Category Archives: Works

Repetition of conceptions

Biography, Enworldment, Philosophy

Quoted in Gabriele Tarde’s Laws of Repetition: “Scientific knowledge need not necessarily take its starting-point from the most minute hypothetical and unknown things. It begins wherever matter forms units of a like order which can be compared with and measured by one another, and wherever such units combine as units of a higher order and thus serve in themselves as a standard of comparison for the latter” (Von Naegeli. Address at the congress of German naturalists in 1877).

This is incredibly helpful for my own thinking. When we take some understanding that helped us make sense of X, and use it to make sense of Y, what exactly is repeated that makes it the same understanding or idea or conception?

To get very specific and concrete, when I first began to understand Nietzsche the conceptions I learned, which I found nearly impossible to articulate explicitly, helped me re-understand a great number of previously unrelated questions, confusions and mysteries that (at least prior to the understanding) seemed unrelated to the material Nietzsche was presenting. Reconceptions burst forth from nowhere and rippled through my memories, changing them. I knew it even prior to recollection. I could feel the change in my soul with an intuitive immediacy that defied language, but which could be used almost effortlessly. The changes even altered my perceptions of music, poetry and the world.

To me, it seemed like I’d just read something exciting that inspired new ideas. I would be forced to put the book down and think, talk or write. But sometimes these inspirations were related to problems Nietzsche had sketched out earlier in the book but left suspended, painfully unresolved. Often, the next day, when my inspiration subsided enough to permit further reading, I would read one of my own thoughts, printed out on the page. Nietzsche had implanted a thought in my head.

One other peculiar effect of these reconceptions was learning how many of my explosive new thoughts were rediscoveries of commonplace insights that I thought I understood well enough, but rejected as truisms, cliches or platitudes or nonsense. Think again. Things I’d heard recited myriad times suddenly had intense meaning, and I was the first to discover what was hidden in plain sight. It took dozens of humiliations to realize I was not the first to unlock the deeper significance of these words. In fact, I was the last. This insight was new only to me. But they could be known only through this strange kind of explosive, renewing reconception.

So, again: What was conveyed in this learning that resulted in new understanding? What was rippling through my psyche? What was I using to make new sense of memories and new experiences?

For now, let’s call these mysterious, indirectly known entities conceptions.

Why were these conceptions so easy to use, but so hard to talk about, much less encapsulate with explicit language?

How do we discover or invent — or instaurate — new conceptions? (Or, more often, rediscover, reinvent, reinstaurate conceptions that are new to us?)

What if all our understandings are just the workings of conceptions? And what if our overall understanding of everything in total is just interrelated conceptions working in concert, perhaps related and coordinated by yet other conceptions?

If we change our conceptions, what impact can this have on our most basic understandings of personhood and of the very nature of truth and reality?

When can we change our conceptions? When should we change them? When should we preserve or protect them?

And, finally, how do we decide together as a society which conceptions we ought to adopt and use in our lives together? Consider the complicating factor that it is up to our existing conceptions to make decisions about what conceptions should be changed to preserved…

Reconceiving conceptions, part 1

Biography, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Fructivism, Philosophy

A note on word choice: I am experimenting with using the word “conception” in place of “concept”. A conception is a conceiving move that produces a concept. A concept can be one of any number of artifacts, all of which can be viewed as alike in that they are produced and reproduced (comprehended) by the same conception.

*

If you think about it — and few of us do — thinking is an extremely mysterious activity.

Thinking is never more mysterious than at the edges of intelligibility, where, in order to think with any coherence, clarity or conviction, a thinker must first find new ways to make clear unified sense of material that is fragmentary, murky and perplexing. These new ways of making coherent sense are conceptions.

When one lacks conceptions needed for thinking, conceptions stand starkly absent. It is similar to how we suddenly become hyper-aware of our reliance on a humble body part, like a little toe, once it is injured or stops functioning, or how much we use a utility when service is interrupted, and we keep mindlessly flipping on light-switches even though the electricity is out.

It is when conceptions and thinking breaks down that we think about the activity thinking and experience how mysterious it is.

For normal people, the experience of grappling with inconceivability is relatively rare. Most things make sense most of the time — or at least most relevant things make sense. Of course, many things remain incomprehensible, inexplicable, irrational, confusing, frustrating, chaotic, crazy or mysterious — but these things tend to be pushed out to the margins. They are labeled “irrelevant” and ignored. Or they are labeled as “evil” or “delusional” and condemned or despised. Or they may be labeled “mysteries” and placed beyond human comprehension, for wonder, contemplation or worship. Generally, nothing short of catastrophe or crisis is sufficient to motivate a person to reconceive and understand something that defies comprehension.

Normally, normal people rely almost exclusively on ready-made conceptions to produce whatever thoughts they think, and to form whatever beliefs they hold. Infinitesimally few beliefs are produced by thinking. Nearly all beliefs are conceived automatically, in perception. Most conception occurs prior to thought, habitually and invisibly, in the continuous act of perception, where conceptions intercept and conceptually format sensations prior to any conscious thinking. When perceptions cohere autonomously in a form that lends itself to effortless intelligibility — self-evident truth — truth and reality are indistinguishable. This state of mind is called “naive realism.”

Is naive realism bad? Many will insist “yes” but this judgment is itself the product of conception — perhaps, ironically, a habitual and unconsidered conception of precisely the kind it disparages.

Naive realism can also be conceived as an ideal. This is what I intend to argue, and I intend to argue it from a highly abnormal angle: that of a design strategist.

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I mentioned that normal people normally do not think about thinking nor the conceptions they have at their disposal for perceiving and conceiving truth, and I referred to design strategists as abnormal in this respect.

Design strategists are forced to think about thinking, conceptions, perceptions all the time. A total breakdown of thought and attempts to resolve the breakdown and resume thought is just part of the work.

This is because design strategists are crisis agents. We are primarily hired to resolve crises, or to create crises in order to help organizations innovate, differentiate or disrupt their industries and throw their competitors into crisis, all for the sake of gaining competitive advantage.

Design strategists are professional crisis mongers. The most important component of such crisis mongering is design research, and the ideal outcome of design research is what I call “precision inspiration”.

Explaining strategic design research and precision inspiration provides context for understanding why strategic design demands thinking about thinking.

*

The best way to explain design research is pragmatically, presenting it in terms of what it does. And since design research was formed in the crucible of business, let’s discuss what it does in terms of benefits, using the preferred genre of the business world, the sales pitch.

What are the benefits of design research?

First, and most obviously, design research informs decisions. It helps organizations identify opportunities for improvement. It helps them understand precisely what can and should be improved, why that improvement will matter to people and how the improvement ought to be made so that efforts to improve things have their intended effect. And these improvements are not only for customers, but for all people involved in the organization — customers, employees, partners, leaders, investors and any other kind of stakeholder. Design research helps organizations “design the right thing, and to design the thing right”. Research improves the product of an organization.

Second, design research looks at opportunities through the lens of an organization’s capabilities, and especially those capabilities unique to the organization and therefore potentially differentiating. The improvements found are improvements only this organization is able to provide. Research differentiates the product of an organization. The product is not just better — it is uniquely better, and this organization is the only one able to provide it.

These first two benefits supply the “precision” part of precision inspiration. They focus effort on a sharply-defined problematic region, where potential value is most concentrated.

Third, design research provides persuasive evidence that helps leaders align organizations around particular projects. If everyone in an organization is persuaded that a project is worthwhile, energy otherwise wasted arguing for following divergent paths — or even taking those paths and working at cross-purposes — is applied forcefully in a single direction. Morale-sapping doubts are answered, freeing participants to invest energy into the project, optimistic that their efforts will bear fruit. Design research helps organizations align and improves efficiency and effectiveness of production.

Fourth, design research also drastically improves team dynamics and helps them collaborate more effectively and enjoyably. By introducing the scientific method into design processes, it brings enlightenment values to the notoriously authoritarian milieu of the workplace. Instead of uninformed speculations and untested intuitions (the products of private imaginations, prejudices, preconceptions and biases) competing to prove that it possesses esoteric insights into the souls of The User or The Customer and therefore has the answer on what solution to build, everyone is free (or freer) to propose questions to ask and hypotheses to test with real people, in order to assess the degree of validity in everyones’ ideas and hunches. The stakes are lower and cheaper, so democratic participation is more affordable. And the output of the research typically partially validates multiple views in ways requiring new combinations. So ingenuity is contributed from more sources and woven together ingeniously by yet others, and ultimately the idea can only be said to originate in the entire team working together on a shared problem. Research improves the experience of production, which lays the political groundwork for the climax of this pitch, the inspiration part.

The inspiration of design research comes from how it can helps us reconceive what we are doing, how we are doing it and why it matters. This is important, because our repertoire of conceptions enable and constrain what we think, believe, imagine, invent. They also shape our perceptions and help us ask clear questions. The limits of our conceptions are the limits of our minds, and the limits our capacity to take intelligent action. In the most productive research, new conceptions are learned directly from participants in the research, in the process of understanding their worldviews. Yet more conceptions must be found/made (or instaurated) to make sense of the full range of conceptions learned and to link them to the conceptual tools of the various disciplines collaborating on a solution. This can rarely be done with the available stock of existing conceptions, so in effect each team is forced to create a new conception-system — a small, local philosophy tailored to the project — that makes the problem intelligible and soluble.

This is an arduous, perplexing and anxious process. Not all people have the intellectual flexibility, faith and fortitude to do it. But when it is done successfully, new conceptions cause novel possibilities pop into existence, ex nihilo — possibilities were literally inconceivable before. This sudden influx of possibilities and outpouring of novel ideas — even new goals, purposes, values — resulting from the acquisition of new conceptions is, in fact, precisely what inspiration is.

The novel ideas produced by research are far less obvious and far more relevant (because they were acquired through precise understanding of specific people and and specific organizations) than ideas produced by the general truisms of industry conventional wisdom. Because industry conventional wisdom processes the same old facts the same old way, produces nothing but the same old same old, same-old: safe, stale, predictable, undifferentiated ideas.

This new, previously inconceivable way of conceiving precisely what this organization can do for precisely these people the organization exists to serve, conceived in a way that makes this problem thinkable in a shared way for all people involved in the effort and aligns them in solving it is precision inspiration.

Deep, rigorous, courageous research is the most effective and reliable way to induce such precision inspiration.

Doing research in this way, day in, day out, year in, year out changes one’s conceptions of conceptions and forces us to rethink how thinking works. A life of producing myriad small, specialized philosophies for specific problems eventually produces a comprehensive general philosophy that expands far beyond the limits of business, or any compartmented life activity and changes one’s view of everything.

In other words, it becomes a fundamental philosophy: a philosophy of design of philosophy.

*

To be continued… Design should be invisible, and so should be our conceptions!

Reconceiving concept

Biography, Enworldment, Fructivism, Philosophy

Concept. Con- + -cept. Together-take.

A concept takes together a multiplicity as a unit.

Concepts do not have form; concepts give form.

It is not possible to give an example of a concept. Concepts can only be demonstrated.

Most of what we say about concepts, and the way we use the term “concept” is pure category mistake, ontological confusion. We misunderstand the kind of thing a concept is, and the practical consequences proceeding from this misunderstanding generates profuse unintelligibility.

How do we acquire a concept? We follow what it does. We follow an argument, an analogy, a story, a pattern, a system, until we pick it up, and reproduce it in ourselves. We follow along, and then we get it. We are initiated into the concept and start using it.

Really well-conceived concepts become habits, and are no longer guided by language or by intention. They guide language and participate in our intentions. They become imperceptible extensions of our personal being, reflected in our experience of reality.

Concepts are intellectual concavities, and this is one reason why we so often resort to spatial metaphors when speaking of concepts. We enter concepts, inhabit them, and look out from them, perceive from them, understand from them, experience from them, respond from them. Concepts are not convex objects that we can grasp. Concepts are that by which we grasp.

Concepts comprehend. Concepts are not comprehended, though truths are comprehended when a concept is received or conceived.

Do we conceive an idea? I would prefer a more finely-articulated account, that includes invisible, silent, but crucially important moral deeds: We face an incomprehensible situation. We try to comprehend it, despite the fact that we have no plan, principles or precedents to help us comprehend it. We enter the void of inconceivability; we undergo perplexity. “We do not know how to move around” in perplexity. We cannot even state the problem we are trying to solve or the question we need to ask, much less answer it. So we grope. We follow faint hunches. We try, fail, try, fail. We follow our noses and our guts. We cannot say what or who guides us, but we are guided, very subtly. If we keep our heads — if we refuse to turn around and flee back to old, familiar, inadequate concepts — if we stay alert to inaudibly quiet voices speaking in native languages of our most private personhood, we somehow conceive a way to think the inconceivable, and a concept is born. The concept then comprehends the situation and generates an idea. But our coarse, public words leap to “I had an idea.”

Concepts are conceived, not comprehended. But often when we acquire a concept we re-conceive it and become able to comprehend that by which the concept was demonstrated, we bolt right on past the demonstration and enjoy having an effusion of ideas of our own, that, suddenly, miraculously, erupt — having been made possible through this new concept.

When we are taught a concept, often we only credit the teacher teaching us the content of the demonstration. We credit ourselves for the outpouring of new ideas, inspired by this little nugget of truth. We are inspired, become creative, and revel in our new powers of insights and invention.

The modest nugget of truth that conveys a concept through demonstration, initiates a learner into new possibilities of thought inconceivable prior to the insight, and inspires myriad acts of creativity — could this be the philosopher’s stone?

Until we acquire a concept, all ideas comprehended by the concept are incomprehensible, or even more often they are misunderstood — that is, they are grasped using concepts that comprehend its content in a different and conflicting way. Even meaningful artifacts, whose meaning is known, felt or otherwise accessed by way of an alien concept, are opaque until the concept is acquired.

Well-conceived concepts form systems of cooperating concepts. They function together, harmonize together, corroborate and reinforce one another, combine to make coherent sense of things. Such concept systems make “things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Concept systems, which use concepts to select and connect other concepts, are philosophies.

As with simpler concepts, philosophies cannot be given directly. They are always demonstrated. When a philosophy is demonstrated, it is necessarily demonstrated using content, but what animates the demonstration — the movements of concept — is the real substance of the philosophy. When the concepts are received the content of the philosophy is comprehended, and, more often than not, confused for the philosophy.

I learned to conceive concepts this way from Nietzsche. I would read his arguments and aphorisms, puzzle over them, turn them this way and that, entertain them, fight them, connect them in various ways, and generally struggle to make coherent sense of what he was saying. He would reduce me to despair, which would cling to my entire lived experience for days and weeks. The unresolved perplexities would pile up and intensify. Then he would resolve one of the perplexities with a tiny crystalline insight. This little seed of a clue would instantly resolve the problem perfectly, then explode beyond the problem, resolving myriad known and unknown perplexities, so rapidly and comprehensively it was nearly impossible to keep track of the knowledge that suddenly was just existent, appearing ex nihilo. Even well-understood knowledge would be blasted apart, evaporated and reconstituted in new significance. And the change went beyond knowledge, too, into capacities for understanding. Truths that had been incomprehensible just seconds before were now perfectly obvious.. I found myself inventing completely new ideas, brilliant ideas, inspired by earlier aphorisms or images. …But then I would read on, and there it would be, typed out, verbatim: one of my original thoughts. Nietzsche was somehow inducing these original thoughts, then proving that it was intentional, in some inconceivable way.

Two problems arose from this experience. The first was the hardest. I found my reconstituted philosophy disturbingly resistant to language. I was unable to convey what I knew, and even the things I knew in this new way were misunderstood entirely by the people around me. And worse, when I would try to convey what I understood, it inflicted terrible anxiety,. People wanted to not know what I so badly needed to say, and it was excruciating. I was intellectually imprisoned. I called it “solitary confinement in plain sight” The loneliness was crushing. But the second problem became the kernel of a more mature philosophy that wanted to understand and articulate how Nietzsche was able to write this way, and what it meant about the human condition and reality itself.

Eventually, after many reconceptions, a few very deep transformative ones, and many smaller localized ones, I began to think of concepts and philosophies as inexhaustible levers for changing our fundamental experience of life, and for opening new possibilities for materially changing the world in ways that might be wiser than if we immediately leap to fixing what seems obviously broken in obvious ways. And then I realized: this is what we always do when we design.

There is a crucially important step that occurs in human centered design after user research and before detailed design where we attempt to make sense of what we learn and put it into a form conducive to shaping and motivating design work. Traditionally, it has been called concept, but the word “concept” normally denotes an artifact, an object, a prototype, a model. The process of getting to that concept is often hellish, and often in proportion to the depth of the research. Teams are gripped in anxiety. I realized design concepts have exactly the characteristics I listed above. The “concept” demonstrates a concept so team members can pick it up and use it to guide their design work.

To be continued…

“Precision inspiration”

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Fructivism, Philosophy

When people ask me what design research is, my favorite answer is “precision inspiration”.

I know this might seem slightly business romantic, but my meaning is exact, clear, concrete — even a bit technical.

*

I’ll start by explaining what research is pragmatically, in terms of what it does. And because I’m a business guy, I’ll explain what it does in terms of its benefits. In other words, I’ll start with a sales pitch.

First, design research helps inform decisions. It helps teams identify opportunities for improvements. It helps us understand what should be improved, why that improvement will matter to people and how the improvement ought to be made so that the work has its intended effect. Design research helps organizations “design the right thing, and to design the thing right.” Research improves the product.

Second, design research also provides persuasive evidence that helps leaders align organizations around particular projects. If everyone in an organization is persuaded that a project is worthwhile, energy otherwise wasted arguing for following divergent paths — or even taking those paths and working at cross-purposes — is applied forcefully in a single direction. And morale-sapping doubts about the project can be quelled, so participants can invest real energy into the project, in the expectation that their efforts will produce a positive outcome. Design research done well is organizational alignment magic. Research improves the efficiency of production.

Design research also drastically improves team dynamics and helps them collaborate more effectively and enjoyably. By introducing the scientific method into design processes, it brings enlightenment values to the notoriously authoritarian milieu of the workplace. Instead of uninformed speculations and untested intuitions (the products of private imaginations, prejudices, preconceptions and biases) competing to prove that it possesses esoteric insights into the souls of The User or The Customer and therefore has the answer on what solution to build, everyone is free (or freer) to propose questions to ask and hypotheses to test with real people, in order to assess the degree of validity in everyones’ ideas and hunches. The stakes are lower and cheaper, so democratic participation is more affordable. And the output of the research typically partially validates multiple views in ways requiring new combinations. So ingenuity is contributed from more sources and woven together ingeniously by yet others, and ultimately the idea can only be said to originate in the entire team working together on a shared problem. Research improves the experience of production, which gets us closer to the climax of my pitch, the inspiration part.

The inspiration of design research comes from how it can helps us reconceive what we are doing, how we are doing it and why it matters. This is important, because our repertoire of conceptions enable and constrain what we think, believe, imagine, invent. They also shape our perceptions and help us ask clear questions. The limits of our conceptions are the limits of our minds, and our ability to take intelligent action. In the most productive research, new concepts are learned directly from participants in the research, in the process of understanding their worldviews. Yet more conceptions must be found/made (or instaurated) to make sense of the full range of concepts learned and link them to the conceptual tools of the various disciplines collaborating on a solution. This can rarely be done with the available stock of existing conceptions, so, in effect, teams are forced to create new conception systems — small, local philosophies tailored to a project — that makes problems intelligible and soluble.

This is an arduous, perplexing and anxious process. Not all people have the intellectual flexibility, faith and fortitude to do it. But when it is done successfully, new possibilities pop into existence, ex nihilo, that were literally inconceivable before. This sudden influx of possibilities and outpouring of novel ideas resulting from the acquisition of new concepts is in fact what inspiration is.

The novel ideas produced by research are far less obvious and far more relevant (because they were acquired through understanding users or customers) than ideas produced by industry conventional wisdom that, because it processes the same old facts the same old way, produces nothing but the same old same-old, safe, stale, predictable, undifferentiated ideas.

Deep, rigorous, courageous research is the most effective and reliable way to induce such precision inspiration.

 

Entertaining ontology designing

Enworldment, Philosophy, Spiral

Follow up email to Nick on ontological designing:

Ok, I’m starting to like this paper, and I’m re-considering my initial resistance to situating myself within this school of thought. Her third sphere of ontological designing, “ontological designing of systems of thought, of habits of mind,” is exactly what I am proposing, and I do accept all her emphasis on coevolution (“While we as humans design buildings, they also design us.”) as true and relevant. 

I think the difference between my view and Willis’s is I believe that it is our personal responsibility to assert our own enworlding intuitions and thoughts against simply being passively enthinged by what surrounds us. Just as existentialism grew out of Heideggerian ontology, I am “existentializing” ontological designing by looking at personal self-responsibility within a context that accepts all the same truths Willis presents here. 

The core measure of self-responsibility is the quality of one’s own “enworldment experience”. Is the world clear, maneuverable and valuable to you, or is it murky, paralyzing, and worthless/doomed? In other words, did you design your enworldment for usability, usefulness, and desirability, or did you passively or prematurely accept an enworldment that falls short (or worse, a social enthingment)?

My passionate belief is that we absolutely must start with what is experience-near (our own lives, our own active philosophies), physically-proximate (our own tools and places) and socially-connected (our actual relationships, especially our most dialogical ones) and gradually spiral outward to enclose widening peripheries. To believe we must fix what’s way out there, everywhere — the environment, society, politics, other people’s beliefs — is ontological designing’s version of existential bad faith, an attempt to evade self-determination with attempts at other-determination.

Please notice my language improvements. Heidegger’s hideous language has got to go. Everyone seems to want to preserve his terms, but this is the awkward language of discovery. It’s been nearly a century and its time to refine. There will be no “worlding” or “thinking” on my watch. Enworldment, and enthingment is vastly better, aesthetically and descriptively.

Anne-Marie Willis’s “Ontological Designing”

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Politics

Yesterday, Nick freaked me out about the existence of Anne-Marie Willis’s paper “Ontological Designing”. I was so distressed about possibly being scooped, and also about the state of my current project — a distress possibly biologically amplified by an infected eyelid — that I barely slept last night. I was dreaming about this stuff.

Today I got up, read most of the paper and sent Nick the reply below, which seems worth keeping.

Ok, this is not what I am doing, though it is the kind of ontological designing Willis describes here that informs my project.

This paper appears to be written from the perspective of a user contemplating designs-ready-made, not a design practitioner reflecting on design-in-the-making (to adapt Latour’s distinction).

The experiences that feed my thought (experiences I am undergoing, unfortunately, though quite conveniently, on this very project) are the reworkings of understanding induced by the breaking of individual interpretations and understandings upon an (as yet) inconceivable design problem.

In these situations, designers are forced to instaurate new local micro-philosophies that permit collaborators with incommensurable understandings to “align” their efforts to design equipment that can be readily recognized in a present-at-hand mode, adopted, and then used in a ready-to-hand mode. I think this microphilosophizing is an underrecognized gap both in design practice (which tends to focus its thinking on its tasks at hand, and rarely to macrophilosophize) and in philosophy (which rarely participates directly in the kinds of hellish rarefied design projects that inform my concerns).

My work is describing what happens if we apply the lessons of constant local microphilosophizing back to macrophilosophizing.

I think it is important because I’m seeing the same dynamics I see in my mini-hells unfolding in the larger world in our incapacity to align on what to do about — well — everything. The disgruntled tolerance for the postmodern condition and its refusal to macrophilosophize (due to the po-mo allergy to grand narratives) has contributed to a deep fracturing and factionalizing of our citizenry.

And you can see that this idea of designerly coevolution completely misses the central problem: How do we agree on what to do in the first place, in order to world our world into a state where maybe it can coevolve us back into a more livable, peaceful condition? Everyone is full of end-solutions, but at a loss to explain or even frame the problem of why we can’t get there, except to invent theories of viciousness about those who refuse to cooperate. We do not know how to think these kinds of conflicts, which are essentially just political crises — but I think I do have some clarifying insights, thanks to my occasional hell-immersions, and my funny habit of trying to feel better by understanding their hellishness and applying the resulting insights back to my own grand narrative, which I happen to think is better than the ones that developed in the vacuum of public intellectuals being to smart and stylish to perform their duties.

Differentiating enworldment design

Enworldment

Over the weekend Susan pressed me for details on how an enworldment can be intentionally changed. How does enworldment design differ from Stoicism’s mental toughening-up exercises, or new age self-helpers who advise us to tell ourselves a new story? It was helpful to be forced to get concrete, and to make some contrasts with transformational methods with which enworldment design might be compared or confused.

Difference 1. Enworldment design is morally unopinionated. It does not pursue any single ideal. It could be applied to help a person become more serene, openhearted, generous, evangelical, etc., or their opposites, or none of the above. The goal is a matter of the unique person and that person’s context.

Difference 2. Enworldment design is epistemologically open, but rigorous. There is no single truth to learn or discover, but a plurality of truth possibilities. These possible truths are multiple, overlapping and exacting, based on what concepts are adopted for developing truth. But this is not an arbitrary relativism, because, while there is no single truth, the possibility of untruth is pervasive and incessant — errors, mistakes, lies, etc. harm truths and make them fail in practice in various ways.

Difference 3. Enworldment design is not willfully imposed on the world, but is instaurated within the world, with the active participation with whatever worldly entities enworlded in the project. The world is taken as a collaborative partner, with its own complex and largely mysterious tendencies and constraints which are discovered in the course of design, which might even change the very goals of the design. When worldly entities cooperate with the enworldment, truth happens. When worldly entities balk, disappear or sabotage the enworldment, untruth happens. (This, by the way, is my ANTsy flavor of pragmatism.)

Difference 4. Enworldment depends on the destructive and reconstructive power of inquiry. Truth is not some objectlike, noumenal thing preexisting out there which we try to unearth by digging through the phenomenal bracket, until we can pull it out, clean it off, inspect it and have it as what it is and always was. That crude description is closer to (though still very far off the mark) reality, which can never be contained by truth. Truth is only the relationship a person has with reality, and those possibilities are myriad. And those possibilities are fragile. All it takes is looking harder, and truth will always break apart, clearing ground for something new. But if that clearing is investigated, harder and harder, something new is always there. Sometimes the new thing is worse than the old thing, but that, too, can be cleared and replaced. So, evaluation, rejection, restarting, discovering, experimentally developing, testing — this is how the work proceeds.

A corollary to difference 4: Because no truth can withstand scrutiny, the fact that a truth has not withstood it does not obligate us to abandon it. Instead, we should ask questions about tradeoffs. Does the critique render this truth useless, now?  Does it expose a flaw that would make it malfunction under certain circumstances? Was the truth durable enough for our purposes, and we just broke it for no good reason, like a kid taking apart a toy? Is there a tougher or more interoperable concept readily available we can swap out? A concept is an instrument that does some things well, and other things less well, not a mystical status of a belief. And just because you can break an instrument, doesn’t mean you should break it, so critique judiciously.

Difference 5. Truth possibilities are myriad, but so are truth impossibilities, which is why honesty and good craft are indispensable. As with all design, truth to materials is paramount. Self-delusion, wishful thinking, subjective fudging (overstraining and abusing the mind’s famous flexibility) are all vices that will compromise an enworldment’s integrity, and make it produce untruth instead of truths.

Oh no. Out of time. I’m just going to list the other points in raw form so I don’t forget them.

Difference 6. Enworldment design uses design methods. One of these methods is to take the experience of the design, rather than its artifact as the ultimate goal of the work. And good thing, too, because an enworldment’s artifact is arrangements of tacit processes to which direct access is impossible. The processes can be learned (and are learned in successful reading of philosophy or religious scripture), but what was learned appears only in how one behaves or speaks, never given explicitly.

Difference 7. Enworldments should be useful, usable and desirable.

Difference 8. Enworldments are separated by massive, intensely unpleasant vacuums of incapacity — perplexity, faltering and indifference. Crossing these gulfs of nothingness is what separates the men from the boys.

There’s so much more. I really have to stop now, though.

Kant’s questions

Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Trefoil

In Critique of Pure Reason Kant famously listed his primary questions:

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions:

  1. What can I know?
  2. What ought I do?
  3. What may I hope?

I find it odd that Kant took such a moralistic angle on his actions and hopes. Why are they framed in terms of ought and may, when they could have been more neutral questions of pure capability? Why not ask what can I do? What can I hope?

I’m sensitive to these kinds of relationships, especially in the ways they can get confused when combined — most of all when that sneaky and garrulous character, the what, starts insinuating himself in questions where he might not be as helpful as he claims to be. The what is pretty glib — a lot of talk, and little action.

In my little 9-page chapbook (which outlines the basic forms of my own enworldment) I permute intuition and object and identified nine combinations. But each of these combinations can themselves be the objects of other intuitions, and those complex combination can also be objects, and so on.

  • Intuiting-what knows the what of is, as fact.
  • Intuiting-what knows the what of can, as method.
  • Intuiting-what knows the what of ought, as ideal.
  • Intuiting-how does the how of can, as ability.
  • Intuiting-how does the how of ought, as grace.
  • Intuiting-how does the how of is, as technique.
  • Intuiting-why cares the why of ought, as value.
  • Intuiting-why cares the why of is, as taste.
  • Intuiting-why cares the why of can, as purpose.

Justifying my frustrating ways

Biography, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I’ve been a serious pain in the ass lately, even relative to my usual unspectacular behavior. I’m in a situation that has been extracting too many of the wrong things from me, too relentlessly, for too long, and it is undermining my mental health.

It’s all got me questioning myself, and my ability to get along with my fellow humans.

If only my philosophy were one that allowed me to dismiss these concerns. But I reject philosophies of contempt. And I’ve tried them all. They are too lonely, and I found the Sublime Solitude of the Profound Thinker to be a super-lame booby prize.

I’m feeling feel obligated to justify myself in multiple ways, even if I haven’t yet matured to a stage where I care if anyone actually buys my justifications. That would choke out out my remaining, already overburdened creativity, and I’m not doing it.

Anyway, below is one of my struggles. It’s pretty good.

*

I read philosophies in the way an industrial designer reads engineering literature.

Our industrial designer reads engineering books and papers to understand new materials he might use, or fabrication techniques that might open new possibilities of form or function. He might even dip into physics now and then to press past apparent limits. His fascination with shaping products invests materials and matter in general with significance, and this inspires his curiosity. But his urgency is a practical one: what can I do with this?

I am trying to justify my oddly arbitrary but intensely picky taste in reading, and, unfortunately in the kinds of work I can tolerate doing. For me, everything is driven by the design of enworldments, and most of all my personal enworldment, which is an enworldment within which enworldments are designable. I’m building a shop that makes parts for shops — shops that might even put my shop out of business.

So, no, I am not particularly interested in discovering unknown truths (not even fresh existential insights, which are my favorite ones). Nor am I motivated to acquire every formal technique for fabricating forceful, durable syllogisms (or even building a respectable baseline logical toolset, because logical welds seem brittler than rhetorical, poetic and especially heuristic joints, which have superior flex and tensility in many conditions.) And my deficiencies in adducing evidence to support my beliefs are worse than you suspect, however suspicious you are. You should not care what I think. I have not, and will never earn your respect, because I won’t do the boring legwork that requires.

You should respect only how I think and why I believe thinking that way is important, good and beautiful, and the ultimate way to show that respect is to try it out by climbing into it, and using it to generating some knowledge or judgments, and to experience how reality changes tone, significance and value while you do it.

I’m just rummaging for whatever is useful for my purposes.

Philosophical bug? Or feature?

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I keep catching myself myself making an odd move when I read philosophical critiques of other philosophies, especially ones involving criticisms in the family of oversimplification, omission, or apparent blindspots.

I find myself protesting that what is being presented as a flaw seems to me a design device that helpfully bundles unmanageably complex phenomena as a simple data object or affordance.

These critics are doing that thing every design amateur does that drives professional designers insane, namely, treating every tradeoff as a disqualification of the design. When you realize that skillful designing is largely a matter of intentionally choosing optimal tradeoffs, perfectionists literally do not know what they are doing, and make design impossible.

To make these optimal tradeoffs, it is necessary to know what the design problem is: who will use it, for what purpose, under what conditions, where, when, and so on.

So, when critiquing a philosophy and calling it oversimplified, what I want to see is a tradeoff analysis. What does this simplification do in use? What class of problems are made harder by this simplification, and why is this an unwise tradeoff? Or better: when is it an unwise tradeoff?

Because, to say it once again: reality is infinitely complex. No concept, no concept system, not even the ideal set of every possible concept, is adequate to comprehend reality. The standard of truth implicit in omission critiques is an impossible standard. I prefer a humbler pragmatic standard of truth based on an absence of untruth, relative to the intended purpose of the truth claim. In other words, does this truth function as intended, or does it malfunction? Truth exists for the simple reason that falsehoods, errors and lies exist.

Enworldment design

Enworldment, Philosophy

Another way to think about enworldment within the larger context of philosophy would to be to draw another anomalous analogy between the domain of thought and the domain of engineering.

Some philosophy explores lines of thoughts out of sheer interest in the thought itself. Something about the ideal material fascinates the thinker. What can be done with this way of thinking? What can it be made to do? What can be made out of it? This is analogous to engineering — it is objective in the sense that the thinker is not inhabiting the thought or merged with it, but instead is absorbed in the activity of crafting, assembling, disassembling conceptual systems. This is philosophy in an engineering state of mind.

Enworldment is philosophy in a designerly mode. This is the mode of linking formal thoughts with the immersive experience of using them for one’s own understanding. Not as merely explaining or arguing — that is still a manipulation of objects external to self. Enworldment is using concepts for original and spontaneous understanding, where the understanding is built into how one conceives what one perceives, without any conscious figuring out or translation process.

Enworldment aims for the same goal as design — the extension of self through artifices. In enworldment we become conceptual cyborgs (thanks, Donna Haraway) through using concepts so perfectly designed that they are invisible (thanks, Beatrice Warde) and that produces a personal being-in-the-world existence that we understand intuitively and clearly, that helps us respond effectively to events in our lives, and that makes existence itself feel valuable and motivating, or as designers frame it, useful, usable and desirable (thanks, Liz Sanders).

I like to distinguish design from engineering by defining engineering as constructing purely impersonal systems — systems with components that function apart from personal participation. Once a system requires for its successful functioning a person who experience, responds and completes the system, the problem has expanded into a designed system. (Most engineering happens inside a usually unacknowledged design context, and most design depends on engineered subcomponents. This is why engineering ought to report up to designers.)

Enworldment is what happens when we pull together ingenious concepts and arguments developed through philosophical engineering type activities and assemble them into a habitat or a vehicle or workshop — something we can climb inside of and inhabit, which then becomes self-evident truth, and eventually indistinguishable from reality.

Beatrice Warde said “design should be in invisible.” By extension, the ultimate goal of enworldment design is naive realism.

Enworldment

Enworldment, Philosophy

I am contemplating a radical shift in language.

I’ve talked about “designing philosophies”, and observed that most of the time when we think about philosophy and design we almost automatically think about applying philosophical ideas to design practice, and rarely the reverse — applying design ideas and practices back to how we do philosophy.

But when we turn back to design these philosophies do this, I’m not sure it is helpful to think of what we are doing as a kind of philosophy (nor other handy words, like psychology or religion). We are definitely designing, but designing a very strange artifact in a very strange way which does something very strange to our experience of life. And further, philosophy is so obscenely freighted with history, crusted with connotation, and so professionalized and specialty factionalized — and I am so uncredentialed as a philosophical professional (or any kind of professional, for that matter), I might as well invent a new domain that I can survey and map out as I please.

So, I want to re-try out a re-new way of characterizing what I am proposing. Years ago I coined the term “enworldment” and started sporadically using it as an alternative term for worldview (which is too ocular and not interactive enough) and lifeworld (which seems too biologically interactive and downplays the conceptual too much for my taste).

Some things I like about the word “enworldment”:

  • It suggests a better locus for the activity of thought. Not inside my skull but outward into a world within which I am enmeshed.
  • I like this implication that the world neither contains us materially, not that we project it mentally, and that this world is neither an active medium that deterministically makes us into some kind of a self (aka identity), not a passive material upon which our agency can impose its will, but rather something we draw around ourselves and weave ourselves into, in how we think about it, in how we interact with it, and what we rearrange within it (aka, what we “make”).
  • I like that it is nearly synonymous with praxis, but freed from Marxian straightjacketing.
  • I like that it promises (or can promise) to do what religions do, but sans mumbo-jumbo. It could be argued — and I would be the last to argue back — that my own Judaism is no longer a religion, but instead, an enworldment. But, because it does everything I expect of a religion, including making intensely meaningful sense (albeit non-thaumaturgic sense) of religious texts and symbols, I observe Judaism (at least Reform Judaism). But the theories I consider respectable and useful smell pretty atheistic to most conventionally religious folks.

Out of time — I’ll write more later.

A possible outline for my book

Enworldment, Philosophy

A philosophy should be:

  • Understood as an instrument that is adopted and used (instrumentalism)
  • Expected to disappear in use and become a ready-to-mind producer of self-evident truths for its user
  • Designed with a subjective user experience (perceiving, understanding, anticipating, responding) as its primary purpose and mode of being, and its objective forms (presentation, argument, vocabulary, etc.) serving as a means to this subjective end
  • Evaluated as a designed experience according to its varying degrees of usefulness, usability and desirability
  • Understood to be used for specific purposes in specific contexts
  • Approached as potentially designable
  • Approached as briefable (framed as a formalized design problem)
  • Informed by design research
  • Developed using designerly instauration methods
  • Produced nonlinearly, through iterative rounds of testing, evaluation and redesign
  • Understood to be shaped by tradeoffs
  • Understood to serve as a mind-reality interface mediating interaction with transcendent realities
  • Understood as a system existing within larger ecosystems, with which it must cooperate
  • Understood to be designed using earlier generations of philosophical instruments

Instrumental-instaurationism?

ANT, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Most “truth is a construct” type constructivists appear to have retained a vestigial correspondence theory of truth; that is, they take truth to be a little mental duplicate of, or model of or, in extreme cases, a substitute for, reality. Truth is true to the degree that it corresponds to reality. According to a correspondence-constructivist view, we are more or less free to reimagine the world we wish to live in, and this is what the world becomes for us.

My view is similar but differs in some consequential ways. I agree that truth is constructed, but my constructivism is modified by an instrumentalist theory of truth. I view truth as something produced by a repertoire of concepts we use to interpret and guide our interactions with reality. Truth is true to the degree that it helps us effectively interact with reality. According to my instrumental-constructivist view, there are ways we can modify the concepts we use to interpret, evaluate and respond to the world, and these can drastically change how we live and experience the world.

However, the changes rarely match what we imagine. We cannot start with an imagined ideal and then just build a worldview to spec. Why? The main reason is, according to this view, the world is very real and transcends our mental images, theories, models and plans, and when we act on it, reality acts back on us. Sometimes we can manage to get reality to cooperate with our hopes and expectations, but often does not, at least not on the first try. This this is especially true with that most special part of reality that is our fellow human beings. Humans are essentially surprising creatures.

This interactivity is a big reason I prefer, in place of constructivism, Étienne Souriau’s (or Bruno Latour’s?) term “instauration” which is a kind of interactive construction — a discovering-making — a term that any hands-on designer or craftsperson will instantly recognize as a better fit for how their constructions really happen.

Sadly, this change in language makes my view an “instrumental-instaurationist” one, which is so incredibly ugly the kidnappers responsible for abducting “pragmatism” might feel moved to euthanize the term out of pity. I’m going to refrain from naming it, and instead just call it a “philosophy of design of philosophy”.

Nietzsche

Biography, Ethics, Geometric Meditations, Spiral, Star, Trefoil, Wheel

I have an understanding of Nietzsche that seems to fall outside the range of normal.

I hear completely different focus, emphasis and purpose in his words, and to be completely honest, that understanding completely changed my life nearly 20 years ago when I discovered Nietzsche.

I’ll try to sketch it out.

  1. A human soul is a society, under a political order. Some parts of a soul are dominant, other parts are dominated, others are suppressed, and still others are completely unknown.
  2. This political order is what we know as morality. What is good or evil is a function of what supports or undermines the political order of a particular organization of a soul.
  3. Morality comes largely from outside. The strongest, most talented parts of a soul can often be suppressed by the prevalent morality. When these suppressed members of a soul rebel within a soul it can produce a guilty conscience. If the suppressed faction of a soul revolt and take it over, the person becomes socially unacceptable, and is called “evil”.
  4. A large part of morality is making questioning the morality taboo. To even question morality is an act of rebellion by the very faction of the soul doing the questioning.
  5. If the questioning faction of a soul questions hard enough, the soul can be thrown into chaos and perplexity and a moral crisis ensues.
  6. If a new political order is produced in a soul, this “revaluation” changes everything. New aspects of one’s soul can emerge and live. The new self experiences itself and reality itself in a completely different way. It can be experienced as a death and rebirth of self, of the world, even of what God means.
  7. When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” this was not a call for permanent atheism, but a renewal of life’s total meaning. Gods do not stay dead. (Which reminds me, Happy Easter to all my Christian friends.)
  8. This experience redeems all pain preceding the struggle. One would be willing to go through it again, and infinite number of times (an “eternal recurrance”) for the sake of this revaluative transfiguration, which is lucky because this is the permanent cycle of spiritual life.

This has been the backbone of my reading of Nietzsche. There’s a lot more to him than only this, but if you approach him from this basic trajectory he seems a lot less… Nietzschean?

Religious worldview

Enworldment, Fructivism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil

What makes a worldview religious? Here is a list of what I believe to be essential characteristics:

  • It is holistic. It effects near-total shifts in perspective, holistically changing the What, How and Why of existence.
  • It is transfigural. it spontaneously changes and seems to re-create both one’s self and the world — the visceral sense of who one is, who others are, what life is, what reality is and the relationship between self, other and everything.
  • It intensifies value. The shift in Why expands and/or deepens the value of life and reality itself.
  • It is transcendent. The worldview is oriented by realities that are understood to transcend comprehension.
  • It defies preconception.. The worldview is literally inconceivable until it happens.
  • It is second-natural. The worldview is not consciously used or applied; it spontaneously changes one’s experience of being prior to thinking. Insofar that one’s beliefs change, this is a byproduct of one’s faith, that tacit layer of understanding that shapes and moves thinking, speaking, feeling and doing.
  • It links us to a community. The worldview is capable of relating to others in a community who share our faith, even when our beliefs, thoughts and tastes differ. Something is shared, and this commonality is known to be real, even when it defies explication.

So far, so good. Now I will infuriate religious people by insisting that many allegedly essential characteristics of religion are dispensable.

  • It does not have to be theistic. A religious worldview can center around God, but God is only one way of conceiving transcendence.
  • It is not about believing. Beliefs about beings, deities, forces, events, theories might be a side-effect of a religious faith, but these are not the substance of religion, and all too often are counterfeits of religious faith.
  • It does not have to include magic. Adoption of magical or mystical beliefs or practices (rituals, sacrifices, prayers, observances) might be adopted as an expression or reinforcement of a religious faith, but these are also not the substance of religion, and all too often are counterfeits of religious life.
  • It is not a means to an end. Adopting religion in order to get something or accomplish something for oneself or the world — again, a goal of this kind can be a side-effect of religious faith, but more often, they are counterfeits.

I believe that many people who think they are religious are not, many people who think they are atheists are far more religious than they know, that many people who think they’ve overcome fundamentalism (which is counterfeit religion) still believe new secular content with the same fundamentalist faith, and that people need religion and are tormented by the wrongness of the world until they find it.

Philosophy as design

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

[This is an older post that was saved as a draft, that I published for my index of Philosophy of Design of Philosophy posts. Unfortunately I lost the date when it was written. It was probably mid-2019.]

The idea that philosophies are systems of conceptual tools used for making sense of the world is not new. This idea was central to John Dewey’s brand of Pragmatism which he called “Instrumentalism”. Here the primary measure of a philosophy is not fidelity in representing some sort of pre-existent truth, but rather usefulness for living a particular kind of life.

And the idea that philosophies are not impersonal theories of truth but are made by and for a variety of specific types of people with specific value priorities and ideals which can differ quite drastically from type to type was one of Nietzsche’s core themes. Nietzsche’s measure of philosophy a emphasized its ability to invest life with desirability.

By now, anyone who works as a designer or with designers will have recognized Liz Sanders’s famous triad of good experience, Useful, Usable and Desirable.

This suggests the question of usability? Have any philosophers emphasized usability, or even given it much thought at all? I have found quite a few, actually, but their works  tend to be scholarly explanations of the work of other philosophers. It seems as if most philosophers are driven by a need to conceptualize something very difficult to explain, usually a perplexity that arose from reading other philosophers’ attempts to do the same. Maybe problems of that magnitude, ones that require a thinker’s entire effort to resolve, are so all-consuming they leave the thinker too exhausted to clearly communicate the resolution of the problem with those not already obsessed with it.

From Irrational Man

Enworldment, Philosophy

William Barrett, Irrational Man:

If philosophers are really to deal with the problem of human existence—and no other professional group in society is likely to take over the job for them—they might very well begin by asking: How does philosophy itself exist at the present time? Or, more concretely: How do philosophers exist in the modern world? … Philosophers today exist in the Academy, as members of departments of philosophy in universities, as professional teachers of a more or less theoretical subject known as philosophy. This simple observation, baldly factual and almost statistical, does not seem to take us very deeply into the abstruse problem of existence; but every effort at understanding must take off from our actual situation, the point at which we stand. “Know thyself!” is the command Socrates issued to philosophers at the beginning (or very close to it) of all Western philosophy; and contemporary philosophers might start on the journey of self- knowledge by coming to terms with the somewhat grubby and uninspiring fact of the social status of philosophy as a profession. …

“Not enough has been made of this academic existence of the philosopher, though some contemporary Existentialists have directed searching comment upon it. The price one pays for having a profession is a déformation professionelle, as the French put it—a professional deformation. Doctors and engineers tend to see things from the viewpoint of their own specialty, and usually show a very marked blind spot to whatever falls outside this particular province. The more specialized a vision the sharper its focus; but also the more nearly total the blind spot toward all things that lie on the periphery of this focus. As a human being, functioning professionally within the Academy, the philosopher can hardly be expected to escape his own professional deformation, especially since it has become a law of modern society that man is assimilated more and more completely to his social function. And it is just here that a troublesome and profound ambiguity resides for the philosopher today. The profession of philosophy did not always have the narrow and specialized meaning it now has. In ancient Greece it had the very opposite: instead of a specialized theoretical discipline philosophy there was a concrete way of life, a total vision of man and the cosmos in the light of which the individual’s whole life was to be lived.”

So, what would be a better position in life for informing a total vision suitable for a broad range of human existences? I would say that being a human centered designer would rank near the top.

I’m reading Irrational  Man, because I’ve been working on redescribing my philosophy in more existentialist language. My project does draw heavily on pragmatist thought, but its ethical core is an existentialist one — but one tempered and matured by insights from distributed cognition, postphenomenology, the material turn in the social sciences as well as human-centered and emerging polycentric design practices.

Synesse revision

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Fructivism, Synesis

I largely rewrote the synesse entry in my Designerly virtues article. “Designerly virtues” is one of the most important things I’ve written this year, and it will be the kernel of Second Natural.

One other note: I think Design Instrumentalism is an updated form of existentialism — a pragmatic existentialism that uses design methods.

The new synesse entry: Synesse — Synesis is the act of inhabiting a new first-person perspective through fruitful dialogue. At first glance this might seem to be empathy, but it is not, for two reasons. First empathy tends to be motivated and guided primarily by attempts to experience some approximation of the feelings of others, something which is difficult, if not impossible for people with different lived experiences. Synesis is guided more by interpretative understanding. By gaining insight into how a person’s perceptions, conceptions, valuations coalesce into a worldview that shapes lived experience, a person’s feelings become more discussable. Further, these insights open new possibilities of interpretation, and freedom from unexamined, habitual, unconscious interpretations that control us if we are not aware of them. Second, the goal of synesis is not necessarily for one person to understand the other. The goal is more for each to approach the other to produce a new, more expansive understanding that can accommodate and do justice to all parties in dialogue. Agreement might not be reached, but a mutually-acceptable account of what the essential difference of opinion is, supports a more pluralistic and respectful form of disagreement that does not (unconsciously) privilege one opinion over the other as superior (and therefore in a position to judge, explain or diagnose the other). These expanded perspectives often produce new space, not only for better mutual understanding and respect but also for conceiving radically new innovative ideas that could not fit into the older smaller perspectives. When design research produces disagreements and intense apprehension among researchers about how to understand their participants, this signals a need for synesis and the opportunities for radically new ideas that come from creating new idea spaces. Not only will the ideas be oriented toward the needs of participants, they will make use of conceptions that are not only non-obvious, but literally inconceivable without synesis — a benefit I call “precision inspiration”. — Synesis is a challenge of the highest order. It involves active listening, apprehension tolerance, willingness to be taught, personal goodwill — all the other designerly virtues, in fact. When we practice this constellation of skills together we get better at it and develop the capacity for synesis: synesse. Synesse challenges the ideal of empathy, especially its impossible goal, which ironically encourages the futile and very alienating conclusion “you can never really understand me.”

 

The earlier version was: Synesse — Synesis is the act of inhabiting a new first-person perspective through fruitful dialogue. At first glance this might seem to be empathy, but it is not, for two reasons. First empathy tends to be feeling-led, where synesis is reason-led, seeking insight into how a person’s thinking shapes perception, interpretation, conception and valuation, which provides insight into feeling. Second, the goal is not necessarily for one person to understand the other. The goal is for each person to approach the other to produce a  mutual understanding that allows each to effectively relate to the other. The most important distinction is achievability of the goal. The ideal of empathy sets an impossible goal for itself. No person can feel what another feels. But synesis is very possible: we can always reach mutual understandings if both people truly want it and willing to work to achieve it. Synesis is the precisely the form of creative understanding most important in design work — not only for our users but within our design teams. We have to create new thought-spaces to get to the goal of synesis, so we become able to understand one another’s understandings and “get aligned”. These same new thought spaces also enable novel creative solution, which is why design research stimulates radical innovation. —  But synesis is an intensely challenging activity that involves active listening, apprehension tolerance, willingness to be taught, and in fact all the designerly virtues, in complex coordination. And when we practice this constellation of virtues together, so we get better at it and it functions as a single motion, this is the virtue of synesse, the capacity for synesis. Synesse challenges the ideal of empathy, especially its impossible goal, which ironically encourages the futile conclusion “you can never really understand me.”