The thing about design

ANT, Design, Philosophy, Politics

Latour, from “A Cautious Prometheus”:

Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc. But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these. In other words, you in design as well as we in science and technology studies may insist that objects are always assemblies, “gatherings” in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, or things and Dinge, and yet, four hundred years after the invention of perspective drawing, three hundred years after projective geometry, fifty years after the development of CAD computer screens, we are still utterly unable to draw together, to simulate, to materialize, to approximate, to fully model to scale, what a thing in all of its complexity, is.

So little design writing pays attention to the social reality on both sides of design — design-in-the-making and design-in-use.

Whenever designers wax political, they fall in line with politics-as-usual. They talk about all the ways design should serve the political goals shared by all good people, opposed by bad people.

It is as if they have never designed.

It is as if they have never aligned any diverse group of people around a goal before.

It would be so much better if, when politics comes up, people would wax designerly,

We do not need to politicize design. We need to designize politics.

The patron

Fables, myths & parables

An industrialist lived the first half of his life solely for wealth.

He worked hard and now he was worth nearly seven zillion dollars.

But something was missing. He felt a void in the center of his soul, and he realized that the only thing that could fill it was art.

So he set out to be a patron of the arts.

But this industrialist could not just be a patron. He had to match his achievement in industry. And not only match but surpass it. Further, he would utilize the very virtues that made him the wealthiest man in the world to produce the greatest work of art.

His patronage would be remembered as the crowning achievement of his life.

So he budgeted one-third of his vast fortune to fund a single great masterpiece.

One third of his fortune! — two and one-third zillion dollars — channeled into one painting!

Whoever was chosen would become mindbogglingly wealthy.

Never had any artist in the history of humankind been incentivized to this extreme of excellence!

The patron knew he would have to proceed very carefully. A third of his fortune was at stake. There was no room for mistakes.

To ensure the desired result, he issued a Request for Proposal.

In this RFP, was a requirement: Provide an exact description of what the paining would be, on quarter inch squares, specifying surface, brush size, paint type, brand and pigment.

The patron wanted to visualize very precisely what each painter planned to deliver, so he could compare proposals and to select the best option.

This is what he intended, and this is exactly what he did.

Hundreds of the best painters submitted proposals.

The patron carefully compared and selected the best one.

The selected painter painted the painting, flawlessly and exactly as described. What is more, the painting was delivered on time and on budget.

It was the best painting ever produced.

Smiling insistence

Design, Love

When I was younger I was “philosophical” in that casual way people are when they enjoy reflecting on life, but still don’t see much benefit in reading other folk’s difficult technical reflections. Maybe we want to keep our own original vision virginally pure. We think to ourselves: “You might need to get your ideas from books and teachers, but I have my own ideas and I don’t need to learn what to think from other people.” Or we read, but just to find others who also know what we know.

It was only a desperate existential need to defend my way of working — the conditions I need to design — that eventually drove me to do philosophy.

In my world, working as a designer, if I cannot make clear sense fast, I get chained to tasks that drown me in anxiety, boredom and despair.

If I hadn’t needed help wherever I could find it, I would have gone to my grave mistaking my very unoriginal notions of originality for pristine, untouched intuition. Naw… we learn from authority to exalt this complacently rebellious arrogant nonsense.

I am still desperate. But I have more inner resources for explaining what is happening to me, when people force me to work in ways that make design impossible.

I still get anxious and I still get bored, but I never despair.

I refuse to despair, because I know better.

But know and insist… and smile? That’s the next goal.

Susan teaches this: Warm demander.

Dysapparitions of material

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

I read Bruno Latour very much as the best kind of Catholic.

I read him as a radical Marian (and the furthest thing from a “Sophiologist”).

I read Latour as the most rigorously devout disciple of Mary Mater.

And Latour knows better than anyone that, just as no woman can be reduced to what some man thinks of her, matter is not reducible to scientific fact — that is, what “the” scientific community thinks of Mother Nature.

Nietzsche, the devoted son of a Lutheran minister, once asked “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

But supposing truth is absolutely not a woman?

Supposing truth is a self-serving, unfaithful notion of woman?

Supposing this notion of “woman” makes relationship with any real woman — actual or metaphorical — impossible?

Now what?

Materialists are the incels of philosophy.

They are obsessed with an ideal object of thought they confuse with real being, and this confused obsession kills all possibility of relationship. The more the materialist obsesses over his object of thought, the more unreal and alienated his notions become. And she can intuit this. She feels it directly: this dude is interacting with some creepy doppelgängeress in his head, not with her. She recoils. Her devastating pronouncement: Ick.

She will open only to those who meet her as real, who converse with her as existent, who live life with her as companion, who become transformed by her, with her, in relationship with her.

She appears as herself only in relationship. She dysappears to those who grasp her as an object of hate or of infatuation or of distant worship.

Believe me, I raised two daughters, and I know an abusive profile when I see it.

The abuser’s tell: He arrives with a defined woman-role in mind, and he demands conformity to it.

“If you were a good girlfriend, you would…”

“If you really loved me, you would…”

Marxism is a collective abuser.

Marxism is an incel driven to psychosis by disappointment and resentment.

The world failed to live up to his high expectations, and he is extremely upset about it.

And he is making that disappointment her problem.

The existent real material order will not play her role, because she is a bad material order, and that is why she is unhappy.

A good material order would behave like a good material order, and then he would happy.

He would toil a little during the day, and write a little poetry in the evening. And the material order would smile sweetly and submissively. She would shelter him for free. She would cook for him for free. She would be an angel of compassionate care when he needs free healthcare. She would fetch his newspaper and slippers. She would perform her wifely duties, and not out of duty.

If she were a good material economic order, she would do all these things.

But she isn’t.

And now she will pay for it.

See what she made him do?

Ethos, ethics, mutuality

Autobiography, Design, Judaism, Politics

The highest achievements of humanity stand upon mutuality. Mutuality is for the mutual.

Ethics belong to an ethos. Ethics are the participatory norms of those who belong to some particular ethos.

When enemies of an ethos demand ethical consistency from those belonging to an ethos, even as they attempt to undermine, weaken or destroy that ethos, they use an ethic against itself.

Imagine a horde of hooligans flooding the tennis courts of Wimbledon. When the players, referees and spectators try to drive them out of the stadium, the hooligans howl accusations of hypocrisy. “If you really loved tennis, you would adhere to the rules of tennis, and drive us out with better and better tennis playing! See? You are no better than us. You are hooligans, too!”

The rest of the world agrees, but takes it further: The tennis crowd is even worse than hooligans. We expect more from elite athletes and connoisseurs of such a refined sport. Hooligans are just noble savages, doing what hooligans do. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to tell them where they can and can’t be, and what they can and can’t do? Tennis players, though, are like us, and we expect them to live up to our high moral and intellectual standards. Maybe even higher! When tennis players use their rackets as weapons, that is truly a betrayal of the ideals of tennis — and to our own.

So Wimbledon is condemned by the officials of the Olympics, and sports officials around the world. Social media goes crazy over pictures of the brutality of the eviction and on and on. Wimbledon is boycotted. Before long, tennis courts and vandalized, tennis players are threatened, assaulted and abused. Soon nobody even wants to wear tennis shoes in public anymore.

The entire world of tennis suffers because of the brutality of Wimbledon security guards. And the fact that tennis players think Wimbledon is above criticism only makes it worse.

I have no idea at all why I got so intense about this analogy.

I suppose it is because this to me is real. Very real.

Maybe it is because I am a designer who is entirely dependent on how people around me participate in the projects I work on.

When we initiate a projects, we attempt to initiate our client collaborators into a new way of working, and establish a design ethos around the project. If we succeed, we can do great work.

But if we fail at this — if our project participants refuse to participate in design processes — we are no longer able to play the game of design. We might be able to flex and contort and pivot and get some kind of work done, but we are no longer doing what we agreed to do. And this is fine if we are good at doing all these other kinds of work. If we are excellent logistics managers, business analysts, process engineers and so on, this is unpleasant but doable.

But if we are designers who approach everything as design, and this is how we cope with practical matters, we are deprived of what is needed not only to flourish but to cope at all.

And to be told, “just design harder and harder, better and better” is a demoralizing insult.

Just play tennis better and better, be extra, extra punctilious about playing by the rules, and eventually the hooligans will see what we are doing, and choose to clear off the courts. Then they might eventually even learn to love our sport. We must have enough faith in our way that we keep playing even when our courts are crowded with people who loathe tennis and tennis players.

Design is not only a set of design techniques, or a design method for effective use of techniques in concert, or a design theory upon which method is grounded, or a design praxis of reflective practice and applied theory, or a tacit design way resulting from a life of deep design praxis. It is all of these, of course, but more than that design is an ethos, which depends on a set of design ethics.

Whenever I hear designers talk about design ethics it always goes directly toward the same set of environmental and social justice concerns. I have yet to hear designs discuss the behavioral norms required for design to happen at all.

And then designers wonder why we seem unable to get the conditions we need to do the work we do.

Our work is almost automatically rejected out of hand by industrious builders with no tolerance for non-rigorous intuitive fluff. They need to very efficiently show progress toward building the next undesirable, unusable unintuitive thing in their backlog.

Design is only possible where a design ethos (at least temporarily) prevails.

Liberalism only works within a liberal ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

“What is Design?” chapbook

Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve been mulling over a project involving letterpress printed design wisdom.

Today, I am fantasizing about letterpress printing a chapbook, in an aphorism-reflection format inspired by Jan Zwicky’s beautiful Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor.

Here is my aphorism list so far:

  • “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” (Winston Churchill)
  • “Design is everything. Everything is design.” (Paul Rand)
  • “Design should be invisible.” (Beatrice Warde)
  • “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “You can’t decide the way forward. You have to design the way forward.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “Compete to be unique, not the best” (Joan Magretta, channeling Michael Porter)
  • “Usefulness, usability, and desirability: A useful design is one that people need and will use. A usable design is one they can either use immediately or learn to use readily. A desirable design is one they want.” (Liz Sanders)
  • “We think with our hands.” (Tim Brown)
  • “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” (Anonymous)
  • “Behind a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” (John LeCarre)
  • “Conflict divides the world into four halves.” (Anomalogue)
  • “Craft is material dialogue.” (Anomalogue)
  • “A problem well put is a problem half solved.” (John Dewey)
  • “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” (Albert Einstein)
  • “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” (Bertrand Russell)
  • “Start anywhere.” (John Cage)
  • “Nothing happens without a plan. Nothing happens according to plan.” (Anonymous)
  • “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (Carl von Clausewitz)
  • “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
  • “The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” (Willfred Sellars)
  • “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “What has a name is real.” (Basque saying)
  • “Never mistake motion for action.” (Ernest Hemingway)
  • “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Alan Kay)
  • “The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning.” (James Clear)
  • “It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.” (Adlai Stevenson)

I need more design-related aphorisms. If you have any, please share.

Best and worst projects

Autobiography, Design

When I introduce myself to clients, I’ll sometimes talk about my “zigzagging career path” through various design disciplines.

The coolest zag was through strategic design. That was a time when I ran around solving “undiagnosed design problems”. Many problems that appeared to be intractable political, management or process problems became far more tractable when approached as design problems.

This has me reflecting:

My most rewarding projects have always been those where we took a design approach to solve a problem that seemed outside the domain of design.

My least rewarding projects have been those where we were prevented from taking a design approach to solve what everyone knows is a design problem.

Ward Farnsworth on aporias

Philosophy

Ward Farnsworth‘s uncanny skill at putting the most difficult things in simple and clear words just amazes me.

I can’t even envy him. The man is in a whole different league, as thinker or writer, but obviously more than that.

I am especially loving his chapter on aporias in Socratic Method. It builds on the topic of ignorance and something he calls “double ignorance” from the chapter before:

…Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general. People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it. But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do. Everyone is in that position sometimes. We have a felt sense of confidence built on sand. It wouldn’t survive cross-examination but doesn’t receive any. Those in that position are badly off and also dangerous to others, like drunk drivers who think they are sober.

Aporia is what happens when we apprehend our own double-ignorance.

If you were questioned by Socrates, he would eventually convince you that nothing you say is good enough. After getting the hang of Socratic thinking, you may reach the same conclusion yourself. Any statement you make about a big question can be revealed as wrong, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate in some way. This discovery can ultimately lead to a sense of skepticism. But most immediately it leads to aporia (pronounced ap-or-EE-ah). Aporia is a kind of impasse; literally it means “without a way.” It is the state reached when your attempts to say something true have all been refuted and you don’t know what else to do or think. Sometimes it is described as a state of mind — a sense of disorientation and perplexity; but strictly speaking those states are a reaction to the impasse. They are what you feel when you run out of resources for answering a question. Your feet are trying to find something solid to stand on and can’t.

Aporia can be a sign that its holder is departing a state of compound ignorance. You thought you knew something, but it turns out that you don’t understand it; you were ignorant of your ignorance, and now it’s clear. … People aren’t alarmed when they are questioned and know the answer. They aren’t alarmed when they know that they don’t know the answer. They are alarmed when they thought they knew and then realize that they don’t.

…double ignorance is, for Socrates, a kind of sleep through which everyone walks to some extent. Then you walk into a wall. The wall is aporia. The awakening is a rude one, but deeply valuable. The sensation of ignorance — of realizing that you know less than you had thought — is unpleasant, at least at first. It is experienced as loss by the ego, which has a built-in good opinion of its own wisdom. But Socratic study helps make that discovery feel more welcome. One comes to see that such a discovery isn’t really the loss of wisdom. It’s the arrival of it.

Then Farnsworth begins listing practical benefits of aporia:

…Aporia may be seen as a necessary stage before real learning can happen. You realize that you’ve been pushing words around as if their meaning were obvious but that you don’t really understand them. Now you have a sense of something missing. Your confidence in your knowledge is gone. It needed to go to make room for something better.

…Aporia in this sense can also cleanse you of obnoxious qualities. Recall the discussion of the Theatetus … Theatetus had given birth to an idea that was pronounced stillborn. Socrates encourages him to keep trying, but says that Theatetus will be better off even if his ideas never improve. Aporia will have made him easier to put up with. Such humility may not seem a very exciting reward at first. But then think about how often people are too sure of themselves, and feel smart when they’re not, and how unendurable they are, and how dangerous, and how likely we are to be just as insufferable to others for the same reasons, and how many problems arise from nothing but this. Other people, it seems clear, would be better off if they realized how little they know, and with a suspicion that in the long run they show themselves to be fools in most of what they say. So would we all. Some shock therapy is a small price to pay for relief from those curses. — Aporia is a form of it.

…Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn. It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good-now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.

Then things get (at least for me) even more interesting…

We’ve just talked as though there are right answers to the questions under pursuit, and that aporia might inspire a harder search for them. But suppose you conclude, after many rounds of all this, that the answers will never be found. It still wouldn’t be time to give up. On a Socratic view it’s never time to give up. We do better by accepting that the search probably has no end but going on anyway as if it might. For even if you can’t possess the truth, you can get closer to it. Discourse that improves understanding becomes the valuable thing, but it works best if you forget that and act as though you’re in it to capture the truth.

And they start pressing into mystical regions. It becomes more apparent how Plotinus really was a neo-Platonist:

A more radical view of aporia regards it as sometimes inspiring speechlessness because you have arrived at a truth that can’t be spoken. The idea goes: there are unspeakable truths — that is, truths that defy language, and so can be called ineffable. Perhaps they are verbal analogues of irrational numbers. But they sometimes can be perceived without words. It may be that justice, for example, can’t be captured by a definition. But it can be encircled by the close failure of many efforts at definition. Instead of that result seeming to be a mess and therefore a failure, the mess is the thing sought. The goal of the effort at reasoning isn’t a conclusion based on the reasoning but a grasp of something larger. We learn that the truth isn’t coextensive with our ability to talk about it or with our powers of comprehension.

This way of looking at aporia might be inferred from the approach of the early dialogues. Why is the truth always sought and never discovered? Perhaps because it can’t be; that is the discovery. This idea finds some support in Plato’s Seventh Letter… “This much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries — that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.”

Now I will do a mic drop for Farnsworth by quoting Nietzsche:

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

This book exemplifies wisdom concealed in simplicity.

I’m halfway tempted to shelve my Farnsworth collection alongside my Marty Neumeier books.

Ecological credit and debt

Politics

One thing I can say for environmentalists — they seem to sense humankind’s debt to the natural order far more immediately than their opponents do.

I’m tempted to make an analogy. Just as conservatives fear economic collapse because (stereotypical) liberals think they (allegedly) can keep spending and spending and running up more and more debt, environmentalists see this same problem with ecology.

A liberal environmentalist might say to a (stereotypical) conservative, you can’t keep overdrawing on our natural resources this way and expect that ecological debt to accrue faster than it can be repaid. The ecology can extend us some credit, in the form of resilience and adaptation, but there is a limit, and when that credit limit is exceeded, expect collapse.

This is a very rough analogy meant only to indicate a trajectory of potential understanding. It is a newborn intuition. If someone wants to analyze it to bits — kill it in the cradle — destroying it will be like stealing candy from a baby. But I sense that it has some potential to mature and become a stronger line of argument. Or maybe it will grow up to make appeals to common understanding on ecology and economy.

Metareform Judaism

Judaism, Kabbalah

Ultimately, I see Judaism not as an original revelation of an absolute truth, but as an initiatory constitution (covenant) and an initiating thrust toward relationship with an inconceivable, incomprehensible Absolute. The present of Judaism is suspended between from and toward. This is radical Reform Judaism.

One of Adonai’s favorite rebukes is “stiff-necked people”. Plato also wrote about stiff-necked people:

Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.

This is just how we are, we humans.

Sometimes we need to de-fascinate our eyes, unfasten our heads, loosen our necks and look from side to side. We might even turn around to see what is going on behind the backs of our heads. And once we get used to a stationary 360-degree view, we might stand up and walk around. We might even interact with the things around us. Some of those things might be other people, and here it might occur to us to converse with them and enlarge our understanding. Finally, we might summon enough courage to go full-on peripatetic and start feeling for exits, openings and entrances to elsewhere and otherwise.

Welcome to Beriah!

A great many religious people today, seeking religious intensity within their traditions, believe that they have found it in activism.

And indeed, they have found something.

But what they have found is the furthest thing from God. They have found collective misapotheosis in totalizing ideology.

They believe they are taking their faith to the streets, when in fact they have imported the street into their sanctuaries.

Their escape from illusion is an intoxicating delusion. Their spiritual awakening is the climax of a collective ideological dream.

Chuang Tzu never said:

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He had awakened from the delusion that he had ever been Chuang Chou. He realized that it was his duty to make everyone around him “do the work” required to wake up to the fact that they are butterflies dreaming that they are people.

I look forward to the day that Reform Judaism turns to its proper from-toward present and, overcome with teshuvah, grinds up and drinks its political ideoidols.

Shame recovery

Autobiography

Shame is weird.

It has little to do with who we are as people, and everything to do with the roles we are called on to play.

If we accept a role and bungle it — even if it is forced upon us — we will feel due shame for playing it poorly, however little we personally identify with that role. If we are forced to dance, and we dance badly, we are made to look ridiculous. This is true even if we are not dancers and care nothing about dance. And that ridiculousness clings long after the dancing ends.

But shame does not necessarily harm dignity. We can maintain dignity even in humiliation.

Personal dignity doesn’t immunize us against the pain of shame. And even if we bear shame with dignity, it can damage us socially, in the outer layers of our social persona, even extending beyond the role we bungled.

If we choose, shame can drive us to new depths of dignity. If our dignity is no deeper than our persona, shame destroys us.

Another strategy for overcoming shame is pride, which is not the same as dignity. Pride treats the contempt of others as unimportant, if not nonexistent. Pride does not attempt to reestablish lost respect, but instead meets contempt with contempt. Pride tries to kill shame. But pride is expensive.

I care what people think. But I have clarified to myself what matters more and matters less, and so I exercise my own judgment, even while listening to and caring about the judgment of others.

I can recover from any humiliation, but in the meantime I cannot avoid feeling whatever shame I feel. I cannot avoid it and I refuse to try.

Did I learn this from Nietzsche?

The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

It should be beneath our dignity to stay in humiliating conditions.

Maybe shame and dignity are the mysterious levers society uses to pushes us away from where we do not belong to where we do belong, even (or especially) if we have to make that place for ourselves.

More than every possible everything

Metaphysics

I used to say this often, but I haven’t in a while: a soul extends to the limits of what we mean when we say “everything”.

Each soul is universe-sized. This is why I sometimes refer to everythings, plural.

Materialists who believe that a soul (psyche) is an emergent property of our nervous system, and folk-believers who understand souls as spiritual bodies enveloped within our carnal bodies — both believe they have nothing in common, but they are wrong. They both confuse souls with person-sized mental entities: ghosts.

And because they see souls as ghosts, they fail to recognize their true everything-sized self for who it is: themselves. They call their own all-encompassing everything-soul whatever God or God-equivalent term they’ve adopted. Misapotheosis is the result of failure to comprehend the true nature of selfhood and mistaking it for the Absolute.

Self is ultimate comprehension. God is what incomprehensibly comprehends each and every self.

God is incomprehensible, but the fact of God’s realness can be comprehended (“God is both real and incomprehensible”).

More important than this theoretical knowing is a practical know-how. We can adopt an attitude toward incomprehensible reality that learns first to expect the unexpected, then to expect the inconceivable (and therefore unimaginable), and eventually learns to recognize and welcome inconceivable realia as the very substance of life.

Let us call this attitude or relation suprehension — the everted complement of comprehension.

Our own conception “everything” is comprised from without by infinitely more than what any or all of us can mean by everything.

Mine is a metaphysic of surprise.

Not only our religious life, but our human relationships depend on this attitude of suprehension — of openness to realities transcending our own compressive self.

Some come by it naturally. Others of us must cultivate it through effort.

Feeling better

Autobiography, Philosophy

The philosopher’s stone turns lead into gold.

You cannot spend a lead coin. You can’t even give it away.

So lead coins accumulate until they crush the life out of you.

Without my philosopher’s stone, my salary would be the death of me.

Service design as a way

Design, Politics

A good service designer should be an observant connoisseur of services. This is not easy. The best designed services are unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, appearing only at carefully choreographed moments of “service evidence”. The best part of a service goes entirely unnoticed and unappreciated.

Services are most noticeable when they break down — when they are not good.

This is why, when people ask me what service design is I answer with a question: “When is the last time you were truly infuriated with an organization?”

Everyone has a story. Five to five hundred minutes later, when the story subsides, I say: “My job is to prevent that from happening.”

Answering the question “When is the last time you received truly good invisible service from an organization?” is a question only true service designers can answer with the same energy.

It almost takes prolonged exposure to absence of a service to appreciate its invisible presence.

So many little things must go well to notice little infuriating things that don’t.

We live in blessed obliviousness to innumerable luxuries, noticing only the flaws.

Not to get political, but if we ever succeed in dismantling “the system”, we will discover innumerable services we never knew were sustaining our lives and our very selves, in ways we never detected or even suspected.

Job description

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

I do not aspire to be an expert, even in fields of expertise of my own invention.

If you need expertise, go find an expert.

But if no expertise exists to address what ails you, I’m here for that.

I’ll approach it as a philosophy design problem of the form “Here I don’t know my way about,” with the aim of reaching a common understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. I’ll design you a little localized philosophy that enables you and your collaborators to define and share a problem so it can be solved.

It will be messy and inefficient and unpredictable. But it will be interesting, if you can handle it.

It’s practical “beginner’s mind” without all the bullshit westernized Zen, with all its blissed out peace and escapism.

Yeah, I’m processing

Autobiography

If the last few posts sound like I’m “emotionally processing” that is because I am.

I had a really discouraging and humiliating week, capping a season and a half of joyless, stressful, tedious cranial labor.

I’ve been breathing sour air of ambient dislike. I’m covered all over with pin pricks and paper cuts inflicted by that polite open contempt practiced by corporate lifers. Chaos and formalism have joined forces to purge chaos of all freedom and formality of all order. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read some Kafka.)

I am where I shouldn’t be, trying to do what I don’t do, and I’ve lived too long to believe this is my lot.

Etiquette and depth of faith

Autobiography, Philosophy

Life has taught me that some people will like me and others will not.

I don’t need to believe people who dislike or disrespect me are bad people. It just means I am probably not supposed to socialize with them, which includes working too closely with them. I’m sure that given the right setting, most of them are somewhere in the range of okay to awesome. They’re just not for me, and I’m not for them.

Others will like me right away — at first, as long as we do not exceed a certain depth — but past that point, they will like me even less than people who instantly dislike me. By “others” I mean everyone.

Of course, if my etiquette were better, fewer people would dislike me immediately. But that would require focusing on other things that I consider far more important than universal likability. In fact, it would require betraying those other things, since likability is something between real or feigned commonality of faith, and etiquette is the art of hiding difference. I’m out to differentiate, and deep disagreeability is the best means to that end.

One of my more pessimistic beliefs is that past a certain depth, we all diverge in faith. Deep down, we are all un-alike and perplexing to one another, and need to suppress this essential difference in favor of commonality. If you automatically drive to the maximum depth with every friend, you will be a friend-losing machine. I am understanding that my depths are just for me. Nobody’s going down there with me. Not only is that reasonable; it is good. I’m not going down into their depths with them either! Fair is fair.

(Oh, you’re different? You respect debate and difference of opinion? Debate and opinions are shallow. Perhaps limiting discussion to depths that debate can resolve is a weird sort of etiquette. Perhaps someday some Francis Fukuyama type of pop political theorist will write a book that casts liberalism as some sort of etiquette of the public sphere. See, this is the kind of rude shit I try to keep to myself, except here on my perverse public diary, this anomablogue. Abandon hope all ye who enter here and eavesdrop on my private thoughts.)

If you have talents in etiquette, that is, social grace, you can reveal more of yourself without irritating or offending others, but I am untalented in that area.

For now, my primary use of etiquette is keeping the few friendships I value.

Autobio DNA

Autobiography, Philosophy

In high school geometry I would never memorize proofs beyond the fundamental axioms. I found it easier just to re-prove them. It took me longer to finish tests, but my teacher let me work through the lunch break.

And this has been my life ever since, for better and for so much worse.