Category Archives: Design

Law of Reason

Design, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.

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“Reason? Why?”

Because it is reasonable.

“But that’s circular.”

It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.

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Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.

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Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.

 

 

The material called reality

Design

Reality is radically heterogeneous: it is made out of materials, people, ideas, imagination, interactions, feelings, roles, habits, perspectives… whatever interacts to make a situation what it is — that is real.

Design works with heterogeneous materials in heterogeneous situations. Whatever reality is there, no matter what it is, it is considered part of a system to be modified.

Design accepts the entirety of reality as its medium and material.

 

Self in design

Design

We have to be who we are to be a participant in any relationship.

When it comes to relationships selflessness is as destructive as selfishness.

It is entirely a matter of knowing how to situate first-person-singular — I — within first-person-plural — We — and to allow a second person singular — You — to do the same.

This goes for relationship between people, but also for relationships between people and  things.

To be selfless in creation — to set yourself aside to do what is called for —  is to make trash. It is crucial to invest yourself in the things you make.

To be selfish in creation — to fail craft by not listen to the material — is to offend nature, including human nature, and gives artifice a bad name.

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When we do design research we are not collecting bits of data that will speak for itself later if we suppress our subjectivity. Not only is this approach naive, it is unnatural, alienating and highly conducive to creating the projection it seeks to prevent.

To be good researchers we have to be there, in situ, listening, letting the present reality speak for itself while it is present, letting it teach us while it is there with us able to tutor us. We have to struggling to understand and to become fluent and articulate by seeing how the reality articulates itself. And we have to be changed by what we learn, from baffled outsider to fluent participant. It is our fluency that will guide our introduction of new elements into the situation, not the data we record, chop up into individual sentences, then categorize into labeled heaps.

What does the learning look like? Like a student struggling to understand, trying out different ways to grasp the material, making mistakes, accepting correction, trying again. Frustration, then light bulbs go off. Ideas erupt spontaneously. This is also what science looks like, not like white-coated gods standing above reality like objective eyes-in-the-sky.

To learn is a humble activity.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Design rhapsody

Design, Etymology

To design — to “de-” apart + “-sign” to seal or mark…

— to set a thing apart and and assign it a significance…

— to define the boundaries of some reality, to extract it from the surrounding chaos and to let its reality stand in the foreground against a background, and to let it be for itself and for us…

— to separate parts within a whole, give them joints, in such a way that a sequential encounter of part-by-part allows the whole to emerge spontaneously like the meaning of a sentence emerges word-by-word without need of grammatical analysis — that is, to articulate in every sense of the word…

— to invite things to participate in human life, to embrace their inhumanity by allowing them to speak in the conversation of craft, to learn the full truth of their existence so they collaborate with us to embody a significance…

— to designify, assign designificance, apart and special.

It is good to design, and this is a good time to be a designer.

)O+

“I don’t know my way about”

Design, Philosophy

For expertise the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out the answer to this problem.” Expertise lacks the answer, but what the question is and how it will produce an answer is not in question.

For philosophy the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out how to think about this problem.” Philosophy lacks not only an answer, but the way to ask and answer a possible question. How to ask and answer and what the answer is are found together.

Wittgenstein’s formulation is elegant: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”

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Any explorer in a new land will not know his way about. His skill is not in already knowing the landscape. His skill is navigating unmapped territory and finding his way about. He will emerge with a map. He will not try to draw it before he has explored it.

We should be suspicious of any explorer who claims to already have a map and to know his way around unexplored territory. Either he’s taking you somewhere that has already been settled, or he doesn’t know his way about “I don’t know my way about” and is likely to get you lost in the wilderness.

Innovation needs philosophy.

 

The pace of interpretation

Design, Hermeneutics

Here is Nietzsche’s advice to readers who want to interpret the fuller meaning of his work:

“It is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work’, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers…”

This is actually good advice for any hermeneutic activity, whether it is understanding a written work, a person, a situation… If you misunderstand your job as gathering lots and lots of facts as hastily as possible to assemble into some sort of representation of the sum of the writer/person/situation’s scattered opinions, you’ll end up with something quite different than if you take the time to reflect, form hypotheses, test them, and interact understandingly with whatever it is you are interpreting.

Delimit, interpret, formulate

Design, Philosophy

From Being and Time:

All our efforts in the existential analytic serve the one aim of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of Being in general. To work out this question, we need to delimit that very phenomenon in which something like Being becomes accessible — the phenomenon of the understanding of Being. But this phenomenon is one that belongs to Dasein’s state of Being. Only after this entity has been Interpreted in a way which is sufficiently primordial, can we have a conception of the understanding of Being, which is included in its very state of Being; only on this basis can we formulate the question of the Being which is understood in this understanding, and the question of what such understanding ‘presupposes’.

 

It seems to me that this might constitute a general framework for approaching any kind of soft-systems quandary and converting it into an explicit question or problem.

  1. Delimit the phenomenon in question, so its being becomes accessible.
  2. Interpret the phenomenon primordially, in order to attain a conception of phenomenon (a way of “taking it together” as a whole).
  3. Formulate the question of the Being which is understood in this understanding, and the question of what such understanding ‘presupposes’.

Then you answer the question. In my world the question is a design problem posed as compactly as possible in a brief, the answer is a design, and the truth standard is whether the design works as intended.

Experience design as opposed to…

Design, Ideas

The main difference between conceiving design as the design of an experience (as opposed to the design of an artifact) is that with experience design the design problem is conceived phenomenologically.

What is aimed for is not an object of some particular characteristic, but rather a specific relationship between a person and an object.

It is becoming clearer by the day that this phenomenological approach to design problems is also a powerfully productive way to approach branding.

Instead of thinking primarily of the object of the experience design being one artifact such as a CPAP mask or a web site, the “object” of the experience becomes the organization who provides the artifact and services, all of which together are experienced by a person as the brand.

Taking an experience design approach does not eliminate or even diminish the problems traditionally associated with the craft of design or engineering. It simply places them in a new, larger context. The designed offerings (whether products or services) still must have very specific characteristics to integrate with and reinforce the overarching brand experience, and designers will work to imbue their designs with these characteristic. And, as always, engineering is of central importance in actualizing the designs in concrete form so they function as intended. But the engineering is done within the context of creating some entity with designed characteristics, and the design in turn is done within the context of a brand experience of some specific quality. The problems nest.

Three developments on the horizon that interest me:

  1. The idea that some experiences are “had” by groups, of whom individuals are participants. For instance, organizations making large purchases often involve complex evaluation processes that can only be understood as soft systems. Even many apparent individual choices are social in non-obvious ways. For instance, a consumer choosing between three brands of laundry detergent in a grocery store has already had his consideration set limited by a network of merchants, distributors, product managers, R&D engineers, and opportunity-defining marketing professionals — whose interactions excluded myriad actual and possible products. Understanding the successful delivery of any concrete experience will include understanding the entire value chain that enables its existence, and conceiving of that chain as people who experience and behave.
  2. The recognition that the tacit dimension of experiences are both crucial and irreducible to explicit language. This has very deep implications. Business is conducted almost exclusively in language (mathematics is a variety of language) that abstracts from reality that which is readily communicable in explicit language. How can an organization that makes decisions based on explicit facts related in logical arguments conceive products that tap into  tacit life-practices (the essence of “user-friendliness”) and tacit moral valuations (the je ne sais quois, what people just “love for no reason”) and evaluate them rigorously without accidentally reducing them to explicit concepts and thus falsifying them? Current design research and “design thinking” practice has made significant inroads, but there’s still a lot of exciting progress to be made here.
  3. If businesses, business models, and services are improved by thinking about them as design problems — and this is a new development — what exactly were businesses doing before? I would argue that businesses conceived themselves as engineering problems. Over the last 20 years, I’ve watched UX go from being from a powerful tool in an engineer-led process to being an equal partner in product development (at least in organizations that have adopted the full UX practice). To me it appears “design thinking” is on a similar trajectory. Today it is a powerful tool in the hands of executives, tomorrow, executive leadership might be only one of several branches of leadership: the branch that executes what other branches of leadership have envisioned and interpreted into concrete activity systems. Just as excellent engineering alone can no longer guarantee a product’s success, excellent execution alone cannot guarantee a great brand.

Group interviews

Design

If you interview a group, do not make the mistake of thinking you are efficiently interviewing many individuals at once.

If you are interviewing a group you are interviewing a group. So make sure that the group you are interviewing represents a group who will be acting together in real life in whatever situation you are trying to learn about. Otherwise, you will interview the wrong group, even if it is made up of fragments of the right groups.

By the same principle, if you interview individual constituents of a group, do not make the mistake of thinking you will understand the group once you’ve interviewed each and every member. If you want to understand how a group thinks, you must interview the group.

(Obviously, I’m again using Buber’s distinction between social and interhuman.)

Art, engineering, design

Design

Without thinking about it, we tend to associate certain types of creative activities with certain media. We assume songs are created artistically, machines are engineered and brochures are designed.

This is not true at all. Not only are many supposed designs actually art — much of what is done in interaction design is a species of engineering. Entire genres of music have been designed (pop) or engineered (serial music). And some of what is thought of as pure engineering is actually art or design. (If German cars were only well-engineered, nobody would care about them.)

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Design is something beyond art and engineering. It is not a combination of the two, or even a higher synthesis.

Design involves a wholly different approach entirely outside of what happens in even the best art and the best engineering. Both art and engineering (and combinations of the two) can be done without reference to any other people than the creator and the creation. Design is always done in reference to third parties who are understood to perceive, conceive, feel and behave differently from the creator. A creator can attempt to design without direct involvement of users, but this means resorting to speculative design processes.

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If you are making a thing solely to please your own sensibility, you are making art.

If you are making a thing solely to function in some defined way, you are engineering.

If you are making a thing and involving the people who will be experiencing that thing and concerning yourself with their sensibilities and their functional needs, you are designing.

 

 

Want creativity for real?

Design, Shit theory

If you want creativity here’s what you really need:

  1. The right approach.
    Business approaches things in a way that’s good for many things, but generally not good for creativity. For one thing, everything’s decided in meetings, through explicit communication by words, numbers and images. Explicit communication will not produce creativity. For another, business loves step-by-step processes. When you say creative process, your average business person will think you’ve got some assembly line string of techniques by which a creation is built up bit by bit. Trying to do things this way guarantees sterility. Creativity requires a lot of pre-verbal (or even permanently non-verbal) intuitive leaps which though testable are not provable, and these leaps cannot be constructed, extracted, extruded or in any way fabricated, but only prepared for, stimulated, coaxed, encouraged — all highly un-macho approaches, which will drive the average exec nuts waiting, and will tempt him reach for the nearest convenient analytical tool to cut through the bullshit and dig out the golden egg.
  2. The right expectations.
    Let’s get this straight up front: Creativity is harrowing. It is non-linear, unpredictable, risky, and in practice often feels like shit. If your organization cannot handle this reality, you’ll have to compete with something other than meaningful differentiation — probably organizational effectiveness. That’s okay. A lot of companies find success that way. And like everyone, you’ll probably talk all about your revolutionary innovations and nobody’ll believe you, and you’ll do just fine. You’ll never be anything like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Virgin, etc., etc., though.
  3. The right team.
    It is taboo to say this, but it is totally true, and you know it. Most people are not creative. Not only are they uncreative, but they’re creativity poison, because they cannot stand the feeling of being exposed to creative processes and do everything in their power to make that feeling go away (because of all the unpleasant characteristics, listed in the point above). Putting the wrong people on a creative team will make creativity impossible. I don’t know why executives who pride themselves on their cold-eyed realism and their ability to make hard calls and all that go all mushy sentimental on this point, but it would profit them to get realer, meaner and tougher on this point and staff the kitchen with people who can take the heat. But no. Everyone’s packed right in, and people are running around sweating and bitching about getting singed on the burner, and that the raw eggs and the baking soda don’t taste like cake. It’s damn hard to get anything cooked.
  4. The right inputs.
    Many designers secretly or openly detest research. And they should. Because all most research does is tie a designer’s hands by telling them all the cool stuff they want to do won’t fly. It closes down possibilities. But if you were to give designers something that opens up possibilities by inspiring them to conceive totally new approaches they’d eat it right up, because that is what designers live for. The type of research finding that opens up possibilities is an insight. Few marketing/insights departments know how to provide insight, even though they believe that providing customer “insights” is their core competency. When they say “insights” what they mean is facts — information about customers — their stats, behaviors, needs, wants, attitudes, and what have you. Insights are not essentially factual, and they are often not even expressible in language at all. The best source of insights is actually exposure to concrete people, environments and situations, and the best expression of those insights are often not words, graphs, or even cool diagrams, or anything else you might expect to find in a report, but rather ideas on what might work for those people in those environments and situations. But when this happens there’s always some process prig lying in wait ready to tell them they’re “getting ahead of themselves” and that their ideas are premature. They’re wrong. These premature ideas are the expression of having an insight. Don’t get attached to the ideas, but do keep them, because they are raw insight ore that can be melted down, refined and articulated — or simply “gotten”.
  5. The right conditions.
    Creativity is not only ugly and temperamental, it is also needy and fragile. It needs protection, but protection of a kind that seems counter-intuitive. To protect creativity, you have to restrain yourself from protecting the participants from the painful effects. If a creative team is not struggling in the dark, suffering from intense anxiety, infighting, bickering, hating it, with no end in sight until the end is suddenly in sight, they’re not doing anything that will blow anyone’s mind. Let them suffer. But don’t add more pain. Don’t interrupt them with the chickenshit that you think is urgently important. Think of the creative team’s hell as a pressurized tank. Your interruption will puncture it and let out all the pressure and deflate what’s trying to happen. As if this weren’t already too much, there’s one more indulgence you should lavish on your ugly-ass creative process: provide decent space with room to draw, sit, stand, fight, walk comfortably, all with minimal outside stimuli. A rule of thumb: keep creative suffering pure of mundane contaminants.
  6. The right tests.
    The usual tests of validity of ideas in business cannot do justice to creative ideas: 1) demanding analytical justification for why something will work, and 2) submitting it to the semi-informed opinions of people sitting around in a conference room. This procedure is 95% certain to kill off ideas that would work and support crappy ideas that should never have seen the light of day. The only legitimate way to test a creative idea is to prototype it and put it in front of real live human beings. After a prototype test is done and the idea survives it or its suckiness is exposed… then arguments for and against that idea and how it tested can be made.
  7. The right support
    Creative ideas need support before, in the form of these all these items in this list. But also, you need people to make the ideas happen. To execute. Such people are called “executives”. If you throw responsibility on creatives to make execution happen, ideas will always be proved impractical, because execution is a talent of its own. That’s because creative vision and genius for execution are two entirely different talents that do not always coincide in the same personality. One of the great things about business is that we get to combine our talents in ways that cancel out our weaknesses and allow us to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible. A smarter division of labor based on more realistic psychology, that permits creatives to conceive visionary ideas and executives to execute and actualize them would produce far more brilliant results.

Heidegger on the user

Design, Ideas

From Being and Time:

The work produced refers not only to the “towards-which” of its usability and the “whereof” of which it consists: under simple craft conditions it also has an assignment to the person who is to use it or wear it. The work is cut to his figure; he ‘is’ there along with it as the work emerges. Even when goods are produced by the dozen, this constitutive assignment is by no means lacking; it is merely indefinite, and points to the random, the average. Thus along with the work, we encounter not only entities ready-to-hand but also entities with Dasein’s kind of Being — entities for which, in their concern, the product becomes ready-to-hand; and together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users live, which is at the same time ours. Any work with which one concerns oneself is ready-to-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the public world. Along with the public world, the environing Nature [die Umweltnatur] is discovered and is accessible to everyone.

 

Diego Rodriguez’s 21 Innovation Principles

Design

Outspiral process

Design

I need to rethink my outspiral process and incorporate my recent insight that chaos has two different meanings, depending on whether it is applied to objective vs subjective truth.

  • Objective chaos is negative — vacuum: absence of order.
  • Subjective chaos is excessive positivity — infinitude: an unmanageable plurality of interfering orders that overwhelms all attempts at singular determination.

These two forms of chaos can occur together as total chaos, but they often do not. Partial chaos is more common, because it is more stable. Objective order will tolerate/promote/create subjective chaos to preserve itself. Subjective order will tolerate/promote/create objective chaos to preserve itself. Each form of partial chaos has its advantages, but those advantages are bought at a very high price.

My outspiral process is designed specifically to overcome stable partial chaos by drawing it into total chaos and then leading it through partial orders into a subjective-objective order. (I am avoiding the expression “total order” for obvious reasons. Fair warning…)

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I recognize this line of thought in Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.

Imagine someone… who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism (how much penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!). Such a man would be the mockery of our society: court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast him out: who endures contradiction without shame? Now this anti-hero exists: he is the reader of text at the moment he takes his pleasure. Thus the Biblical myth is reversed, the confusion of tongues is no longer a punishment, the subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side: the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel.

This, of course, corresponds to Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian.

I’m reading  The Pleasure of the Text on the basis of another conceptual recognition, the concept of readerly and writerly texts, a problem that has been central to my own thinking since 2003.

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A painter uses pigments to create forms that draw the active viewer into his world.

A musician uses sounds for the same purpose. Nobody but a muzo listens to notes.

A philosopher uses truth assertions to draw the active thinker into his world. Philosophers are a species of artist, but because few people can see how truth and reality are not identical, their artistry is as invisible as the air we breathe.

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“How’s the water, boys?”

 

Design problems vs engineering problems

Design, Ideas

Many problems are left unresolved because they are design problems misidentified and approached as engineering problems.

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To conceive a situation as a design problem means to approach the situation with the intention of improving it, by acting into the situation with some kind of system that does something for someone.

Breaking the problem down into component parts:

  1. A design improves a situation, which means it requires some clarity on what constitutes an improvement. In other words, design is guided by some kind of ideal.
  2. A design acts into a situation, which means design fits into a larger context and becomes a constituent part of it.
  3. A design is a system, which means it is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole.
  4. A design does something, which means it performs specific functions.
  5. A design is intended for someone, which means the design successful to the degree that it is valuable to people for which it is intended.

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Engineering problems are embedded within design problems, as point three and four: a system that does something. To isolate this part of the problem from the context of the situation and to suspend the consideration of the people for whom the system is intended is to define an engineering problem.

This makes the problem as it is defined easier to solve. But this comes at the cost of solutions that fit into situations and actually improve them significantly, despite the fact that they meet all defined requirements.

Pain of innovation

Brand, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

The primary obstacle to innovation of every kind is the pain of philosophy, which begins as angst before blooming into perplexity.

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We don’t hate new ideas because they’re new.

We don’t even hate new ideas because they displace beloved old ideas.

We hate new ideas because they require the creation of conceptual vacuum before we can understand them.

A conceptual vacuum is not like empty space. It is empty of articulated order, which means it overflows with everything-at-once. It is chaos.

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The depth of an idea means: “how much forgetting does it require in order to be understood?”

More depth = more forgetting = more pain.

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Real innovation is the product of deep thought. That is, it involves forgetting the conventional wisdom of some realm of activity, re-conceiving it, and thinking out the consequences. This alone generates new ideas capable of inspiring people.

But most people have no taste for thinking, much less thinking in depth. They see thinking and doing — and especially creative doing — as opposed. To this sensibility, disciplined thought and research — anything that seems to question or negate can only encumber the creative process, which is understood to be purely positive. So the method is brainstorm the maximum number of ideas possible — very deliberately excluding thought.

What comes from this process is usually large heaps of uninspiring cleverness, which gets translated into forgettable products, services and marketing.

Doing something really different requires a hell of a lot more than ingenuity. It requires the courage to take the preliminary step of “thinking different”, and then the faith to relentlessly execute upon the new thinking. We reject what comes before and after, and pay attention only to the easy middle part.

  • Before: Philosophy
  • Middle: Ideation
  • After: Operationalization

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The very deepest ideas draw us into the underworld of mind. To grasp them we must cross the river of forgetfulness, and then grope through limbo, without boundary stones, maps, compasses or stars to guide us. If we look back, all is lost. We are trapped in the old life, rooted to the institutional view, pillars of respectability.

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When we rethink how we think, we gain freedom of movement, first in mind, then in body.