Without art, design is as sterile as selfless love.
Category Archives: Works
Faith space
Normally I don’t publish this kind of disorganized mess, but today I feel compelled to reflect on what feels like a constricting world, where liberal space from others is increasing scarce.
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A person’s beliefs are not the same as that person’s faith.
Here is why I make the distinction: Beliefs are the product of innumerable choices, guided by attitudes that precede belief. The attitudes manifest primarily as our intuitions of relevance and value, and they pre-consciously influence what we are inclined to regard with interest or complacence, what we accept or question, what we embrace or push away.
Our practical responses are similarly guided. We are pre-consciously inclined to behave in particular ways to different kinds of beings and situations.
Before birth, long before we think or begin making conscious choices, a complex feedback process of perceiving, reacting, recognizing, responding has begun, and this process simultaneously produces us as people and our situation as the world we inhabit and the relationship between enworlded self and the world in which the self emerges is faith.
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The best conversations sound out harmonies and cacophonies among faiths, faiths felt to inhabit an impossibly deep, dense, vast reality — a reality which monotheists like to emphasize as one, which polytheists like to emphasize as plural, and which pluralists like emphasize as simultaneously plural and unified.
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When talking with people of other religions I often detect a shared faith, even despite divergent beliefs. They’re “coming from a good place.” Or their “hearts are in the right place.” This place is what I call faith. And the goodness and rightness seems for me to have much to do with a desire for more than what their beliefs can grasp or possess. This is what I experience as liberal, and, for me, it has less to do with what one confesses or professes, and more to do with hospitality, mobility and spaciousness of soul.
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It is not enough to be a mystic, to believe that there is more, to sense that that a beyond exists. It is necessary to desire it and want more and more of it, even though that means almost renunciation of many mystic virtues. A liberal soul does not have special divinatory or gnostic powers, or some special relationship with god that makes one immune to vulnerability, loneliness, anxiety, uncertainty or forsakenness. A liberal at heart might be a mystic turned inside out — …
One way to see design
Design is materialized philosophy.
When designing something — which always and necessarily means designing something for someone — the central question is always: what is the right philosophy for this context?
The purpose of design research is to get to the heart of this central question out, and then to pose the design problem in such a way that designers think about the design problem in the right way, from the philosophical perspective suited to the problem.
Design briefs are tiny philosophical primers.
A good design brief will effect a perspectival shift in the reader (the designer) that brings new possibilities into view, possibilities that were inconceivable prior to the shift. This phenomenon is what is commonly called inspiration.
It is the job of design researchers to produce precision inspiration.
Designers develop hybrid systems
Reading Verbeek’s What Things Do, I’m reminded of Latour’s handy term “hybrid”, an entity that is neither purely subjective nor purely objective, but a fusion of both.
In Latour’s eye, the distinction between nature and society, or subject and object, which has seemed so self-evident since the Enlightenment, needs to be seen as a product of modernity that has far exceeded its expiration date. No other society makes this distinction in such a radical manner, and in ours it is more and more painfully obvious how poorly it allows us to comprehend what is happening in the world. The project of modernity, according to Latour, consists of the attempt to purify objects and subjects — we set objects on one side, subjects on the other, and draw a line between them. What is on the one side of the line is then material for scientists to investigate, with what is on the other side for the social scientists. … This purification and separation of subjects and objects, according to Latour, is coming to be less and less believable. Ever more entities arise that cannot be comfortably placed in this dichotomy. Latour calls these entities “hybrids.” The irony is that these hybrids thrive thanks to the modem purification: precisely because they don’t fit within the subject-object schema, we cannot recognize them and therefore they can proliferate at an astounding rate without anyone trying to stop or change them. But now, as their numbers become ever greater, it becomes more and more difficult to deny their existence. We are flooded with entities that straddle the boundary between humans and nonhumans…
Humans and nonhumans are just as bound up together in our culture as they are in others; therefore, Latour concludes, we need to study our technological culture similarly to the ways that anthropologists study other cultures. This means studying how the networks of relations between humans and nonhumans develop and unravel. In order to understand our culture, we must trace out both the process of purification and that of hybridization; we must understand how hybrids arise and why they are not seen as hybrids. In order to understand phenomena, they should be approached as black boxes that, when opened, will appear to contain myriad relations and activity.
If we grasp and internalize this understanding of hybrids, it becomes possible to compactly differentiate how designers approach their problems versus how engineers approach theirs — and why they so often marginalize designers and accidentally prevent designers from working in the way designers believe is best. Here it goes:
Designers develop hybrid systems. Engineers develop objective systems.
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I’ve written two elaborations of this idea, material to supply the understanding that makes grokking the compact definition above possible. I’ll post both, because there’s no time this morning to combine them.
Version 1
An engineering perspective treats design as a sub-discipline of engineering. Design adds an aesthetic (and among more enlightened engineers) and usable “presentation layer” to a functional objective system.
A design perspective ought to treat engineering as a sub-discipline of design. Once a hybrid subjective-objective system is developed through a design approach, objective sub-systems can be defined within the larger context of the hybrid system and built according to engineering methods. According to a design mindset, an engineered system is always and necessarily a subsystem belonging to a larger hybrid system that gives it its purpose and value.
The reason so few people see the obvious truth of the latter design perspective is that their vision is obstructed by a philosophical blockage. The hybrid system concept does not play nice with the modern subject-object schema. Designers learn, through the practical activity of design, to view problems in a new way that is incommensurable with modernity’s default philosophy (as described by Latour).
But designers are rarely philosophical, so the methods rarely progress to the point of praxis. Design language is all bound up with humans and the trappings of subjectivity (emotions, opinions, habits, etc.) on the side of who the design is for and the trappings of romanticism on the side of who does the designing (insight, inspiration, creativity, passion, etc.) Design practice is a jumble of “recipes” — procedures, jargon, styles and theater — a subterfuge to make design fit the preconceptions of folks who don’t quite get what designers are really up to. So design submits to modernist schema and goes to modernism’s special territory for people people, romanticism.
Version 2
Designers consciously work on developing hybrid systems where subjective and objective elements relate and interact. In design, people and things are thought of together as a single system. And things are not only material objects; they can be ideas, habits, vocabularies, etc. Whatever makes a design work or not work, including the engineered elements, as well as all business, cultural, environmental considerations are part of a design problem. When a designer opens a black box of their own making, they will see subjects interacting with objects and subjects, and objects interacting with other objects and subjects.
Engineering, on the other hand, works inside the subject-object dichotomy, and works on problems of objective systems. As a matter of method, engineering purifies objects and arranges them in systems. When an engineer opens a black box of their own making they see objective components interacting and working as a system.
From the view of engineers, the interior of the black boxes they make are their concern, and the surface layer of the box — the point where subjectivity encounters engineering, is the concern of designers. Engineers build the black box; designers paint and sculpt it to make it appealing to people.
Philosophy fails
This morning I was forced to use the redesigned Freshbooks. They’d totally revamped the user interface. It was very slick and visual. And it was six times harder to use.
This is a depressingly typical experience in these times. I’m constantly suffering the consequences of wrongheaded, well-meaning changes made to things I rely on to not change.
I was lamenting to a friend how much work, time and money Freshbooks (and companies like them) sink into solving the wrong problem and making new problem.
I complained: “Not only did they thought about it wrong — they didn’t even think about how they were thinking. This was a philosophy fail.”
And these are the mistakes that offend me: philosophy fails. People failing to reflect when reflection is most needed. They need to think about how they are thinking about what they are doing… and they instead choose to be all startuppity, and just do. Just doing is valorized, and it shouldn’t be, any more than just thinking. We need thoughtful practice matched with practical thinking: praxis.
10,000 foot view
Lately I’ve been reflecting on what strikes me as the most difficult and interesting challenge I’ve faced adjusting to service design after decades of practicing other flavors of human-centered design: the problem of altitude and granularity appropriate to solving service design problems.
In design, thinking about altitudes and zoom levels is common to the point of being a tradition, starting with the Eamses’s classic “Powers of Ten” film. Given its strategic, integrative, multidisciplinary scope, Service Design is particularly zoomy, so it is unsurprising that altitude-based frameworks and analogies are frequently used in the Service Design world.
As important as it is to understand the value of working at multiple altitudes, it is also helpful to be prepared for the experience of changing altitudes, especially within Service Design’s own peculiar range. For the uninitiated, the shifts in granularity, theme and perspective can be a slightly strange experience. As a sort of expectation-setting initiation, I offer an extended, but hopefully not too labored, analogy.
If strategy flies at 30,000 feet (where the ground is so distant it looks like a map) and we agree most design flies at 3 feet (where the ground is so close and so chaotic it is hard to survey), service design flies at 10,000 feet, approximately the cruising altitude of a single-engine prop plane.
10,000 feet is a very useful altitude that bridges 30,000 foot and ground — clarifying relationships between strategy, operations and the experiences real people (real customers, real employees) have as a result — but flying at this altitude does introduce practical challenges.
First, there is the issue of clouds. At 30,000 feet, the clouds are below you. Standing on the ground, the clouds are above you. But at 10,000 feet you are flying in and out of clouds, which can be very disorienting, in the most literal sense. It can be tricky to know which way you are facing or which way is up. And the view is neither clear nor continuous. One moment you can see a bit of ground, the next you see nothing but your instruments, and you have to use your memory, imagination and your recording and data-gathering tools to form a sense of the whole. But the understanding that develops from these varying sources has far more structural clarity than you can get from the ground, and more human richness than you can detect way up in the cold, thin air of the stratosphere. To put it all together, though, interpretation is necessary. The picture doesn’t automatically emerge by itself. The heterogeneous parts must be skillfully pieced together into a coherent image.
Second, you are dealing with some odd scales of meaning. Looking down at a town, everything looks miniaturized but still human, maybe even exaggeratedly human because the tedium of life is abstracted away and we relate to it like kids playing with toys. Some homes are big, some are small, some are complexes or towers. Some are arranged in grids, some along windy branches of street bulbing in cul-de-sacs, and some cluster along the edges of lakesides or hills. Some homes have trees or yards, pools, trampolines or gardens, driveways or parking lots. You can imagine what life in the neighborhood might be like. But you can also see the layout of the city, and get a sense of how parts of the town connect up. You can see where the schools, the stores, the churches and the sports fields are. You can see where things have been built up, what has been left in a wild state, and where development is happening.
Now, imagine telling a story about the life you see below, doing justice both to the individual lives taking place in the tiny buildings below but showing how it all connects to form a system… this is not the usual storytelling scale. It is neither intimate nor epic. It must generalize, but without blurring key particularities or averaging individuality into bland anonymity. But if you wish to tell the story of how a town works, or if you want to propose significant structural modifications to the town, this is the narrative scale required. Telling such a story requires thoughtful zooming in and zooming out to show connections between whole and part, connecting fine grain details of breakfasts, meetings and bills, with grander-scale phenomena like demographic trends, commerce and traffic patterns. Translated back to Service Design, this means combining stories of cultural and industry trends, corporate strategies and vignettes from customer’s and employee’s lives to show how these macro-level trends and strategies impact the everyday existence of individual people, and conversely, how the micro-level behaviors impact strategies and generate trends.
Finally, intervening at this height is strange. Many proposals for change fall somewhere between strategic and tactical. They anticipate details of implementation, but without over-specifying them. Specifications are suggestive and provisional and intended more to clarify a problem than provide a solution. Many people find the interpretive latitude confusing: what in the recommendation is fixed and what is variable? If everything is open-ended what use is the recommendation at all? It can all seem vague and insubstantial, yet there is a thrust and lasting momentum in the work that carries initiatives forward and in a direction that benefits both the organization as a whole, its employees and the people it serves. Somehow the recommendations made from this altitude are capable of creating continuity between the grand plans of strategists and the intricacies of implementers on the ground.
The 10,000 view manages to refract the grand plans and sweeping aspirations of the 30,000 foot view into actions on the ground that actualize it and prevent it from remaining mere aspiration and plan. And the 10,000 foot view provides individual actors on the ground a way to relate and connect their efforts to tangible, relatable and realistic goals that connect up with the purpose of the organization.
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Recently it occurred to me that this 10,000 foot theme is closely related to a framework I found useful and amusing earlier in my career, which I’ve called the Bullshit-Chickenshit model:
Bullshit – Meaningful, inspiring ideas that that seem to promise practical action but never fulfill that promise and never find application.
Chickenshit – Practical actions that seem like they ought to serve some meaningful purpose, but in fact is meaningless and done for no reason.
Bullshit is meaning without application. Chickenshit is application without meaning.
Flying at 10,000 feet helps prevent strategy from losing sight of concrete application and devolving into idealistic bullshit that gets nodded at and then immediately ignored. And the 10,000 foot view provides context for people working on or near the front lines to help them to remember how their everyday work connects up with larger organizational goals, so the tasks don’t lose their purpose and fragment into procedural chickenshit, obeyed, entered into TPS reports, tracked and graphed for reasons nobody remembers.
Drops away into blindness
This passage from Voegelin’s Anamnesis sparked the insight I diagram as an asterisk.
In the illuminatory dimensions of past and future, one becomes aware not of empty spaces but of the structures of a finite process between birth and death. The experience of consciousness is the experience of a process — the only process which we know “from within.” Because of this its property, the process of consciousness becomes the model of the process as such, the only experiential model to serve as the orientation point of the conceptual apparatus through which we must also grasp the processes that transcend consciousness. The conflict between the finiteness of the model of experience and the “infinite” character of other processes results in a number of fundamental problems. (The term “infinite” indicates already by its negativity that along with it we enter on an area transcending experience. To speak of a process as infinite is tantamount to saying that we have no experience of it “as a whole.”) One of the most interesting of these problems is that of the antinomies of infinity in Kant’s sense. We can subject the finite process to certain derivative transformations, the so-called “idealizations,” which conduce to such concepts as the infinite series or the infinite regress. When such “idealizations” are related to finite series, there result the paradoxes of set theory; when they are related to such processes as the causal nexus, there result Kant’s antinomies. The causal series cannot begin in time because we have no experience of a beginning “in time”; more precisely, one could say that because we have no experience whatsoever of a time in which something might begin — for the only time of which we do have experience is the inner experience of the illuminated dimension of consciousness, the process that drops away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness.
Two elaborations: 1) We have more “illuminated dimensions of consciousness that drop away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness” than just time. In my asterisk, I added two other dimensions.
2) I also another analogy to illumination and darkness. We may not see objects in darkness, but we do see the darkness that prevents us from seeing. In my own experience, sight and blindness is a better analogue for our experiences of finitude and infinity, because blindness conceals not only what is concealed, but the concealment itself. With blindness, we can fail to see what we look at, because when nothing is there, nothing is also missing. If we do the blind spot experiment, wherever falls in our blind spot simply dis-appears — becomes visually nothing — without any tell-tale something blotting it out — there is no visual “nothing” to see. When nothing is there, no thing is missing, as far as we can tell.
We have to wonder — or rather, it is good to wonder — that if we can’t even tell the difference between a blind spot and a seen spot, what exactly is going on in our field of vision, which seems so continuous to us? And if we extend sight to perception, and perception to consciousness, and ask the same question — the question of what happens in in the nothingness of existence? — things get weird.
When we sit in meditation, for instance, we learn how this happens constantly at all times even in our own concentrated awareness. You could say that meditation is an existential blindspot test. We cannot see it directly, and we never have to see it at all if we do not want to (for instance if we wish to imagine ourselves to be self-omniscient) but if we allow our perplexities to bloom we will see ample signs that our consciousness is as sporadic and permeated with nothingness as our visual field. I think, therefore I am? The corollary: I don’t think when I am not, in the gaps that permeate my existence.
Crap. I’m out of time. There’s new stuff here, so I’m going to go ahead and post this.
Design talks
A list of design theory/practice ideas I’ve had that could become talks, all of which include monographesque provocatively non-descriptive titles with almost-clarifying subtitles, separated by colons:
- “No Pain, No Gain: Necessary Suffering in Innovation” – The agonizing experience of navigating the vacuum between framings fits poorly inside the fantasy image of creativity peddled by Design Thinking to the freedom-craving lanyard-tethered denizens of cubicle-land. Real, deep creativity is intensely painful at key points in the process, very few people are willing to undergo the ordeal, and anyone with authority will be tempted to use their power to abort innovative thought when they start to feel the anxiety inherent to the kind of radical reframing that produces innovative ideas.
- “Philosophy of Design of Philosophy of Design of: How Philosophy Is a Design Medium” – The implications of Dewey’s Instrumentalism crossed with both the methods and experiences of human centered design suggests that philosophies are mind-reality interfaces which ought to be thought of in terms of good design rather than faithful representations of truth.
- “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.
- “Who Is Our Engineer? is the New “Who is Our User?”: The Relationship Between Designers, Engineers and Users” – One of the most misconceptions that limits the effectiveness of design in many organizations is the notion that design fits inside a engineering as the people who responsible for making the “presentation layer” of an engineered product or service. This talk argues that flipping this relationship inside out and viewing engineering as a discipline within design permits both engineers and designers to increase the effectiveness of the other. In addition it will be argued that every relevant design discipline has one or more engineering disciplines involved in actualizing the design, and that design competence in any particular medium involves a working rudimentary knowledge of its engineering aspects and and understanding of how to collaborate with engineers of that discipline.
Problems, living and non-living
I do not do well when my thinking loses direct contact with my own core moral impulses. And by moral impulses, I mean whatever it is behind my mind that invests the world with purpose and value. My moral impulses drive me to pursue problems I feel as live problems.
Problems that feel insignificant to me even while I factually understand and acknowledge their importance cannot become my problem, no matter how much I want to “own” them. (Unless I somehow manage to link them to one or more of my live problems, something I’ve gotten pretty good at.) These problems are not alive to me, and I have difficulty mustering attention and energy for them, and I can’t make myself remember their content no matter how hard I try. My mind seems to resist and expel “non-living” problems
A decade ago I viewed such problems with contempt and disparaged them as trivvial chickenshit. I viewed my live problems as vastly important, not only for me but for the world.
But now the conclusions I’ve reached pursuing my live problems forbid all contempt for what others value. However, if I am not alert this principled respect can tempt me to lapse into respecting their contempt for what is simportant to me, and what still seems to me to be the most important problems in the world*. I still do not believe the importance of these problems is an artifact of my personal taste.
I have rejected contempt as a self-defense weapon, so I cannot actively disrespect unphilosophical contempt for philosophy. But that does not entail respecting it.
* I believe every one of the crises the world faces is a consequence of philosophical degradation. Humanity cannot solve its biggest problems because it still misdiagnoses design problems as technological ones. (That is, people tend to fixate on what objective systems need to be engineered, and fail to consider the hybrid objective-subjective systems upon which engineered systems depend. They see the engineered system as primary, and design as a superficial “layer” that can be added and tweaked — not as the foundation upon which engineering problems are defined. And the toughest design problems are tough due to the toughness of philosophical problems that defy crisp design problem definition: “How do we even think about this problem?”
Tour of the asterisk
We cannot live in an imagined future within our own mind. The future is real and it will reveal itself when it arrives. The future will defy our specific predictions and our general expectations.
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We cannot live in a remembered past within our own mind. The past was real and what it showed us when it was here can never be fully reclaimed. If we allow the past to speak it tells us scandalous and amazing things. Usually, though, we ask it leading questions and it obliges us, confirming what we suspect, flattering our conceit that now is fundamentally different: we know better now. But we have always known better now.
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We cannot know any particular entity just because we know about it in general. If we interact with the particulars of the world in new ways, paying scrupulous attention, striving to make coherent and general sense of what we perceive, these things will disclose truths to us that will force us to rethink everything we think we know. This process is unending, its content inexhaustibly volatile.
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We cannot know situations in general from what we have learned of the specific situations we have inhabited: those situation to which we are habituated. Only a minuscule slice of possible situations are habitable to beings like us, and within this range, the tiniest shift will throw us into shock. We love to hear the survivors’ stories, but these are exceptional.
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We cannot know another person by knowing about them. Each person is another instance of everything, containing anticipations, memories, understandings, and incommunicable experiences unlike our own, and person packs the power to teach us not only about realities, but to teach us into new relations with reality, which is to teach us out of old selves and into new ones. Be careful who you let teach you!
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And finally we cannot know ourselves, simply from having been ourselves so far. We are fragile, fallible, barely oriented, and packed with potential to learn, to transform and to live brand-new transfigured realities. Self-estrangement can throw a me into relief before a more enduring I. It is hard to want that.
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Philosophy should disappear
I had a thought last week I want to record for later use.
Short version.
- Great design disappears, and becomes an invisible extension of a user’s will.
- According to my belief that philosophy should be regarded as a kind of design, a philosophy should disappear once it is understood.
- This accords with enneagram theory, that type Five (thinking) integrates toward Eight (instinct). To successfully design a philosophy that disappears into the background of instinctive second-nature is to “go to eight”.
Some notes.
- Many people have observed the fact that great design disappears.
- Certainly, beautifully designed things are pleasing to those who place them in the foreground and admire their design — but in use these designed things must disappear into the background of a user’s attention and become an extension of the user’s will. (Of the many balances and tradeoffs designers make, this is one of the hardest.)
- A merely competent design is one that can be figured out. The user must stop and think (and in so doing foreground the design) but once the problem is resolved, the design can be backgrounded again.
- One of the most important marks of design excellence is making verbalization unnecessary. The only words that should be running through a user’s mind are ones connected with the user’s task. Any words pertaining to recalling or figuring out how to use the designed thing is an obtrusive interruption to the dialogue.
- Philosophies tend to be regarded as idea systems that help us resolve problems.
- This might be the result of the view that philosophy is about the objects of philosophical work, and the neglect of the subjects doing the thinking.
- Most philosophical work is created for the consumption of other philosophers. This situation is analogous to how computers were once primarily built for other computer professionals. As long as this was the case, they remained largely opaque to lay users.
- Most philosophy is engineered to solve problems not designed to help people understand (and prevent problems from arising).
- I think the big difference between an Eight-integrated Five and an Eight is that the former designed his own second-nature, where the Eight works with innate and passively-acquired instincts.
Design of philosophy
I have arrived at the belief that philosophy is another word for the design of conceptual tools used for the purposes of enworldment.
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Have philosophers taken a human-centered approach to their design work?
Before answering, consider the fact that many philosophers are professors who spend as much time preparing lessons, teaching, and evaluating the success of their teaching. They also write papers and submit them to peer juried journals. If accepted, their papers are published, and the ideas may or may not be put to use by others and cited.
Now, the question a designer is trained to ask at this point is: Who is the user?
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An innovation principle presented by the altogether brilliant design thinker Diego Rodriguez:
Design and trade-offs
For non-designers (and immature designers) the toughest part of design is trying on different trade-offs.
The reason it is so tough is this: while most people can shift between ideas with relative ease, it is harder to shift between conceptions — different logics of coherence and meaning that invest ideas with different significance.
Harder still is to allow new conceptions to animate perceptions. Old conceptions cling and highlight features of perception that would remain inconspicuous to fresh eyes. And each shift in design direction adds new relevancies without removing the old ones, so the problem becomes more insoluble with each iteration.
It is like memory: it is easier to learn on command than to forget. The old ideas, once seen, become hard to unsee. The old concepts, once learned become impossible to unlearn. Perception becomes almost cubistic — too many simultaneous perspectives are viewed at once.
Pluralistic play — the ability to flit between logics — to try on different conceptions and perceptions — this takes years of practice, and the practice can only start once a person has discovered the dimension of mind that multiplies the universe into innumerable overlapping everythings.
Idea dump: intimacy, design/engineering/philosophy, social science-technologies
The following is more of a diary entry than an article. I have put too little effort into editing, and it might make sense only to me. I just wanted to get a snapshot of these ideas as they exist today, before they change or disappear.
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The start of an idea: it seems that many “linguistic turn” philosophers become anxious encountering any concept that fails to promise eventual public accessibility and acceptance. I have a hunch I cannot yet support but this all seems rooted in a binary either-or of private and public: EITHER we speak precisely, logically and empirically in the least ambiguous language possible, OR we speak a muddledly, and self-sentence ourselves to imprisonment within our own private language cells.
I do love the private-public distinction and find it useful, but I think the most fascinating varieties of philosophy are between these extremes, in a region that could be called intimate, or what Martin Buber called the interhuman. This is where Nietzsche works, and I may read him with this theme in mind on my next tour of his corpus.
The intimate is where poetry happens. When poetry goes public it is lost to prosaicism. When poetry goes private it is lost to insanity. Poetry is intimacy suspended between insanity and prosaicism.
It is not true (or at least not right) that all language aims to be explicit. Sorting out the purpose of a particular vocabulary and determining its degree of explicit monosemic and pregnant polysemic content is an interesting problem — and less a philosophical problem than a design problem.
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Speaking of various kinds of problems, I’ve done much reflection in the last couple of years on what distinguishes engineering problems and design problems (my most recent formulation: an engineering problem concerns systemization of rule-bound entities, where a design problem concerns hybrid rule-bound and choice-making entities), but I have also been thinking quite a bit about the relationship between design and philosophy. It might be my most radical idea that philosophy is best understood as a species of design, and how it is designed determines what it can do. (I see a philosophy as a mind-reality interface analogous to a computer user interface to support intelligibility of unmanageable truths and semi-obscure phenomena. Philosophy-as-design strikes me as the furthest consequence of Jamesian Pragmatism.)
It might be interesting to converge these two themes, philosophy-as-design and design-vs-engineering. It might go like this: maybe we have been accidentally designing philosophies optimized for solving engineering problems, and further, when we think about philosophy in these engineering terms we successively engineer the possibility of design out of of our philosophies. We trust only logical rules that compel reason to accept a single conclusion, or the problem does not compute and returns a syntax error. We engineer philosophies good only for engineering, and this has distorted our understanding of what a science is and can be, including the social sciences. This is why 20th Century social sciences and social engineering are linked: social engineering was all that could be done with the philosophy that thought the social sciences.
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I’ve been groping with a vague new thought. Generally we define sciences ontologically, by their object of study. What if we defined sciences pragmatically, by the types of technologies they produce? The pragmatic definition of Actor-Network Theory then might be: the science that produces design. 20th Century sociology might be: the science that produces social engineering.
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For the past few years I’ve been enamored with (or maybe dominated by) Bruno Latour’s account of science and technology, and particularly his refusal to separate the domains of science and technology. Sciences use technologies at least as much as technologies use science. There is no pure scientific learning followed by pure technological application.
My intuition harasses me with the question of whether there is (or ought to be!) a similar dynamic at work in the social sciences. Currently the social sciences seem (I am not as well-informed as I would like to be) to place enormous emphasis on the front-end observational hypothesis-formation segment of the scientific method. Where is the interactive experimental moment of the scientific method, where technologies are employed to generate more knowledge? And what exactly is a social science technology, anyway? Have we asked that question enough? I am leaning toward a belief that a social science technology is a design, and in an experimental setting it is a design prototype introduced into a social situation. The social sciences merge with human-centered design practices. Not as the pure understanding that precedes a pure application, but as a profoundly mingled reciprocity.
Design as gift (edit for 10ke)
Design is like gift-giving. How?
When one person gives another person a perfect gift, the gift is valuable in three ways:
- The gift itself is intrinsically valuable to the one receiving it. The giftis good to have in one’s life, because it makes life easier, more pleasant or more meaningful.
- The gift contributes to the receiver’s own self-understanding and identity. The gift becomes symbolic of the receiver’s own relationship to the world — an example what they experience as good, which can signify the recipient’s ideals in concrete form, in ways that explicit language often cannot.
- The perfection of the gift is evidence that the giver cares about and understands who the receiver is. The successful giving of a perfect gift demonstrates that the giver was moved to reflect on what the receiver will value and consequently has real insight into who they are as an individual and what they are all about.
Great design experiences are similar to gifts. When a design is successful the beneficiary of the design gets something valuable, sees tangible proof they are valued and understood, and experiences an intensification or expansion of their sense of self.
Philosophy design
For the last several weeks I have been trying very hard to care about Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In general, though, (with some exceptions) I have found its problems and approaches to resolving problems too tedious, too inapplicable and too dry to keep me engaged. It is cognitively, practically and aesthetically irrelevant to me.
Or to put it in UX language, for me, the experience is not useful, usable or desirable. I am not the user of this stuff.
I suspect the user of analytic philosophy is other professional philosophers who want to philosophize to other professional philosophers.
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Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the UNIX of philosophies.
My project is to design a Macintosh philosophy. (A well-designed thing to be used by people who don’t want to be forced to tinker with technicalities, unless they want to. And perhaps a thing that appeals especially to designers looking for tools to help them design better.)
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Philosophy is a kind of design. It is a mind-reality interface.
Every philosophy permits us to render some aspects of reality intelligible, while confusing or obscuring others; supports us in some practical activities and while muddling others; helps us intensify the feeling of value of some things while devaluing others. In other words, a philosophy makes our life experience as a whole useful, usable and desirable. But like with every design, tradeoffs are necessary, and where to make these tradeoffs is a function of the user and the use context. We can be conscious about it and make these tradeoffs intentionally — or we can be like bad clients and persist in trying to have it all.
And as with all good designs, philosophies disappear.
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Even bad interfaces disappear, leaving only frustration, alienation, friction, dissipation, confusion.
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We would laugh at an argument over whether iOS or Android is truer. Maybe it is time we laugh at philosophical arguments the same way. Let other people sit around and debate whose philosophy does the best job of representing the truth. I will do an experience assessment.
Office politics is real politics
Where a person chooses to work, and how that person relates with others in the workplace shows that person’s deepest political preferences (as opposed to superficial party loyalties).
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The pragmatic meaning of “respect” litmus test: Some people believe respect means to treat all people as equals (or at least political equals), while others think it means to acknowledge organizational rank (which means accepting inequality), while yet others have personal criteria for earning respect through displays of this or that virtue (industriousness, honesty, intelligence, ingenuity).
It is easy to see how perceptions of “disrespect” can occur across conflicting definition of respect… One person attempts to treat another person as an equal, and this is perceived by the other as insubordinate presumption of an inferior…
Workplace clashes of this kind is the true site of ideological difference (between what Boltanski and Thévenot called “polities“). The appeals that are heard or not heard, the decisions that are praised or condemned, the preferences that are honored or ignored in the daily world of work is the very political substance of a person’s life. “Office politics” is not a metaphor — it is where politics touch down, are lived out as the reality of choice or compulsion.
Compared to the reality of work politics, national politics as reported by Fox News or MSNBC is abstraction. Newscasting might as well be sportscasting. Parties are rival teams playing in distant coliseums. We may have bets placed on one team or another, but mostly it’s just symbol play.
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Every company is a polis. Beneath the surface of missions and core value (and other such internal-communicationy bullshit), every business has a set of values or rival sets of values, which have been operationalized as work practices, and which are regulated through local political norms. These operationalized values determine the character of the businesses offerings and its self-presentation in the market.
Outline
Introduction
- What philosophy is
- What designers do: empathy (as opposed to art which is sympathetic) creation of useful, usable and desirable things
- Practical use of philosophy for design
- Truth as reality interface (a useful, usable and desirable philosophy.)
- Anatomy of this book: ontology, epistemology, ethic.
Ontology
- Ontology = inquiring into being = asking “in what sense is this real?”
- Being encompasses more than physical entities
- Many kinds of being exist: objects, time, perspectives, imagination
- Designer’s ontology: the more ways one sees in what sense entities can exist the more space a designer has to work
- Order bounded by chaos
- Chaos is superabundance of orders
- Order filters chaos
- Practical consequence of chaos: surprise
- Knowing chaos means openness to surprise: nonsense might be not-yet-seeing-the-sense
- Perpetual possibility of “otherwise”, esp. when otherwise seems impossible
- Horizon and the otherwise — horizon always feels complete and excludes the otherwise
- Pluralism: coexistence of ontologies united in possibilities of otherwise — possibilities which can (and ought) to be sought and actualized (“fusion of horizons”)
- An ontological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of being (metaphysical manifold)
Epistemology
- Epistemology = inquiring into knowledge = asking “how do we know?”
- Knowing is filtering (determining relevance) and relating
- Knowing is both explicit and tacit
- An epistemological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of knowing (venn – name?)
- Tacit know-how: skilled wordless interaction with concrete realities
- Tacit morality: sensing value
- Perspective and pluralism
- Pluralism vs reductionism
- Perspective and inspiration: the upside of pluralism
- Knowing is social: “How do we know?” more than “How do I know?”
- Self as a society
- Knowledge shows realities: aletheia
- Synesis: seeing realities as together with others together
- Positivity and negativity: facts and questions
- Knowing a subject vs knowing an object
- Participatory knowing versus objective knowing
- Hermeneutic holism: knowing wholes and parts
- Social hermeneutics
- Social creativity
- A methodological framework: a simple way to approach social creativity (the outspiral)
Ethics
- An ethics sustains an ethos (lifeworld)
- Designer’s ethos: Maximum diversity within unity, mediated by things
- Designer’s ethic: Commit to learning from others in order to design to them and provide them a place in the world
- Designers outfit an ethos with things that support it — not preserve or conserve, but allow it to live and develop like a living thing
- Enworldment: creating myriad ways to exist in the world with things and people
- Virtue ethics
- Virtue of receptivity: otherwise awareness
- Learning a subject requires unlearning — unlearning is the hard part.
- Learning involves letting go of what one already knows in order to know better
- Unlearning is an anxious activity: immersing in perplexity
- Virtue of sacrifice: willingness to suffer to understand another person
- No method to emerge from perplexity
- No way to predict the outcome
- Virtue of fortitude: acceptance of the pain of learning
- Inspiration as expansion of horizon: sudden acquisition of new way to see
- Inspiration brought about by learning from others, suffering anxiety, accepting perplexity, emerging with new perspective
- Virtue of reason: the obligation to demonstrate, persuade
- Virtue of constancy
- Virtue of honor – agreements
Thought scraps
- Empathy vs sympathy
- The way philosophy is read… hermeneutically: not step-by-step explanation
- Blindness vs darkness
A Designer’s Philosophy
I am starting work on a book called A Designer’s Philosophy.
The book will outline a comprehensive philosophy suitable for a designer. To some extent it will include a philosophy of design, but that will not be its primary focus. One of the central, deliberately accepted assumptions of the work is the principle of pluralism, which is why it is “a” philosophy for one particular way of approaching life. This book will offer a set of conceptual tools to help a certain kind of person self-orient, understand, articulate and act in the world in a cohesive, consistent and meaningful way: a sort of user-interface for the environing, pregnant chaos we know as reality.
It will be based very heavily on American Pragmatism, phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics (fused in the tradition of Richard J. Bernstein), synthesized with several like-minded but diversely-focused parallel practical traditions including current UX practice, Soft Systems, Design Thinking and Actor-Network theory. I will also steal freely from late Wittgenstein, various Existentialists, philosophers/historians/scholars of science and even some not-very-reputable theologians.
But this will not be a scholarly book. I will do my best to include no quotations or footnotes, or anything that complicates the dead-simple but elusive concepts this book exists to convey. It will be a comprehensive, organic vision and whatever introduces a seam or calls attention to a grafting scar, such as a nod to the discoverer of this idea or that, will be cut, smoothed and disguised to the best of my ability.
In other words, this book will be a great theft. I will acknowledge the thinkers to whom I owe an intellectual debt in one little easily-skipped blurb introducing a bibliography. Essentially, I am going to steal a great number of insights and make them my own, then provide a list of the households I hit as a cursory acknowledgement of indebtedness. But in fact, it will be an act of thieves’ honor: “I’ve hit these homes and made off with all the loot I could carry in my own arms. I think I grabbed the best stuff, but it might be profitable to hit it again.”
My goal is to make this book as visual, as simple and as compact as possible. If I can distill it into a pamphlet of 16 pages of diagrams that will be perfect, because that makes letterpress a viable option.
The philosophy will divide into three parts (not including introduction and conclusion):
- Ontology: “What is being?”
- Epistemology: “How do I know truth?”
- Ethics: “How should I live?”
The book will be 100% free of techniques, case studies, scientific corroboration and any other content that might give it the slightest chance of success. This book will be beautiful, and meant to be fetishized (and fetishized with the purest conscience, because the book will show why fetishes are necessary and valuable). My view is that while philosophy can be understood as a form of pre-science indispensable to scientific progress, it can also be understood as a form of art, and at its best is an inseparable synthesis of prescience and art, a beautiful and inspiring surveying and mapping of a field of possibility upon which methodical disciplines can travel, settle and flourish.
Because it is unlikely to sell and because I want complete control over its physical form, I’m anticipating self-publishing it in a very small run.
Want creativity for real?
If you want creativity here’s what you really need:
- The right approach.
Business approaches things in a way that’s good for many things, but generally not good for creativity. For one thing, everything’s decided in meetings, through explicit communication by words, numbers and images. Explicit communication will not produce creativity. For another, business loves step-by-step processes. When you say creative process, your average business person will think you’ve got some assembly line string of techniques by which a creation is built up bit by bit. Trying to do things this way guarantees sterility. Creativity requires a lot of pre-verbal (or even permanently non-verbal) intuitive leaps which though testable are not provable, and these leaps cannot be constructed, extracted, extruded or in any way fabricated, but only prepared for, stimulated, coaxed, encouraged — all highly un-macho approaches, which will drive the average exec nuts waiting, and will tempt him reach for the nearest convenient analytical tool to cut through the bullshit and dig out the golden egg. - The right expectations.
Let’s get this straight up front: Creativity is harrowing. It is non-linear, unpredictable, risky, and in practice often feels like shit. If your organization cannot handle this reality, you’ll have to compete with something other than meaningful differentiation — probably organizational effectiveness. That’s okay. A lot of companies find success that way. And like everyone, you’ll probably talk all about your revolutionary innovations and nobody’ll believe you, and you’ll do just fine. You’ll never be anything like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Virgin, etc., etc., though. - The right team.
It is taboo to say this, but it is totally true, and you know it. Most people are not creative. Not only are they uncreative, but they’re creativity poison, because they cannot stand the feeling of being exposed to creative processes and do everything in their power to make that feeling go away (because of all the unpleasant characteristics, listed in the point above). Putting the wrong people on a creative team will make creativity impossible. I don’t know why executives who pride themselves on their cold-eyed realism and their ability to make hard calls and all that go all mushy sentimental on this point, but it would profit them to get realer, meaner and tougher on this point and staff the kitchen with people who can take the heat. But no. Everyone’s packed right in, and people are running around sweating and bitching about getting singed on the burner, and that the raw eggs and the baking soda don’t taste like cake. It’s damn hard to get anything cooked. - The right inputs.
Many designers secretly or openly detest research. And they should. Because all most research does is tie a designer’s hands by telling them all the cool stuff they want to do won’t fly. It closes down possibilities. But if you were to give designers something that opens up possibilities by inspiring them to conceive totally new approaches they’d eat it right up, because that is what designers live for. The type of research finding that opens up possibilities is an insight. Few marketing/insights departments know how to provide insight, even though they believe that providing customer “insights” is their core competency. When they say “insights” what they mean is facts — information about customers — their stats, behaviors, needs, wants, attitudes, and what have you. Insights are not essentially factual, and they are often not even expressible in language at all. The best source of insights is actually exposure to concrete people, environments and situations, and the best expression of those insights are often not words, graphs, or even cool diagrams, or anything else you might expect to find in a report, but rather ideas on what might work for those people in those environments and situations. But when this happens there’s always some process prig lying in wait ready to tell them they’re “getting ahead of themselves” and that their ideas are premature. They’re wrong. These premature ideas are the expression of having an insight. Don’t get attached to the ideas, but do keep them, because they are raw insight ore that can be melted down, refined and articulated — or simply “gotten”. - The right conditions.
Creativity is not only ugly and temperamental, it is also needy and fragile. It needs protection, but protection of a kind that seems counter-intuitive. To protect creativity, you have to restrain yourself from protecting the participants from the painful effects. If a creative team is not struggling in the dark, suffering from intense anxiety, infighting, bickering, hating it, with no end in sight until the end is suddenly in sight, they’re not doing anything that will blow anyone’s mind. Let them suffer. But don’t add more pain. Don’t interrupt them with the chickenshit that you think is urgently important. Think of the creative team’s hell as a pressurized tank. Your interruption will puncture it and let out all the pressure and deflate what’s trying to happen. As if this weren’t already too much, there’s one more indulgence you should lavish on your ugly-ass creative process: provide decent space with room to draw, sit, stand, fight, walk comfortably, all with minimal outside stimuli. A rule of thumb: keep creative suffering pure of mundane contaminants. - The right tests.
The usual tests of validity of ideas in business cannot do justice to creative ideas: 1) demanding analytical justification for why something will work, and 2) submitting it to the semi-informed opinions of people sitting around in a conference room. This procedure is 95% certain to kill off ideas that would work and support crappy ideas that should never have seen the light of day. The only legitimate way to test a creative idea is to prototype it and put it in front of real live human beings. After a prototype test is done and the idea survives it or its suckiness is exposed… then arguments for and against that idea and how it tested can be made. - The right support
Creative ideas need support before, in the form of these all these items in this list. But also, you need people to make the ideas happen. To execute. Such people are called “executives”. If you throw responsibility on creatives to make execution happen, ideas will always be proved impractical, because execution is a talent of its own. That’s because creative vision and genius for execution are two entirely different talents that do not always coincide in the same personality. One of the great things about business is that we get to combine our talents in ways that cancel out our weaknesses and allow us to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible. A smarter division of labor based on more realistic psychology, that permits creatives to conceive visionary ideas and executives to execute and actualize them would produce far more brilliant results.