In the field of design research, leading questions are generally considered undesirable and are carefully avoided, especially in foundational research (where the design team is trying to develop a basic understanding of some domain of actors, their goals, behaviors, attitudes, contexts, etc.), and in generative research (where the team looks for opportunities to introduce improvements … Continue reading A good use for leading questions
Sebastian Haffner’s memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany, Defying Hitler, offers some fascinating insights into the role of development of private life in maintaining a liberal democracy: After 1926 or thereabouts there was almost nothing worth discussing anymore. The newspapers had to find their headlines in foreign countries. In Germany all was quiet, … Continue reading Private life and liberalism
I have been trying to reread Daybreak, for probably the sixth or eighth time. This is the book that originally, back in 2004, made me start a notebook to capture the connections I was seeing across passages and across books in Nietzsche’s corpus, which before had existed only in the margins of the books themselves. … Continue reading Daybreak
Why is it that reading Nietzsche always sends me back into working in my wiki? I just made a new theme: Reciprocity. And under that page I created three headings: Of help Of harm Of love I will offer a chord of quotes to indicate the theme that unites these three reciprocities. Of help: “Pity … Continue reading Reciprocities
I’m digging through old posts where I mentioned sophia, looking for a Nietzsche quote on taste, where he links taste to wisdom. One striking pattern: a great many of these posts were abandoned but kept private (as opposed to left in draft form, which is what I generally do with with writing I think is … Continue reading Sophia contingens
One of my more unfortunate habits: whenever the bad design of some misconceived and malformed product, service or state of affairs pisses me off I imagine the meeting that produced it. Then I imagine all the little philosophies each participant brought into the room and used for misunderstanding and talking past (or over) all the … Continue reading Expathy?
Decentering one’s self or one’s identity as a response to one’s former egocentrism or ethnocentrism is just this year’s model of altruism. Altruism is benevolence modeled on a stunted vision of individualism, which it tries to overcome by simply inverting it: Selfish people care about themselves at the expense of others, so unselfish people care … Continue reading Please do not decenter yourself
My friend Nick Gall hates being called a fructivist, but not only is he one, he was the first one, because he invented it. Here’s my own sloppy definition of fructivism: Fructivism is an ethic that prioritizes fruitfulness — the proliferation of creative possibilities — over more traditional virtues. I needed to define fructivism because … Continue reading Fructivism
This morning, for no particular reason I’ve been poking around in Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer In addition to the various particular errors we may make regarding particular thinkers, there is also a common mistake that we commit again and again in our interpretation of all … Continue reading Esoterism practice
Clifford Geertz helped me see that understanding (or, empathy) is not an act of directly experiencing what another person experiences (which renders understanding impossible, if not essentially absurd), but rather the ability to participate in their symbol system, so that we can understand a proverb, a poem or a joke — or, as I like … Continue reading Teaching 9
Topics for my Medium blog on design: Touch-points/-lines/-planes/-volumes Design as gift Saving more than time and money Perpetual improvement = bad experience Triple-catastrophe of October 2011 Design Hero’s Journey Experience rhythms: journeys, cycles, episodes
Joseph Campbell’s most famous quote, “follow your bliss”, might really have been a careless remark of an old man well past his prime. For years I refused to take Campbell seriously, and even posed him against an antithetical motto, “follow your angst.” But reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I do not see any … Continue reading Joseph Campbell (and some weird rambling)
Reading Appendix A of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, “Campaigns and Movements” I came upon this bit: “Most of us, when young, hope for purity of heart. The easiest way to assure oneself of this purity is to will one thing—but this requires seeing everything as part of a pattern whose center is that single thing. … Continue reading Maturing
To understand another culture it is necessary for an ethnographic investigator to suspend or temporarily suppress their own reflexive cultural judgments, at least long enough to get a sense of how life looks and feels from within the other culture’s lifeworld. If the investigator carries their own convictions and habitual judgments into the investigation, they … Continue reading Synesis
When I use a product, I feel the milieu that produced it. Products are crystallized philosophies. In a designed object I feel people — the people who produced it and sometimes a precise person for whom an object is intended. This “personal from” and “personal to” is what makes design what it is. When I get … Continue reading Why I get emotional about design
Wow, this post really sprawled out. It hits a lot of my enduring interests. I’m not sure it is suitable for reading. It might just be a personal journal entry written to myself. Feel free to eavesdrop if you wish, but I cannot promise it will make sense or yield any value. * I listened … Continue reading Slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions of interpersonal being
Today, I feel a need to make an arbitrary list of consequential reconceptions. These are some of the core ideas I want to put in one of the several pamphlets I have planned. I’ve named two of them: Geometric Parables and The Ten-Thousand Everythings. Maybe this is the start of a third pamphlet, Syllabus Listicalis. Blindness is … Continue reading Syllabus Listicalis
What has happened to our attitudes toward bigotry? I used to feel like I was a member of a vast alliance of people committed to fighting bigotry. We believed it was possible, and in optimistic moods perhaps even even inevitable, that bigotry would be overcome. In the last three or so years, though, I have … Continue reading Bigotry bigotry
Is it just me, or do the conceptions of logocentrism outlined in my Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory seem logocentric? Logocentrism – The Greek logos has a wide range of meanings, and designates both a rational or intelligible principle and a structure or order that provides phenomena with an origin, or that explains their nature. … Continue reading Logocentrism
Religions are born as freely-given gifts. They mature in gratitude toward the giver. They die as stolen gifts, snatched from the giver’s hand and stolen as a possession: a belief. * The giver is a mystery known only by way of receiving from who-knows-where. In the absence of this receiving the giver becomes nonsense. Once … Continue reading Inspiration, faith, belief.