Category Archives: Polycentered design

Service system development

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

The interface between business viability and design desirability is behaviors.

The success of every business initiative hinges on customer behaviors, and to a slightly lesser extent the behaviors of people on the front lines who serve those customers, and the behaviors of many others who support the front line.

Design specializes in what motivates those behaviors, which inhibits or redirects them, and what kinds of conditions encourage networks of behavior that produce favorable business outcomes.

The interface between operational feasibility and design “desirability” (I prefer “adoptable” or “joinable” or even “partakable”) is the shaping of the actual conditions that produce the behaviors. This, of course involves the production of the customer touchpoints designers shape. But in service design, internal touchpoints exist at every interface between people and the rest of the organization. Besides touchpoints, there are also organizational infrastructure that are not touchpoints in any conventional sense — policies, team structures, technologies, partnerships, etc. These enable or constrain conditions for behaviors, and these are carefully considered and, where appropriate, changed.

The interface between business viability and operational feasibility is the initial and ongoing investment to produce the conditions that will produce the behavioral return on investment.

The overlap of all three together is what I call the field of service system development, one third of which is service design, fluent in business viability and operational feasibility, but specializing in adoption/participation factors.

Quadrephania

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.

Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.

Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.

Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.

Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?

Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.

The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.

The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.

The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.

And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.

Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.

Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.

Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.

Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.

Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.

In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.

By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.

But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.

And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.

This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.

Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.

Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.

The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.

I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”

I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.

“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”

Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?

Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?

I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.

Systemic gift-rejection

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Any service designer will tell you that value exchanges (or cocreation) are our core concern. At every point in the unfolding of service, value is exchanged or generated among those receiving, delivering and supporting that service. If the value exchange is solid, the service feels worth it to everyone, and everyone plays their part. If it stops feeling worth it, people stop participating, or they withhold full cooperation, and the service starts to unravel.

Typically we think of these exchanges as investments and returns. ?Everyone puts something into a transaction, in order to get something out.

But there is another element of value exchange that is neglected, if not rejected: those things we give because we need to give them. These are our gifts, and giving these gifts gives our lives purpose.

When we are given opportunities to give our gifts, life enters the services we serve, and invests our organization with purpose and consecrating radiance.

Few system-builders consider this crucial and infinitely renewable resource.

Most organizations are ready to squander everything in order to avoid wasting time and money.

Years ago I made a list of resources designers should consider. Somehow the original list got lost, but I found one record of it in a list of planned talks:

“Lean How?: How Design Methods Make Waste Tradeoffs” – Lean methodologies tend to emphasize efficiencies of time and money, but these are often gained at the cost of wasting other resources. This talk proposes looking at forms of internal waste (time, money, team morale, organizational credibility) and external waste (customer goodwill, innovation opportunities, attention and brand equity) and seeing choice of methodology in terms of waste trade-offs.

Social metaphysics

Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Well, I took the slack bait and responded to one of those inane “watercooler topics”. I’m posting it only because the term social metaphysics emerged in my response, I think it’s a good coinage.

“Social metaphysics” has a nice ambiguity to it, too. It implies a socially shared metaphysics as well as a metaphysics of the social.

I take it both ways at once, of course, because somewhere in the neighborhood of Beriah, givens get radically polycentered — givens and takers, alike — each instaurating the other in givennesss.

Chokhmah obscura

Everso, Kabbalah, Polycentered design

I think of Chokhmah as the infinitesimal pinhole of a camera obscura through which the infinite light of Keter projects into an almost as infinitesimal five-dimensional plane the width, breadth, depth, duration and awareness of the whole cosmogonic unfolding. In this projection within One, each one of us lives and dies as an everted holographic vision of the whole, a subject of Malkhut.

This is a response to a (god)heady passage from Scholem:

Among the symbolical descriptions of the unfolding of God in His revelation, special attention must be given to that which is based on the concept of the mystical Nothing. To the Kabbalist the fundamental fact of creation takes place in God; apart from that he admits of no act of creation worth that name which might be conceived as fundamentally different from the first inmost act and which takes place outside the world of the Sefirot. The creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God Himself. This is also a crisis of the hidden En-Sof who turns from repose to creation, and it is this crisis, creation and Self-Revelation in one, which constitutes the great mystery of theosophy and the crucial point for the understanding of the purpose of theosophical speculation.

The crisis can be pictured as the break-through of the primordial will, but theosophic Kabbalism frequently employs the bolder metaphor of Nothing. The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God is externalized and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En-Sof, the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is this mystical ‘nothingness’ from which all the other stages of God’s gradual unfolding in the Sefirot emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the “supreme crown” [Keter] of Divinity. To use another metaphor, it is the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence. Some Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for instance Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain that in every transformation of reality, in every change of form, or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible. Nothing can change without coming into contact with this region of pure absolute Being which the mystics call Nothing. The difficult task of describing the emergence of the other Sefiroth from the womb of the first — the Nothing — is somehow managed with the aid of copious metaphors.

In this connection it may be of interest to examine a mystical jeu de mots which comes very close to the ideas of the Zohar and was already used by Joseph Gikatila. The Hebrew word for nothing, ain has the same consonants as the word for I, ani — and as we have seen, God’s “I” is conceived as the final stage in the emanation of the Sefirot, that stage in which God’s personality, in a simultaneous gathering together of all its previous stages, reveals itself to its own creation. In other words, the passage from ain to ani is symbolical of the transformation by which the Nothing passes through the progressive manifestation of its essence in the Sefiroth, into the I — a dialectical process whose thesis and antithesis begin and end in God: surely a remarkable instance of dialectical thought. Here as elsewhere, mysticism, intent on formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the instrument of dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by no means the only witnesses to this affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking.

In the Zohar, as well as in the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon, the transformation of Nothing into Being is frequently explained by the use of one particular symbol, that of the primordial point. Already the Kabbalists of the Geronese school employed the comparison with the mathematical point, whose motion creates the line and the surface, to illustrate the process of emanation from the “hidden cause.” To this comparison, Moses de Leon adds the symbolism of the point as the centre of the circle. The primordial point from Nothing is the mystical center around which the theogonical processes crystallize. Itself without dimensions and as it were placed between Nothing and Being, the point serves to illustrate what the Kabbalists of the thirteenth century call “the Origin of Being”, that “Beginning” of which the first word of the Bible speaks. The somewhat pompous phrases in which the opening lines of the Zohar’s interpretation of the story of creation describe this emergence of the primordial point — not indeed from the Nothing as remarked in another context, but from the ethereal aura of God — can serve as an example of the mystical imagery of the whole book:

“In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recess of the mystery of the Infinite, En-Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, neither red nor green, and of no color whatever. But when this flame began to assume size and extension it produced radiant colors. For in the innermost center of the flame a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En-Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the ethereal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely unrecognizable until under the impact of its break-through a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and therefore it is called Reshit, that is ‘Beginning’, the first word of creation”

By the Zohar, as by the majority of the other Kabbalistic writers, this primordial point is identified with the wisdom of God, Chokhmah. God’s wisdom represents the ideal thought of Creation, conceived as the ideal point which itself springs from the impulse of the abysmal will. The author extends the comparison by likening it to the mystical seed which is sown into Creation, the point of comparison apparently being not only the subtlety of both but also the fact that in either the possibilities of further being are potentially, though as yet invisibly, existent.

Service design rhetoric (notes on a WIP)

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I think I am making progress on developing simple ways to talk about service design beyond the service system engineering most service designs do.

Before I start, though, I want to clarify something: I’m not knocking service system engineering. It is hugely important, and this is why organizations buy it. An organization with broken touchpoints and unintegrated operations is going to be so nonfunctional it will be unable to do anything else. Broken touchpoints is pretty easy to do. Integrating operations to enable them to deliver adequate, seamless service is something service design is better at doing than any other profession. Solid service system engineering is a necessary condition for both adequate service and exceptional service. But service system engineering is only a sufficient condition for adequate service. For exceptional services that inspire personal loyalty from not only those who receive it, but also those who deliver and support it, design of value exchanges is needed. And the more exceptional and the more inspiring the service aspires to be the more it needs to get serious about personal meaning and motivation.

Scrap 1: Essential services and organizational “knitbones”

This sets the stage for the rhetoric I’m developing today. It all centers on a concept: essential service. Essential service is what separates a functional socially engineered adequate service from exceptional, inspired designed services.

A person’s essential service is that thing they do for others that gives their life purpose and meaning. Perhaps we all have an essential service, if we discover what it is and find an organization that allows us to provide it. But in reality only some lucky souls find such opportunities,

Let’s call such lucky souls a “knitbone” service actor, after the knitbone plant, also known as comfrey, a plant known for its soil enrichment capabilities. A knitbone plant has a deep taproot that extends to layers of earth inaccessible to other plants and draws nourishment up to the surface. Wherever knitbone is planted, neighboring plants flourish. This is why wise gardeners plant knitbone throughout their gardens.

Service design applies the same principle to organizations. Service design tries to strategically place knitbone service actors where they can infuse meaning into their organizations. If they are on the front lines, the service they provide is felt as genuine and valuable to those who receive the service. They make strong positive brand impressions, and cultivate external brand relationships. If they support the service at or behind the front lines, they generate a culture of meaning for other employees or partners responsible for delivering or supporting services.

A knitbone service actor is inwardly motivated to perform their essential service. The value of doing this service is intrinsic to its performance. A knitbone requires little to no external motivation. There is no need for carrots nor sticks nor monitoring. They only need opportunities to perform this service, which means 1) finding other people who need and value this service, and 2) receiving whatever supporting services from other people they need to perform their own essential service effectively.

Perhaps not everyone in an organization has an essential service. Some job roles might be intrinsically motivated by anyone. I think neither of these are true, but it doesn’t matter if you disagree with me. The goal is not to achieve some perfect utopia of an entirely inspired intrinsically motivated organization. The goal is to approach it and achieve it as much as possible.

And if the vision of this kind of organization is not intrinsically compelling, and you need external motivations to care about it, consider these:

  • External motivations encourage artificial behaviors that leave neutral or negative impressions, and do not inspire loyalty. It all feels phony, empty and “corporate”.
  • External motivations are expensive. If someone wants to do something anyway, you don’t have to pay them as much as you do to get someone to do something they loathe and resent being made to do.
  • Systems designed for external motivation are expensive. The infrastructure required to monitor and enforce behavioral compliance cost a lot of money to establish, maintain and staff.
  • Externally motivated organizations will struggle to retain precisely the most valuable talent (aka its knitbone employees) who will leave the minute they have an opportunity to find a more supportive and inspiring environment.

Wow, I am starting to seriously love my magical knitbone symbol.

Scrap 2: Start with service experiences, and operationalize backwards

Another point is equally important, and complementary to essential services and knitbone service actors.

It is simple: Services should begin with service experiences and develop systematized operational capabilities to support such experiences.

Fact is, the exact opposite happens.

The way most organizations evolve is function first. The organization is organized into units that develop and perform key organizational functions. The organization needs financial accounting and other money stuff to get taken care of? Establish a finance function to cover it. Computers are important? Establish an IT function. The organization needs to get the word out and persuade customers to buy their product? Marketing. If a need arises, and none of the existing units can do it, that means it’s time to form another functional unit.

Each of these units develops its capabilities mostly in isolation from one another. And with rare exceptions, the people who will use these capabilities are barely even considered, much less involved in the development.

At the tail end of this process comes a patching-together attempt, and it is usually only patched for the customers, not the hapless souls on the front line stuck with using them to try to deliver decent services to these customers. And those who try to support the front line in various ways also struggle with the sticked together pieces-parts frankenstein monster that is their organization.

Trying to reform the organization for service is an enormous task, which involves the deepest, most complicated and difficult organizational problems involving desirability, feasibility and viability imaginable. It is at minimum three highly demanding jobs.

Postscript: More whining about the missing two-thirds of the service trio

But service design is still an immature discipline that not only lacks a service system engineering role (equivalent to the software engineer role in the classic product trio) and a service manager role (equivalent to the product manager role) — it lacks awareness that this is a problem.

And because it is way, way, way too big a job for any one person, it succumbs to the managerial/technik habit of dropping Why, and focusing solely on What and How, and in effect reduces itself to service systems engineering, enhanced with amateurish attempts at business strategy. And the profession begins to attract service system technicians who don’t even miss the desirability part of the work. And the profession as a whole devolves into a dry flavor of management consulting increasingly incapable of delivering anything inspiring or meaningful.

Material, medium, form, object

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I’m thinking through the relationship between the essential elements of a design discipline — those things that define any design discipline.

First, though, I want to define design in general against disciplines, with particular emphasis on engineering and art, two domains into which design often blurs. Of course, it is an obnoxious fool’s errand to insist on technical precision in everyday speech, so please take these definitions as intended, as artificial sharpening done for the sake of precise understanding.

Design is the development of systems in which free-willed people participate as essential parts of that system. By free-willed, I mean they can (to some degree) choose whether and how to participate. A designed system is not complete until free-willed people are participating in it. As I have said zillions of times before, this is why design research is part of all design work. A system without free-willed people participating in it is still only an engineered sub-component.

Engineering is the development of systems without free-willed participants. Whatever the materials used in the system, whether concrete or logic, the components behave choicelessly. Often we engineer when we should design. We use various governing techniques to remove choice, so people become engineerable components in our social engineering projects. Or we exclude people from our problem framing, and focus solely on whatever thing we are making, presumably for them, but not in reference to them. Or we make assumptions or speculations that people will behave as we expect and hope. But the engineered thing is viewed as separate from the people who will eventually come along (or not) and try it (or reject it) and adopt it (or abandon it). Design never considers its thing apart from the people interacting with it.

Art is the development of a thing primarily in relation to the artist, and only secondarily to other people. In design, the people for whom the thing is being designed are primary and the designer is present only as a semi-reliable proxy. Some art is more systematic than other art. The essential difference is that art can (and arguably should) be made without involvement of people who will eventually participate in it by experiencing it. Gadamer argues that an artwork is never complete without its audience (and that is where I picked up this line of thought). But while the artwork is being made, the artist is the audience who completes it. While a design is being made, only representative people for whom the designwork is being made are suitable.

The most important difference between design and both art and engineering is that the latter can be done without involvement of other people who might eventually encounter what is being made, where design cannot. Design succeeds or fails by the choices of the free-willed people who are intended to participate in it.

When design becomes stylistic self-expression, it slides into art. When design becomes systems-development and problem-solving and loses touch with the free volition of human participants experiencing these systems from inside, it slides into engineering.

Now, let us establish terms, grounded in some accessible examples. Material, medium, formation, object.

Water is a material that can become a medium for a wave. The wave formation moves through it, by it, as it. A wave can keep moving beyond water, as long as some other material serves as a medium. People playing on the shore can be that material, and this is what happens when we enjoy being tossed by waves. We become a wave medium. So the wave is not essentially water, but the essence of a wave necessarily involves some mediating material. When we look from a distance, at water being moved by a wave formation we see an object: water formed into a wave.

Now, let’s get flaky. Setting aside whether this is real or true, what is meant when someone claims to be a spirit medium? It means that they as a person has become a material (like the water) through which a spirit moves or acts or speaks. The spirit moves, acts or speaks through the medium, by the medium, as the medium (for as long as the medium is serving as a medium). But the spirit does not stop with the medium. It keeps moving. It moves, acts and speaks to the people who witness the mediation, and extend the spiritual motion if they are willing to be moved and perhaps reformed or transformed by what they witness.

Design involves a variety of materials, some physical, like water, and some mental (mind-like), like our spirit medium example. Some of the forms conveyed or transmitted through media is mechanical force of the kind engineers harness, and some of the forms are ideational, emotional, symbolic (like the forms inherent in television or social media content) and some is behavioral, a mixture of physical and mental, ranging from mostly physical, unconscious reflexes to fully deliberate volitions (imitation or fashion trends among people).

The most complex material designers have learned to shape is the densely hybrid material known as organization.

This is the material the discipline of service design shapes.

Of course, organizations can be decomposed into a vast variety of materials, but this only complicates and confuses matters.

A fanciful analogy: Imagine a choreographer, who works with the material of human bodies in motion, who decides to chart, not only the movements of his dancer’s limbs, but the entire physiology, internal and external, of each dancer. He is not wrong that these materials move with the body, but this additional data overwhelms and obscures his orchestrated bodies-in-motion problem without adding much or anything of value, and demonstrates not thoroughness but shallowness of understanding of the essence of the choreographer’s craft. Indeed, compulsive thoroughness is symptomatic of lack of depth of understanding, and is a kind of compensation. When the intellect cannot penetrate deeper or saturate into what it seeks to know, it splatters, spreads out or piles up upon the surface of the matter. Ironically, this dense breadth is misnomically called “going into depth” but depth is precisely what it lacks. Depth abstracts precisely the simple essence of a matter, and allows the concrete details around it to logically crystallize around it. A dancer’s internal organs will take care of themselves if the choreographer focuses on dance movements.

So, the material of service design is organizations.

What is its medium, and what forms are conveyed via this medium?

The medium is behaviors — more specifically interactions between service actors, some of which are human and many of which are not (thank you, Bruno Latour!), across interfaces of myriad types. Currently, service design is still drowning in philosophical debt from its origination in customer experience design (a customer-centered flavor of HCD) that it focuses its attention on customer touch-points, but this only a subset of the many interfaces by which a service is woven together. Service design is drowning in philosophical debt from building itself out from a CX philosophy, and endlessly hacking and patching its methods on this inadequate, monocentric philosophical platform. (And tragically, because service design is becoming a handmaiden to journey management, which is also customer-centered in its logic, and the technological platforms being used as journey management infrastructure follows this logic, it looks more likely that service design will regress than progress.)

Now we have the material of service design, which is organizations.

And we have the medium, which is interactions via interfaces.

What is the form conveyed through this medium? Value exchanges! Each interaction directly or indirectly moves value among actors. This movement is what animates services and organizations (in two senses of the word: setting them in motion and ensouling them).

And, finally, what is the object service design produces? A network of brand relationships, each a perception of the organization, experienced as a boundary object. Brands are so much more complex than most people have the philosophical capacity to understand.

Let’s try this framework out on UX for a moment. Material: digital technology. Medium: human-computer interactions. Form: experience (of momentary value exchange!). Object: Digital thing (product, app, website, game, etc.)

A managerial cannot distinguish the form (experience) from the object, because they are exclusively objective, meaning they have access only to one objectivity (aka subject). So when they say they are building an experience, they are referring to the artifact they are coding. And they can build it just fine without involvement of people. And if the experience they build has usability problems, no problem. The experience was “instrumented” and the problems can be caught and corrected. So the experience is always improving.

But the experience actual people have — the experience designers are concerned with — does not improve. Because when they open their app to use it, they never know what to expect. It is constantly changing. They are constantly required to relearn it. And half of what they use has not been properly tested. They themselves are the usability test. Which means they are constantly subjected to usability problems of various kinds.

If you look at it this way — again, the way designers see it — it is not hard to see that this is an atrocious experience, however much the product itself improves. But managerials don’t look at it this way. They see only things, not people experiencing things over time.

A service designer sees it even more clearly. Product managers are backstage actors who shape the delivery of a service, which is the management of an experience of a digital product over a long span of time. And these services are profoundly broken because on the whole the field of product management is oblivious to the fact they are not managing a product, but service actors — custodians of a long customer experience that needs even more management than their product does.

I do sometimes bridle at service designer games which reduce every product to services, but here it sheds very useful light on the true nature of product management.

And that light becomes glaring when we look at product managers the same way we look at frontline service actors, for example, call center agents. The worst customer experience problems we find in call centers often originate in poorly conceived scorecards, that put agents’ and customers’ goals at odds with one another. The agents are evaluated by how much they can upsell and cross sell, or how quickly they can resolve a call. They are misaligned with what customers need, which is focused help achieving their own goal of getting help, or buying something inexpensive that fits their modest needs. Likewise, product managers are often evaluated by their productivity, that is how frequently and how much they are able to improve (aka change) their products. But if users need a reliable, steady tool that they can learn once and keep using, these changes harm the experience of the product, which, to say it again, is not the awesomeness of the digital thing frozen at some point in its development. Far from it.

A few ideas that emerged organically in this post that I want to catalogue for future development.

    The concept of philosophical debt. Think of this as the compounding accumulation of theories, practices and general praxis upon a misconceived point of departure, which requires eventual change of paradigm, and the discarding of many core tools and methods (redescription of Kuhn, for managerials)
    The idea of nonhuman service actors as service actors, an idea lifted directly from Latour, who always saw social orders constituted of nonhuman actors as well as human ones. Service design will probably have to catch up with Latour now, with AI agents functioning more like human actors than tech platforms.
    Design discipline defined by material, medium, form, object. It seems to me these have been smeared together, and it has caused quite a bit of methodological confusion. Most super-clever managerials are eager to avoid the inefficiency of involving service actors directly in design practices and lack philosophical capacity to grasp why this is disastrous.
    “Managerials” as a pejorative, for managers of people, products, journeys who take engineering approaches to design problems. Because they are unable to understand pluralistically in a variety of first-person terms about human interactions with each other and with nonhuman actors — they think from the one first-person perspective that dominates corporate life, a technicic objectivity that renders everything an object that behaves in quantifiable ways, and may be made, through engineering approaches, to behave differently. Whatever a managerial touches becomes social engineering. I think James Burnham influenced this coinage.

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Star

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.

Presequence, consequence, richness

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

A statement is made in the nexus of two implicate meanings, one preceding it as an implicit question to which it is an answer, and another following it as every possible practical response implied in what is stated. To understand a statement is to understand both the presequent and consequent implicate meanings, together in one thrust of meaning.

Hermeneutic presequence — an implicit question, to which the statement is a response.

Pragmatic consequence — the full set of ramifying practical implication that follow from a statement.

The range of possible hermeneutic presequences and pragmatic consequences varies from philosophy to philosophy, and can be called its semantic scope. Semantic scope is the ideal set of every possible meaning a philosophy can attempt to express, however well or poorly it expresses them, and whether or not it actually makes the attempt.

Three important notes:

First, the range of possible meanings should not be confused with realities to which a meaning refers. The latter should be called metaphysical scope. A philosophy with large semantic scope might focus densely on a narrow metaphysical scope, and a philosophy with narrow semantic scope might extend itself across a vast metaphysical scope.

Second, there is no accessible superset of semantic scopes. Every semantic scope appears to itself to be the ultimate superset, and whatever stands beyond it lacks sense, and may, more often than not, really be nonsense. But claims of nonsense cannot be proven, especially if we take hermeneutic presequence seriously, as heirs of positivism rarely do.

Third, this framing distinguishes ontology from metaphysics. Ontology belongs to semantic scope, not to metaphysical scope.

A fourth note is even more important: The overlap of meanings and practical responses to meanings in realities, especially social realities (collaboratively generated), has a perceptible positive quality. Pluralism is not only an accommodation for many various solitary individuals, it makes shared realities more tangibly, richly real. In this richness we feel the presence of other souls and the value of this reality and its sharedness.

A corollary of the fourth note: If semantic scope is shared between people, this opens the way to expansion of metaphysical scope. Shared semantic scope enables showing and sharing more and more reality.

What is richness?

Design, Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Shit theory

I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.

The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.

A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.

But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.

When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.

This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.

Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.

Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.

A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.

An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.

Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.

I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?

And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.

A story is not a tree.

A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.

Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.

Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.

Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.

When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.

The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.

It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct artificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?

That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…

Remembering the value of Desirability

Design, Polycentered design

Two venn diagrams are often used by designers to explain what they do.

Each triads presents design as pursuing an overlap of three primary values.

The first, and most common, formulated by IDEO, is the view of a designed solution from an organization’s perspective. A successful design solution is viable, feasible and desirable:

  • Viable: the solution is advantageous to the organization
  • Feasible: the solution is something the organization can actualize
  • Desirable: the solution is something people want and will choose over other options

The second, invented by Liz Sanders, focuses on what makes people choose a solution. A successful design solution is useful, usable and desirable:

  • Useful: the solution fulfills objective, functional needs
  • Usable: the solution removes obstacles and interference from fulfilling needs
  • Desirable: the solution is something people want, apart from functional needs

Notice that Desirable occurs in both triads.

Also notice that Desirable denotes a different concept in both diagrams, a fact easily missed by folks who think verbally.

But fascinatingly, despite this difference, in both diagrams it is always the element of Desirable that drops out first.

And this is because in both diagrams Desirable addresses subjective responses of people to an organization’s offering. These subjective responses motivate objective behaviors, and it is these behaviors that make a design system flourish or fail.

Subjectivity is difficult for most of us to think. This is because we naturally think objectively about physical and conceptual objects. When we use objective thought to understand objects (like engineered objects and object-systems and business objectives, and objective measurements of objectively observed behaviors) the understanding we develop serves our purposes.

But subjectivity confuses objective thinkers because any subjective difference projects a different objectivity into the reality we share. Each of us, walking into the same room notices different things in the environment, and these cause us to make different sense of things. A socially competitive person might look for signifiers of wealth or refinement. A germaphobe might see cleanliness or filth. An artist might notice the aesthetics and symbolic features of a room, indicating a personality or culture. An engineer might see an interesting device or mechanism. My wife senses a field of emotional interconnections, dense with possible stories. A police officer might detect evidence of what has happened or might happen in the room. A preoccupied person might notice only what they are thinking about or what they might be missing on the phone in their pocket.

This is why equating reality and objectivity is not only naive but reductive and, where people are concerned, inadequate. To know a person objectively is to impose one’s own objectivity upon them and to miss precisely those things that motivate behaviors that are, in fact, life and death matters for any organization.

But getting at these multiple objectivities requires a different mentality than business-as-usual objectivity.

This is what designers are supposed to do. But the demands to think objectively, strategize objectively, communicate objectively, plan objectively — these can interfere or even block subjective understanding.

I remember years ago I worked on a technical CMS implementation of a site I had designed myself. I had done extensive research with all the user segments. I had developed a nuanced understanding of where their needs, emotional motivations, perspectives and language differed and converged. I had sensitized myself to how each related differently to the same organization, and interacted with it differently. And the minute I began implementing this design system in this technical platform and started ranging with its myriad features and constraints, all that subjective multi-objectivity went right out the window. To get this engineering work done, I had to attune myself to the logic of this system, and I crystallized into single-logical engineer.

I could not be both an engineer and a designer.

This is why designers should not be shoved into slash roles. Designers need to focus on desirability, supported by a team where others focus on viability and feasibility and project management. If they are forced to do more, the desirability work will be eclipsed. A UX-Ui designer will become only a UI designer. A Service Designer who must also shoulder the weight of process engineering and business strategist might do a lot of service consulting and journey management coaching, but they’ll forget what it is to design.

Subjective understanding is both important and fragile. It requires cultivation and protection.

It is hard to develop and very easy to lose. After a point, it is not only lost, but forgotten.

And once it is forgotten the reasons for cultivating it and protecting it and valuing it are lost.

It starts first with loss of Desirability as something independent from Usable and Desirable. “If this thing is both Useful and Desirable, doesn’t that make it Desirable?” This collapse reduces designed things to mere utility. They work well, but no personal attachment forms between the person and the functional thing or with the organization who provides it. It is a functional transaction.

The next loss is Desirable as something requiring the same level of effort and specialization as Viable or Feasible. It is all leveled down to touch-points with useful features that do not introduce pain-points. Objects and more objects, measured objectively, producing measurable outcomes. The Desirability work is primarily a matter of identifying which parts of which objects to implement first in order to achieve which objectives. It is all easy to talk about, argue about, measure and reward. But, again, it produces nothing anyone can care about.

This is what happens when design is marginalized or refused the conditions required to do design work.

First comes the slash roles. Then come the slashed jobs.

Side note (mainly to myself): a general theory of Desirability. Desirability is rooted in service.

We need to serve — and to have our services needed, valued and received with gratitude.

We all need to be needed.

But we need to be needed in specific ways — according to our essential service.

If someone extracts service from us that is not the service we need and want to give — especially if our essential service is refused, devalued or made impossible — instead of feeling fulfilled purpose we feel used and degraded.

To understand a person’s essential service and to provide them opportunities to provide this service to others who will value it — and at the same time provide that person with services that allow them to focus on their essential services — this taps sources of value, motivation, loyalty, hope, resilience and a myriad other passions. An organization rooted in this kind of value will have charisma, soul, energy and je ne sais quoi far beyond a corporation that relies only on dollars and fear to drive its gears.

Lead… then gold!

Design, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

When a person loses their soul, the very soul who could intuit the loss is absent. All that is left is unreality feeling the unreality of unreality.

I’ve quite a bit on ethnomethods — those mostly intuitive behavioral conventions that permit us to participate in some particular social setting. To belong to a culture is to know how to produce and how to interpret a repertoire of meaningful behaviors. We learn how to understand other people’s behaviors and to make ourselves understood by them; then we adopt them as habits; then we internalize them and they become second-natural, and eventually we forget them entirely and they recede into nature.

Many ethnomethods are never explicated. We learn them mimetically — by direct intuitive mirroring. We just pick them up.

Very few people can deliver a lucid lecture on the ethnomethods they use. Nor can they be relied upon to talk about them, mainly because it would not occur to an interviewee to bring them up, since they operate outside of linguistic direction. Understanding ethnomethods — a sociological approach known as ethnomethodology — requires direct observation and experiment.

But also, and I am sure I am nowhere near the first to say this: language is ethnomethodic. Cultures adopt a shared active vocabulary. And they speak in certain ways about their shared world. This relationship between words, communicative behaviors, referenced realities and speech acts produce mental ethnomethods. Through ethnomethods, people adopt cognitive behavioral habits, and become “inwardly” likeminded through their outward conformity to the intricately inter-related heterogeneous outward norms.

Why do I bring this up? Several reasons:

  • Ethnomethods are the meaningful substructure of organizations, and organizations are the material service designers shape. When we do this shaping, ethomethods are a huge, elusive and difficult part of that shaping.
  • Scholars who have studied how designers work and teach new practitioners (like Nigel Cross and Donald Schon) have observed that design practice differs in distinctive ways from other professions. When these practices are taken up by communities and become a disciplinary field, and are intentionally transmitted through education, training and apprenticeship they become an ethnomethodic tradition. Cross invented an adjective for indicating belonging in the repertoire of behavioral, linguistic and cognitive ethnomethods: “designerly”.
  • Design practice has, since the pioneering design research work of Lucy Suchman, adopted ethnomethodic practice — but ironically has adopted and transmitted it purely ethnomethodically! Very few designers have any explicit knowledge of where our methods came from. Ethnomethodology is embedded in many of our methods, and when we use those methods we function ethomethodologically. If the ethnomethodological tools happen to cycle out of our work, the ethomethodological ethnomethods disappear with them. And designers, who are nine-nine parts technician, and maybe one part intellectual, are ill-equipped to notice.
  • Service design, as a field, has its own evolving set of ethnomethods. Of course, like all fields we have our methods (tools) and our methodologies (systematic use of tools), and when people ask us about how we work, these are what we talk about. But beneath all this is a layer of ethnomethods that guide how we do our work and even how we think about it. I suspect many service designers see themselves as more intellectual than other designers. It is partly because we are required to explain ourselves, our value and our methods to so many different stakeholders. And it does require a degree of articulateness beyond that required of other designers. But this is not intellectual articulateness, but, rather, a technical articulateness.
  • And, perversely, for this very reason, I think service design has lost almost all its designerly ethomethods. It started with “meeting business halfway” and learning the language of business in order to communicate the value of service design in meeting business goals. Then it became mastery of that language and fluency in speaking it, which means learning to think in it. Then it became immersion and active participation in business practices. Then it became learning new methods and approaches to managing journeys and products within journeys. Designers began meeting business halfway from the previous halfway point. And then halfway from that… then that… then that, until eventually, Zeno-paradoxically, our service design stopped being designerly at all.

And this brings me to the thesis I have been working and reworking, which I just summarized to one of the few service design intellectuals I know:

I’m coming to you with a growing suspicion about the field of service design that I think cannot be discussed by most practicing service designers.

I believe that the tacit philosophy that underlies and unconsciously shapes and animates service design practice has never been fully adequate to the problems service design is meant to address. The whole field has always stood on a shaky intellectual foundation, and this has weakened our disciplinary praxis.

But in the last several years, I think even that foundation has eroded away, until that now service design has devolved to total submission to that tacit philosophy that shapes and animates business management — a vulgar subspecies of what Heidegger called technik.

The intellectual foundation upon which service design was erected needs to be dug out and re-laid, so service design can bring design to the business world.

As it stands, service design offers nothing to business that is not new-and-improved business management consulting. And it is this non-designerly sameness that sets dull eyes aglow with recognition when service design gurus speak their language. Service design now sees eye-to-eye with business because it is no longer design, but utterly safe, unchallenging, non-disruptive business as usual. It is no more revolutionary than corporate progressivist activism, and just as phony.

Service design has gone native in the world of business. It has, in the process lost its soul and cannot even sense it.

A methodological note:

I’ve joked that brimstone is my fossil fuel, and that rage is my muse.

I’ve waxed bad-poetic about my daggerscalpel. Something bothers me dreadfully and gets me all murderously angry. I grab my dagger and lunge at it with full intent to kill. But as the weapon tip plunges toward the heart of the matter, it changes midair into a surgical instrument of healing. And now I know something that releases me from resentment.

Most recently I’ve spoken humorously about my philosopher’s stone as a bludgeon — I smash it into some leaden stupidity and watch it transmute into golden insight.

And so on.

Let me see if I can transmute all this ragey negativity into something beautiful.

Design is a very different way to enworld our world. It is not meant to replace other enworldments, but does retune them so we can all collaborate in harmonious difference to solve shared problems.

Design wants to solve these shared problems in some distinctive ways.

It wants to bring things into existence that people value, and which makes life in general more valuable. That is, it wants to offer things that people freely choose and want to have in their lives.

It wants these things to be beneficial to all involved. In the case of a service, the service should not only be beneficial to those who receive the service but also those who deliver that service on the front lines, or who support the service behind the scenes. The service offers opportunities to serve and to be served in ways that are meaningful and rewarding and make people thank their lucky stars that this service exists.

It wants this rewarding involvement to be true of its own services. Anyone who gets staffed to a service design project should immediately feel a palpable change for the better. Anyone who works as a service designer at a service design agency should feel this as well. They should feel that they are bringing a gift to their client. If they do not feel this in their hearts, the designer and the agency need to look into the design of their own service and get right with their craft.

It wants to do what all design does: make things that are useful, usable and desirable. Useful is the easy part. It is about what the design does for whoever uses it. Usable means we can use it intuitively, without massive cognitive effort. It means working with simple gestalts and purely intuitive interactions. And desirable means reinforcing a person’s values and overall sense of value. It means inviting relationship.

It wants to shape a reality that can be enworlded but shared in a variety of ways by a variety of participants. Each participant approaches the artifact in a different way, experiences it differently and responds to it, interacts with it, and changes it from their own point of participation. The single reality is actualized by the distributed agency of participants, each of whom experiences the reality in their own way. In Christopher Alexander’s words, a service is a semilattice experienced by a plurality of participants, not a tree-structure experienced in one way.

Design wants to create a world where a diverse range of people who might inhabit the same world very differently all feel at home and grateful to be here together.

This is why I design.

Service trio

Design, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

Service design focuses on human participation in service systems. In order to do the job well, a service designer must work with others focused on business viability and technical feasibility and find that golden overlap at the heart of the Venn diagram.

To put it in terms of IDEO’s feasible / viable / desirable model, service design has primary responsibility for desirability.

To use another famous IDEO model, service design is “T-shaped” with broad familiarity with feasibility and viability (horizontal crossbar of the T) and specialized depth in understanding people and what motivates them to participate in a service, and what might prevent them from doing so, (the vertical column of the T).

For years now, I have been observing that every design discipline has its engineering counterpart.

Design systems by definition are composed of both human and non-human components.

The engineers occupy themselves with purely objective sub-systems, while designers concern themselves with humans who might participate in the system and support it to some degree, or to abandon or undermine it. If engineers do their job, the thing being made functions as intended, and designers do their job, the functioning thing is something people want to purchase, try, adopt, keep using, increase their use of, spread the word about, etc., and the thing gets used in real-life.

And sneaking around the edges are business people who figured out how this thing, once functioning and in use, helps their organization flourish, mainly by making or saving money.

So there you have it: desirable, feasible, viable.

The problem with services, though, is that few organizations understand them.

Most business-as-usual organizations remain essentially atomistic in orientation, and assume that a satisfactory assemblage of satisfactory parts automatically amounts to a satisfactory whole.

So they fixate on managing the individual pieces and parts. Product managers fixate on their product. Marketing fixates on its messages. Customer service fixates on helping customers looking for help. Everybody’s in silos, and nobody is working on how the parts hang together, much less thinking about ways the parts could form into something whose whole is greater than the sum of stuck-together ad hoc parts.

For at least a decade and a half, service design has lacked its engineering counterpart. And maybe because of this, or maybe causing it — or probably both — service design as it is currently practiced attracts a type of person who finds it relatively easy to flow into that vacuum, and to try to perform the roles of not only designers, but also engineers and business consultants.

They’re not really “service engineers” but then again, neither is anybody else, so nobody has anything to compare them unfavorably against. Few of them know enough business management to be sophisticated “service managers”. Maybe Service-Dominant Logic experts could do this role if any of them ever wandered off campus to do useful work, but they don’t. So service designers do that, too.

These two awkwardly massive jobs inevitably overwhelm the experience design part of the job, which is also considerably more complex than most other forms of experience design (such as visual design or UX).

Where most design disciplines focus mainly on one person, and are monocentric (user-centered, customer-centered, employee centered, etc.) service design is pluricentric, understanding complex interactions among a plurality of people, each of whom sees the service differently, like in the famous fable, “the blind men and the elephant”.

This plurality of experiences and roles cashes out in different behaviors, which are distributed throughout the system and collectively determine its collective behavior. This kind of distributed agency makes service design systems polycentric.

Service designers must understand the pluricentric experiences and polycentric behaviors of design systems together and arrange them in ways that are mutually beneficial to each participant. (I’ve called service designers “win-win engineers”).

So what we call “service design” is actually three overwhelming jobs.

Each job is not only too much work for one person to do, but also too much expertise for anyone to know, too many skills for any one person to master.

But worst of all, each of these activities demands a different, incompatible mentality. And of these mentalities, design is the hardest to maintain, the least recognized and therefore the first to be chucked out once things get stressful.

Service design tries to cover non-design activities with the design umbrella, but then strands design out in the rain.

Service designers end up least of all… designers.

As it stands service design looks, sounds, acts and smells more like management consulting than design, and the people attracted to the profession seem more interested in constructing logical systems than understanding human beings and their loves, fears and hopes, and crafting things that might matter to them.

Service design will only mature as a profession when it differentiates roles, and like product management forms a close-knit trio of a service manager-strategist who focuses on viability (analogous to product manager), an service systems engineer who focuses on feasibility and a service designer who focuses on desirability.

This is not a tree

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.

I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.

Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.

Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.

The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.

So many things are not a tree.

A city is not a tree.

A service is not a tree.

An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.

Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.

History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.

A culture is not a tree.

A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.

The Tree of Life is not a tree.

A Service Is Not a Tree

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Reading Christoper Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree” I am realizing the extent to which a service, also, is not a tree — and the extent to which we service designers try to force services into tree-structures.

Alexander’s signature move, dating from his earliest work, is what I would characterize as polycentralizing design: identifying the multiple centers and fields of activity, noting where the fields overlap and interact, and how these overlapping fields are embodied and changed — most notably, vivified, strengthened, weakened or killed — by physical form.

Alexander’s eternal enemy is orders that abstract and simplify the complexity of life, and design structures reflecting this simplified abstraction, that are intended only to support this partial understanding, and end up severing vital connections that allow built environments to live.

Why is it that so many designers have conceived cities as trees when the natural structure is in every case a semilattice? Have they done so deliberately, in the belief that a tree structure will serve the people of the city better? Or have they done it because they cannot help it, because they are trapped by a mental habit, perhaps even trapped by the way the mind works — because they cannot encompass the complexity of a semilattice in any convenient mental form, because the mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception?

I shall try to convince you that it is for this second reason that trees are being proposed and built as cities — that is, because designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act.

More to come…

Service design’s core mission

Design, Polycentered design

It is a terrible thing to be prevented from giving what you were born to give, and, instead, to be forced to give what you don’t have.

It is the gift of gifts to give what you were born to give to others who need and value it, and, in exchange, to receive what you lack but badly need.

And one of our greatest needs is to give.

The mission in the heart of service design, buried beneath mechanical rubble and organizational slime, is a holy thing.

Woo-woo

Polycentered design

I take books like drugs. Doubt me?

Chaos is not absence of order, but precisely the opposite – the presence of infinite orders. Each of us, sheltered in the shade of our own minuscule I-here-now, benefits from
sphere upon sphere upon sphere upon sphere of ontological filters — deflecting, transmitting, sky-glowing — each successively diffusing and reducing infinity infinitesimally. Each sphere bears its own portion of infinity. Each contains a holographic infinity, a jewel-node in Indra’s Net, conveying within itself the entire jeweled net, refracting and refracting and refracting and refracting to infinite density in one centripetally radiant photon of infinite, dimensionless magnitude.