems almost ludicrous, like sensitive hands on a Cyclops.

I will conclude this quotation chord with an aphorism of my own,

Conflict divides the world into four halves.

Or two halves, if you are a cyclops.

Often in qualitative design research we will talk about how we thicken the What with insights into the Why.

The classic example we give is the difference between a blink and a wink. The former is a physical thin description. The latter adds thickness of the meaning behind the eye movement. Thickness is an attempt to say depth without all the spiritual and psychological pretensions.

The cyclops just wants the certainty of blink counts. And this counting necessary. But is not sufficient.

With this work I’m being forced to do, which occupies all my time and daytime headspace, it takes an entire morning to remember who I am.

Re + member. <— wink wink wink wink wink

Mission mistatement

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.

If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.

In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.

Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.

Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.

If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.

Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.

As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.

The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.

These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.

Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.

And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.

These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.

These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.

It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.

Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.

And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.

When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.

Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.

And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.

Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.

What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?

Faith.

Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.

Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies

The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.

Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.

A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.

Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.

That is our mission.

The world needs design so badly it rejects 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.