In honor of Hanukkah and Christmas, two great gift-giving holidays, this post is about gifts.

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Agreement does not (only) mean correspondence of belief. More than that, it means compatibility of belief. It means the possibility of relationship in the medium of understanding, activity and purpose. A truly agreeable gift signals agreement in this expansive sense.

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From Clifford Geertz’s “From the Native’s Point of View”:

…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

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“Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them.

A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.

A good design shares the essential qualities of a good gift.

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A post from an old blog:

Heaven is the world once it knows who it is, and what it is not.

The following is not  an argument. It is nothing more than a way to see things, which can be entertained, tried on or ignored. One person can compel another to accept certain facts through use of logic and empirical evidence (under threat of excommunication from the world of the reasonable), but understanding of worldviews is entirely different. Here there is no compulsion, only invitation. Invitations can always be declined (otherwise it is a disguised summons)…

Continue reading A new way to see? →

Respect means to value another person’s worldview.

Dignity is the status of deserving respect.

Honor is the cultivation of dignity and the mutuality of respect.

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A pluralist respects differently from a monist.

For a monist, the essence of respect lies in the uniformity of worldviews, in agreement on what the truth is. Truth is the intellectual representation of reality, and the intellect is entirely adequate to the task of understanding that of reality a human being ought to know.

For a pluralist, the essence of respect lies in the differences between worldviews, and of the creative potential in overcoming difference in pursuit of truth. Truth is the human relationship to reality, and pursuit of truth is the attempt of a finite being to relate as fully as possible to reality, which is infinite, and not reducible to the finite terms of the intellect.

Both monism and pluralism are self-evident and self-consistent by their own terms.

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Both monists and pluralists seek unity, but the mode of unity differs.

The monist looks for oneness based in uniformity of ultimate substance. That substance might be the smallest unit of substance, of which everything is composed. Or the substance might be the greatest unit of substance, of which everything is a part. But finally, the self and other (that which is not the self) is made equivalent through the sharing of a single nature. Monism is homotropic.

The pluralist looks for oneness based on integration. The integration consists of establishing various kinds of relationship (material, practical, intellectual, etc.) between the self and other, and conscious participation in that which exceeds the self. The other can be another self, or the material world, or past or future, but the pluralist seeks to extend its participation in the world by seeking otherness and modes of relationship and participation with that otherness. Pluralism is heterotropic.

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A type of pluralist exists who stresses tolerance over relationship, and who seeks to hermetically preserve its sense of individual unity by simultaneously acknowledging the fact of otherness and discounting the practical importance of otherness. Also, a type of monists exists who asserts a preexisting or preordained unity, but who becomes intensely agitated if anything appears to contradict his conception of this unity by demonstrating inexplicable and undeniable otherness. These types pursue elimination of difference (either through withdrawing from difference or destroying it).

Brand equity measures how much a product satisfies cultural needs.

Not only is perfection unattainable, even its value is questionable. A better attainment is the discovery of fresh imperfections that demand our attention: compelling problems.

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Perfection is an ideal which sets a goal for a pursuit. The locus of value is in the activity itself — the pursuit — not in final attainment of the ideal.

The futility of the pursuit of perfection is no argument against perfection, but a guarantee of pursuit’s permanent abundance.

If we fail to recognize this futility as a guarantee, and treat perfection as a chimera to ignore, life will devolve into slack laziness or hectic duty.

A meaningful life is spent in faithful and futile pursue pursuit of unattainable goals.

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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

— Rumi

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

This story has a lot of philosophical truth to it, but it lacks psychological truth. Here’s how I see it playing out:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish answer ‘It’s great, thank you.’

Five years later they’ll say ‘Water? We don’t believe in that crap!’ or they’ll say ‘Hell, yeah! Water!’

Twenty years later they’ll know what water is or they won’t. Either way they will say ‘It’s great, thank you.’

Nietzsche: “What Homer says of it is so true and so terrible it pierces us through: ‘the muse loved him dearly and gave to him good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet song.’ — This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good AND evil, that is her way of loving dearly! And everyone will interpret for himself why it is we thinkers and poets have to give our eyes in exchange.”

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The modernist fantasy is this: one day the world will be understood completely, exclusively through empirical observation and mathematical modeling. The project is set, all that is required is persistence and ingenuity. We will experience scientific revolutions (lowercase), but the Scientific Revolution (uppercase) is the last philosophical revolution humanity will ever undergo. Philosophy is spoken. Science has eyes only for the observable.

Modernity wishes the optical to not only dominate, but silence the word, by eliminating the need for it. If you protest this tendency, a modernist will see exactly what you’re doing, and will not listen to you. Only those subject to subjectivity object to objectivity.

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Heraclitus: “Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.”

Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”

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Subjectivity speaks and listens.

Objectivity sees and observes.

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James Spradley observed something interesting. When a researcher surveys research participants, the researcher doesn’t get answers to questions, but observable behaviors — responses to conditions.

Whatever the participant says during the survey is unanalyzable noise in the experiment.

For social science to be scientific, it must silence its subject and make it objective.

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Rilke: “A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”

Hannah Arendt , from the Human Condition:

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.

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Viewed as part of the world, the products of work — and not the products of labor — guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all. It is within this world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our bodies and produced by its laboring, but without stability of their own, these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear in an environment of things that are not consumed but used, and to which, as we use them, we become used and accustomed. As such, they give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men. What consumer goods are for the life of man, use objects are for his world. From them, consumer goods derive their thing-character; and language, which does not permit the laboring activity to form anything so solid and non-verbal as a noun, hints at the strong probability that we would not even know what a thing is without having before us “the work of our hands.”

Distinguished from both, consumer goods and use objects, there are finally the “products” of action and speech, which together constitute the fabric of human relationships and affairs. Left to themselves, they lack not only the tangibility of other things, but are even less durable and more futile than what we produce for consumption. Their reality depends entirely upon human plurality, upon the constant presence of others who can see and hear and therefore testify to their existence. Acting and speaking are still outward manifestations of human life, which knows only one activity that, though related to the exterior world in many ways, is not necessarily manifest in it and needs neither to be seen nor heard nor used nor consumed in order to be real: the activity of thought. Viewed, however, in their worldliness, action, speech, and thought have much more in common than any one of them has with work or labor. They themselves do not “produce,” bring forth anything, they are as futile as life itself. In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things — into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfilment and which makes it, indeed, as the Greeks held, the mother of all arts, the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. The materialization they have to undergo in order to remain in the world at all is paid for in that always the “dead letter” replaces something which grew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed as the “living spirit.” They must pay this price because they themselves are of an entirely unworldly nature and therefore need the help of an activity of an altogether different nature; they depend for their reality and materialization upon the same workmanship that builds the other things in the human artifice.

The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors. Human life, in so far as it is world-building, is engaged in a constant process of reification, and the degree of worldliness of produced things, which all together form the human artifice, depends upon their greater or lesser permanence in the world itself.

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An insight that has inspired me: The world of commerce is the site where action (in Arendt’s sense) occurs today, and it manifests as brand.

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Some customers only want to consume and purchase products, to sustain their own labor and work activities.

A growing number of consumers, however, seem to be looking for something beyond mere sustenance and mere function. They respond to super-functional meaning, which corresponds to Arendtian action, and the vehicle for this meaning is brand.

This does not mean that brand is always the vehicle for action, any more than words are always meaningful. Brand can be — and in the hands of functionalists, usually is — merely a system of identification, a mnemonic device, or a functionalist promise. However, insofar as action occurs in business, it manifests as brand.

And because commerce has overgrown culture to the extent it has, what used to take place outside of commerce, now takes place within it. For this reason, the role of brand in our culture is changing.

So far, Apple is the purest example of what many seem to want brand to become, and it is still unique. This doesn’t stop people from trying to present it as exemplary of something already common — because (in the case of those who love it) we want it to be a norm, or (in the case of the apprehensive) we want to minimize its importance, or (in the case of the uncomprehending functionalist) we just can’t detect any important difference.

But, regardless, Apple is qualitatively in a class apart from Sony, Virgin, BMW and Microsoft.

And Apple is also in a class apart from philanthropic brands like Tom’s Shoes, Whole Foods, or Ben & Jerry’s. Those brands might “try to make the world a better place” but they seek to benefit humanity on the plane of labor and work.

What makes Apple far more interesting and inspiring is that Apple envisaged a world reordered to accommodate super-functional considerations. And it manifested this vision through superior function.*

Far more significant than the concrete accomplishment, however, was the vision that led Apple to see value in usability in a time when everyone preached “learning to be computer literate” with DOS and CP/M, etc. Apple believed technology exists for the sake of humanity and ought to accommodate itself to humanity, and not the other way around. And coming out of the 20th century where technology and economics and even history just happened to humanity, without humanity choosing any of it, this is a revolutionary idea, and even if you only feel the idea and cannot articulate it, the idea inspires passion.**

Apple makes a promise, but it isn’t the sort of functional promise we usually think of when we think of promises: Apple promises a world beyond functionalism, a world that includes technology but places within the broader context of the liberal arts.

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NOTES:

* Apple’s usability — its functional superiority — has always tempted functionalists to reduce Apple’s success to superior usability. Then these same functionalists proceed to criticize Apple in functionalist terms, pointing out Apple’s myriad functional shortcomings, and how fanboys are clearly fanatics for denying the importance of these problems. And it doesn’t help at all that the fanboys don’t really know how to say what it is they love about Apple, and that they themselves often try to explain it in functionalist terms.

* “…this is a revolutionary idea, and even if you only feel the idea and cannot articulate it, the idea inspires passion.” — Contrary to the attitude of romantics (who want to claim the domain of brand for the heart and gut, and leave the mind out of it)  this is how brand works: brand is an idea that is palpably real to a person, even prior to articulation.

A thought experiment: Bring to mind your favorite symphony. Play it to yourself in your mind. What are you hearing?

Are you able to actually recreate the sound of each instrument and combine them into a sum? Or are you recalling an effect of a mass of instruments that somehow represents the whole without representing all the parts? Pay close attention: do you notice anything missing from your imagined symphony? Or is the effect complete, despite the unrepresented individual parts?

When I try this experiment, what I recall is a sonic form that resembles the symphony. Nothing essential seems to be missing. However, if I put this apparent completeness to the test (for instance by trying to hum the first violin part out loud) it becomes obvious that this totality doesn’t come apart into individual instruments. I can hum the major theme, and “hear” it as the symphonic whole, and I can hum some of the standout solo parts, but most of the music is mysterious abbreviated into a sense of the whole.

However, there is more to my memory than the things I can recall at will. I experience this when I hear an actual performance. As I listen I recognize the recalled form in what I hear. But beyond that, I also detect with surprising subtlety and detail, the degree of conformity and deviation. None of this can be conjured up by the imagination, only recognized.

I find that when I do recall a musical piece in that incomplete gisty way, it arises with a desire to actually hear a performance of it.

The ideal seems to crave completion in concrete phenomena. And, of course, concrete phenomena, too, need the ideal — because without the ideal, phenomena is chaos.

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In creativity, the ideal and the phenomenal play similar roles and have similar characteristics as they do in memory.

Just like imagined music wants to be heard, newly conceived and undeveloped ideas wants to be actualized and experienced in reality.

Just like imagined music wants to be heard, newly conceived and undeveloped ideas are perceived only in mysterious abbreviation, which can only be described in a combination of broad outline and very specific highlight details.

And like remembered music, the ideal is much more than what is imagined. It seeks itself in the concrete world and can distinguish whether what it sees matches the ideal or strays from it.

I’m thinking of getting a tattoo on my back…

Continue reading Possible tattoo design? →

Continue reading Powers of Ten →

Design research is often split into generative research and evaluative research.

Generative research is conducted before the design is begun and helps designers segment their users into groups with similar goals, needs, behaviors, attitudes, language, and mental models. Knowing this information helps designers understand what to design and how to design it.

Evaluative research is conducted once there are design artifacts to test with users. The designed artifact can be the completed design, or the underlying concept for the design, or some isolated aspect of the design, such as its taxonomy, or its use of words or imagery.

To this point, the perspective I have offered on research is strictly objective. The researcher is working entirely in the realm of gathering factual information about users (or about the user’s response to artifacts).

But these same research methods can be used to produce subjective insights in the researcher and the design team which can be even more valuable than the informational content.

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Before I describe the benefits, I will will first need to explain the difference between objective information and subjective insight, because the two are frequently confused and used interchangeably.

Information about characteristics of a person’s subjectivity (for instance, descriptions of attitudes or feelings,) is still objective information, even if it is about something that lacks physicality or cannot be directly proven scientifically. The one acquiring the information still regards its object from a distance, and is not directly subjectively affected by acquiring the knowledge.

Subjective insight is such that it directly changes how one perceives. Insight is not about a subject, it is about the world the subject experiences. For the researcher (and design team) he insight takes the form of seeing one’s own world differently. This does not mean that the researcher begins to see in exactly the same way the research participant sees, but it does mean that the way the researcher sees changes in response to what he learns in an attempt to understand the participant.

(For this reason an insight is always to some degree disruptive to the one having it. Insight is not for the faint of mind or for the dogmatist. It requires tact, imagination, flexibility, openness and resilience. These qualities are not terribly common in the business world, which is why researchers and empathic designers can sometimes feel misunderstood.)

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Another way to see the difference: Objective information refers to the 3rd person. Subjective insight appeals to the 1st person.

First person, always means “I”, that is, the researcher, or the designer. The insight must come out of the “I” having the insight, in the form of an immediate experience — a shift with an “ah ha!” Anything less is not an insight.

The difference between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge is the difference between hearing the details of a plot versus becoming absorbed in a literary novel or poem, or learning about history in the traditional way versus seeing a historical film. In the former the emphasis is on the facts. The latter provides facts, but more emphasis is placed on how the facts are related and perceived as meaningful for a particular person.

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When generative research is understood to contain not only factual information — which is very important — but also contains subjective insight, generative research is revealed to be even more valuable than it first appears.

Not only does the research provide the design team with the material it needs to make smart design decisions (what to include, how to prioritize it, what nomenclature will make the most sense, what kinds of imagery the user will respond to, etc.) — it also provides an opportunity to shift the perspective from which the problem is seen and approached. This has two benefits:

1) Accessing this perspective is the same as “knowing where the user is coming from.” Knowing where someone is coming involves much more than knowing how the other feels, or what he is interested in, or knowing what words he uses. It is something that must be demonstrated, and the judgment on whether the demonstration is authentic or not is highly intuitive. To have objective information about the other, and attempting to use it without really understanding the other’s perspective is a sure-fire way to sound inauthentic and manipulative.

2) Acquiring a perspective for seeing a problem is creatively productive. When we get creatively blocked, most often it is because we try to solve a problem with our unexamined and unconscious habits of thought. Think about how breakthroughs happen: We suddenly conceive of a new way to think about the problem, and once we view it in this new way all sorts of possibilities open up to us, and we have a breakthrough.

A similar change occurs in the evaluative research when it is understood to test not only the artifact (as a sort of experiential quality assurance), but also how well the design team has learned to see where the research participant is coming from, and to demonstrate that understanding through designing an artifact that addresses that perspective. Full understanding of a research participant enables a talented design team to design in a way that demonstrates deep understanding.

This kind of deep understanding — insight — combined with thorough understanding — having all relevant information — is the foundation for cultivating the strongest kind of brand relationship.

This passage from Clifford Geertz’s essay, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” has been become a landmark for me:

In short, accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. … Whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like … comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems. …  Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

This presents an alternative both to the scientific understanding of human beings (objective observation and measurement of individual and collective behaviors and responses), and the romantic “empathic” ideal of learning to see from the informant’s perspective, or to “go native”.