Dimensions of Service Design

Design

Below is my first attempt to convert a 2019 talk I gave to a group of UX researchers into a blog post. I’m not sure if it’s working or not, but I’m going to publish it here to get feedback.

Service designers are asked all the time how what they do relates to what other designers, especially UX designers, do. My colleagues have been asked this question by clients, and it seems a new article on this question pops up every couple of months. Everyone has their own way of answering the question. My favorite way of explaining it has three parts.

  1. I start by showing two tools service designers use that give a concrete indication of what makes us different.
  2. Then I use a metaphor of dimensions to clarify how different design disciplines relate.
  3. I finish by returning to the two service design tools, and make the relationship both clear and concrete.

 

Part one: Two key service design tools

To begin, I will show two tools service designers use.

The first service design tool is something we call a Moment Map. A moment map shows all the paths a person can take as they receive a service. Typically, a Moment Map begins with the recognition of a need and ends with the resolution of the need. A Moment Map can depict an existing service, but more often we use them to outline a proposed future service.

A Moment Map shows all the channel paths available to a person receiving the service. By “service channel” we mean the medium by which a service is delivered. A service that is delivered via an app or website can be said to take place in the digital service channel. If you call a call center, the service channel is telephone. If you get in the car and go to a retail space or service center, we might call that the retail space service channel.

Below is an example of a Moment Map.

Moment Map example

The second service design tool is the Service Blueprint. A Service Blueprint follows one customer’s journey through a service step by step, and at each step outlines how the service is delivered. The delivery is divided into a frontstage – what a customer experiences — and backstage, where processes, policies, people and technology platforms are identified. The process of blueprinting produces a list of touchpoints and capabilities DaVita required to deliver an experience like the one described in the journey.

Below is an example of a simple Service Blue Print.

Service Blueprint example

Keep these two service design tools in mind as we move through the second part of the discussion where we metaphor of dimensions to clarify the relationship between service design and other design disciplines.

Part two: Design spaces and their dimensions

To understand the relationship between service design and other design disciplines who collaborate with service designers, for example UX designers, it is helpful to think about it in terms of dimensions.

We’ll start with a single touchpoint.

If you recall your elementary school geometry, a point is zero dimensional. When we connect two points, that makes a line. In our model, a touchpoint or a series of touchpoints is an experience that unfolds in time in a single service channel.

So a zero-dimensional touchpoint or one-dimensional “touch-line” is a single channel experience.

The space of single-channel design

Single-channel design problems are well-understood. We have tried-and-true methods for solving them. We have existing team structures, with roles who are used to working together. Many books have been written explaining how to do single-channel design, and how to do it better. This is the kind of problem most designers, such as UX designers spend their time working on.

Most UX designers will tell you that there is more to their work, though, than just focusing on their service channel. To do a good job designing in any service channel it is important to understand the context. We must understand the person for whom we are designing. UXers call them “users”. They might be “customers”, or “patients”, or “employees”, etc. In service design, we like to call them “service actors” or just “actors”. We need to know who they are, what they are trying to do, and we need to understand their needs, attitudes, beliefs, and habits. This is something designers of all kinds always want to know about the people they design for.

We also need to know what they’re doing before they use the artifact we are designing, and what they’ll be doing after. And we also need to know what other touchpoints they’ll be interacting with.

Context of single-channel design

Back in my UX design days, people were always looking for a telephone number to call, just in case they “need to talk to a real person.” And we were always concerned with how people arrived at our digital touchpoints from other channels. What expectations were set?

While UX designers (and other single-channel designers) don’t have direct control over what happens before or after the experiences they are designing, or the experiences their users have in other channels, understanding this before-and-after cross-channel context helps designers create experiences that connect seamlessly and harmonize with the other experiences that make up a user’s overall experience with the brand.

But some design disciplines go beyond understanding, and actively shape the full end-to-end cross-channel experience, for example, omnichannel design, experience design, customer experience design and patient experience design. They look at the whole experience a person has engaging an organization as they zig-zag between channels to accomplish their goals, and ensure that the whole experience at every point is seamless and positive.

This is where design gains another dimension, and we can think of two-dimensional design, or design of touch-planes.

The space of omnichannel design

Omnichannel design problems are harder to solve than single-channel ones. Methods for solving these problems exist, but they are not as widely known, and are missing altogether in many organizations. Omnichannel design teams include many of the the same people found on UX projects, but many other collaborators with expertise in all service channels also need to be involved, and many of them will be new to design methods might feel uncomfortable. And documenting, updating and activating and managing the omnichannel experience is a capability many organizations are only beginning to develop. Journey Management systems like TheyDo can help companies mature their omnichannel experience management capabilities.

Notice that the first service design tool we saw, the Moment Map, is a visualization of the omnichannel customer experience.

 

But omnichannel design also has a context which must be understood in order to design effectively. An omnichannel experience is only the tip of an operational iceberg.

Context of omnichannel design

The experience is both enabled and constrained by a company’s capabilities. A company might not have capabilities to deliver a good experience in the channel of choice of a customer. For instance, a customer who “wants to talk to a real person” on the phone might be frustrated by a company that does not operate a call center.

It is is also enabled and constrained by people who deliver and support the experience. Wherever in the experience the motivations of those delivering and supporting the experience are aligned with those of the customer (or other person being service) the experience is likely to be a good experience, but where motivations are misaligned the experience will be marred by friction, frustration and obstacles.

When this operational context becomes part of the design problem itself, a third dimension of design opens. We start thinking about “touch-volumes”.

The space of service design

With this third dimension, we are now in the domain of service design. Service designers not only design the omnichannel experience for the service actor who receives the service. We also design the experience of all other service actors who deliver and support it. This means we must conduct research with all service actors and understand the goals, needs, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, in order to understand how to align interests and create positive interactions between actors that afford mutual benefit and a good experience.

We also design the capabilities and operations that support optimal service delivery. We want to remove friction and obstacles that might prevent the smooth, efficient and satisfactory delivery, and we want to strategically automate wherever possible to free actors to focus on the more demanding, rewarding or special parts of the service where a human touch enhances the experience.

Notice that the second service design tool we saw, the Service Blueprint, is a visualization of the third dimension, which describes the service delivery of a service.

Part 3: Bringing it together

Once we see how different design disciplines relate using the metaphor of dimensions, we can now look at the two key service design tools, and locate single-channel design projects within them.

What the service design work does is it shows how single-channel touchpoints connect in the context of the larger service. By doing service design, and understanding the omnichannel service experience customers might have, and blueprinting how the service will be delivered, which includes digital tools employees and partners might use to support service delivery, many different UX projects can be coordinated to play various parts in a larger service experience, and that larger service experience is an important context for that design work.

Gut liberalism

Philosophy, Politics

It has been obvious to me for a while that Generation X was the last generation to be inculcated with liberal values. And by “inculcated, I do not mean only that we were taught to affirm the truth and correctness of a set of explicit liberal principles. We were trained to perform mental and social liberal acts. Perhaps it would be better to say that we were initiated into a liberal praxis. We are the last to understand liberalism from within.

What do I mean by praxis? Praxis is a reinforcing feedback relationship between theory and practice. Theory guides practice. Practice informs theory. The theory-guided practice informs theory. The practice-informed theory guides practice. Behind this loop, a set of intuitions develops, which move and shape perceptions, conceptions and responses. This intuitive grounding gives practice a reflective lucidity and theory applicability and effectiveness, and both a spontaneous naturalness. Praxis creates a tacit common sense among thinking and doing (and sometimes feeling). In other words, through praxis we develop a faith.

Until a faith develops behind praxis, the theories are only known about. And the actions are executed via memorized mental instructions. The practice is theoretically explained by reciting memorized concepts. The words and actions are stiff and unnatural.

After a faith develops behind praxis the words and actions are animated by something spontaneous and masterful, and they have a grace and naturalness. A person with faith-grounded praxis clearly “knows what they’re doing.” Their hands and bodies act with intelligence. And their minds are deferential. The mind knows it plays a leadership role, but must share credit with the whole being.

The point I am trying to make is that a great many young people I attempt to discuss politics with have been initiated into an illiberal praxis backed by an illiberal faith. They believe what they have been taught to believe about liberalism, from the understanding of an illiberal faith that rules out solidarity and understanding among unique persons, and accepts only shared interests among members of identities. They have been taught criticisms against liberalism and have accepted them uncritically, and are therefore closed to liberalism as a praxis, because it has been rejected as a theory. And against all evidence, they have been taught to interpret their own internalized nihilism, despair and dissatisfaction as caused by liberalism (and capitalism!), when, in fact, this unhappiness is a symptom of their own illiberal faith.

This seems true across the left-right spectrum. Young right-wing post-liberal youth are as smugly contemptuous of liberalism as the “left”-wing progressivists. They each see themselves as confronting an ideological other from the most diametrically-opposing position possible — as utterly opposite as Bolsheviks and Nazis.

From the perspective of this political Flatland, they cannot conceive how they are opposed from outside by something their omniscience cannot conceive, submerged in oblivion, a nothing from nowhere.

The sun is setting on our liberal-democracy. This is not because our institutions have eroded, or because one bad side is ruining everything. It is because we are running out of citizens who know how to participate in liberal-democracy. Liberalism must be inculcated in the young through education, but instead of educating our children, we stashed our children in childcare facilities where they were pacified for convenient management, while their parents dedicated themselves to what matters most in life: their career paths to retirement. The tradition has been broken, and now it is decaying, and the more people celebrate this fact, the faster we rot.

Changes of faith

Philosophy

In metanoia, what really happens? So much of it transpires beyond anything we can communicate. It isn’t ineffable. We can say all kinds of things about it. The problem is with being heard and understood. We are faced with an unhappy choice: We can say what makes perfect sense to our own ears, and face the perplexity, angst and hostility of those unprepared to comprehend our incomprehensible words, or we can translate our truth to familiar terms and be radically misunderstood.

Designers face this reality with their uninitiated clients and collaborators. We can “speak the language of business” and make do with approximate and often inadequate understandings of our work and what is required to do it effectively, or we can try to teach them designerly ways of understanding so they can collaborate with us effectively, or at least support the work, or at least not make our work impossible.

In reality, coming to that understanding requires a gentle transition from the familiar to a new unfamiliar praxis. The transition is only partly mental. Much of the understanding is acquired through doing. It is intuited in the How-doing hands and in the Why-feeling heart long before the What-knowing head catches up and can chatter explicitly about the What, How and Why of the work. To get that What-How-Why to coalesce and stabilize is to have a faith. The faith is not in the content of the understanding, nor is it in the willful believing of that content. Faith is what acts behind the understanding, that makes the explicit content of belief understood and self-evidently true. But to people who think exclusively in terms of systems of explicit content this just seems like mystical vapidity, a thereless there.

This understanding of design is not just a metaphor for religion. It is a species, or maybe a region, of religious understanding. There is a designerly metanoia a person will undergo, which will effect in them a designerly faith, which will animate their being and make it possible to think, feel and act as a designer in any situation where design is needed.

But returning to the question: in metanoia, what really happens? Do we awaken slumbering mental or spiritual faculties that allow us to receive previously undetected givens? Do we reorganize or recrystallize our souls to accommodate (or accommodate ourselves to) new intuitions and conceptions? How does it happen that a person and the world are reenworlded together in an event which changes nothing and everything together in one epiphanic rush? Does this question even need resolution? Or can we let it go with the simple fact that something of our ownmost own, nearer even than the content of our most intimate belief changes, and the consequences ripple outward to and beyond the furthest edges of the universe, before the advent of time and after it.

The Chinese coins hung from my reading lamp dangling over my right shoulder, are each the size of everything. It is only the metal part of the coin that is spatially constrained. The outer edge of the metal disk radiates an infinitely extensive circle along a two-dimensional plane, symbolizing in two dimensions an infinitely extensive sphere in a three-dimensional volume. This is the environmental part of the coin. But punched in the center of the metal is an empty square. This finite square-shaped bit of space is separated from the infinite environment of the coin, but it is also continuous with it, despite its apparent separation, and this is especially apparent when we see this coin from outside its plane, in three-dimensional space. Spatially-speaking, the metal is also continuous with the interior and environmental space, and the only difference is some of the space is occupied with the metal of the coin, and the rest is occupied by space and materials understood to belong to the coin’s environment. The entire world is saturated with myriad overlapping Chinese coin environments. These coins are quite overwhelming when we intuit their actual being.

When someone is faithless to another person, this just means they have allowed themselves to reenworld to us in unfamiliar form, as strangers. And some strangeness is so estranged it does not even want reconciliation, but increased estrangement. For reasons of its own, the new faith wants to divorce itself and alienate itself from the formerly uniting faith. We call it “breaking faith” for reasons few people recall.

Three neglected distinctions

Philosophy, Politics

I want to call attention to three crucial distinctions that I seldom see made, but which are disastrous if conflated.

  1. Evil versus immorality. Evil is acting with sadistic intent to harm or annihilate. Immorality does not intend suffering, harm or annihilation, but it tolerates or supports what does harm, and sometimes even tolerates or supports evil. When evil and immorality are conflated, moral judgment loses a primary point of orientation, and well-meaning people can be manipulated to tolerate or even support causes whose only goal is sadism, harm and annihilation. The passionate revulsion humans naturally feel toward evil is channeled into whatever examples of immorality capture their attention (whether injustice, indifference, disrespect or tribal animosity).
  2. Authoritarian versus totalitarian. Authoritarians attempt to tyrannically control what individuals do (and do not do). Totalitarians attempt to tyrannically control not only what individuals do, but also how they think and feel. Totalitarianism is not authoritarianism taken to an extreme; totalitarianism has the aim of displacing intuited reality with its own constructed truth, and it has its own path of development. When totalitarianism and authoritarianism are conflated, the visible brutality of authoritarians can be used to divert attention from cultural propagation of totalitarian ideologies through propaganda and indoctrination.
  3. Moral explanation versus justification. Moral explanation is descriptive, and causally accounts for the thoughts, attitudes and actions of an individual or group. Moral justification is normative and morally assesses the thoughts, attitudes and actions of an individual or group. When these are conflated a sympathetic description of how a person or group became evil can be passed off as a justification of evil.

I just know that something good is going to happen

Biography

I have always felt — and I believe this is a generational feeling — that something inconceivably good could happen.

Kate Bush sang of it in Cloudbusting.

I just know that something good is going to happen

I don’t know when

But just saying it could even make it happen

We also felt knew something inconceivably bad could happen. We fully expected to be annihilated in nuclear war. Every generation has its apocalyptic anticipation. Ours was nuclear holocaust. We cannot conceive our own inevitable nonexistence, so we channel the dread of this inevitability into some end-time event, and make it an object of all-consuming fear. Nuclear holocaust, the apocalypse, global warming. Every generation is the first to face the real existential threat.

We inhabited a vacuous present, which is an interregnum preceding the inconceivable good or bad event. This present offered us only tedium under fluorescent lights, a long, pointless trudge through the Stations of Quotidia to pointless retirement, all utterly impossible for any person to want. We were commanded to want it, anyway. We had no way to comply. You can’t make yourself want something unwanted (though you can want to want and use that as a counterfeit for wanting). But we discovered that we could extract some meaning and dignity from defiantly refusing to do what was impossible, as if we were choosing not to comply out of spite. (Punk was our pica. We didn’t have proper nutrition, so we ate soil and cigarette butts, and it was, to our impoverished palates, delicious.)

I think young people today have been taught to sneer at inconceivable hope, and to take every signal from within the soul literally. They are fixated on a literal climate apocalypse, and are too knowing for salvation. In another age they would be Father Ferapont, or one his modern secular politicized echoes.

Their ideology blinds them to the connection, because for them the gulf between scientistic believing and creedal believing is absolute. The one thing they do have right is that they are not religious. Father Ferapont confuses his creedal ideology with a religious faith.

The one thing the adherents to the post-postmodern doom cult cannot conceive is the possibility that they are not the moral pinnacle of humankind — judges fit to condemn (or faintly and tentatively praise) the present and all that has come before. There is a covert moral narcissism hidden in this attitude that brings to mind the words of Nietzsche: “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.”

The metacognitive incompetence of these young judges in their self-assessment of their own judgment defies all comprehension. Ironically, moral judgment is the only place where they have any confidence at all, but it is precisely here where their confidence is least warranted.

Ungrounded is not abstract

Philosophy

I believe what is making so many people feel alienated from the world, from other people and from themselves is too much playing with remote notions and far too little intuition of what is present.

If the world feels like a simulation to you, maybe you inhabit a simulation. If you feel like a ghost, maybe you are not doing what is required to be.

Lacking intuitive grounding, the ideas the alienated thinker plays with are not even abstract. After all, an abstraction is abstracted from something real and concrete. An ungrounded idea might share the simplicity and insubstantiality of an abstraction, but it can’t even claim to represent anything other than itself.

Too much ungrounded thought-play and a thinker will almost automatically succumb to that perennial radical cop-out that today narcissistically claims to be a courageous assertion: reality itself is constructed.

People wonder why art today is so uninspiring: “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.” Nietzsche saw what is coming, the last time it came.

Intuition abuse

Philosophy

Some people cannot believe something exists only if they are unable to think it.

Others think the more something is encountered as the existent it is, the less it can be thought, and the more one must rely on direct intuition, such as perceptions or tacit know-how and tacit feel-why.

This is a Kantian — not Jungian — use of the word intuition. By this use, intuition is a direct, non-linguistic, non-logical, non-representational relationship with some real, present entity or being we are presently encountering.

I am strongly in the second camp. Intuition gives us what is present. What we actually encounter in reality will always be partially incomprehensible and inconceivable, but, through skillful use of intuition supplemented by thought can become more comprehensible and conceivable.

Our thoughtful intuitive dealings with realities of various kinds is the best data (literally “givens”) for representations of reality. Thoughtful intuition provides us a repertoire of representations faithful to the real entities and actual beings we attempt to represent in language and thought. It also develops our capacity for interpreting and responding to present realities.

Intuitive grounding makes thought reasonable, and not merely ideologically logical — or capriciously illogical.

If we approach present realities representation-first, scanning for representations to recognize and logically manipulate, we lose our ability to improve our representations. Our ideology limits our ontological repertoire and we experience only what we were already “ready to see” or “ready to hear”. This data gets fed into our cognitive processes, which are also often limited to an ideological toolset. Ideologically-determined nounset interact by an ideologically-determined verbset.

But approaching representations intuition-first is also disastrous. Capricious illogic and intuitive manipulation of mental representations acquired willy-nilly from wherever does not produce a reliable sense of reality, nor any sense of the kinds of supernatural realities new age mystical types think they know. Intellectually laziness, indisciplined and unscrupulousness only reinforces and intensifies whatever unchosen prejudices and attitudes that passively infected our minds.

To rely on one’s intuition in matters of representation or language or logic to try to understand a distant reality is to misuse intuition and to short circuit intuition and turn it toward mental objects, instead of outward toward beings and entities transcending our mind. Intuiting mental objects is not a proxy for intuiting the realities these mental objects claim to represent.

A strong aversion to learning and informing your mental objects in order to make them more faithful representations — to rely instead on intuiting mental objects already inside your head — this is an alienation from reality akin to solipsism.

Moral benchmarking

Ethics, Philosophy

Before I dig all the way down into Bernstein’s Radical Evil, I want to benchmark my current views on what is evil, vs immoral, vs unethical.

Evil means active desire to annihilate and inflict suffering on other people.

Immoral means supporting evil, while stopping short of being evil oneself. One accepts, affirms and strengthens the conditions of evil and beliefs of evil-doers, while lacking evil desires.

According to this view, most progressivists are immoral. Only some among them — the ones who support Hamas, chant their slogans and mean it, or the ones who enjoy harming, abusing, terrorizing and humiliating living manifestations of identities they hate — are actively evil to any real degree.

But most progressivists I talk with believe the same things evil progressivists believe, and differ primarily in lacking an appetite to take part in the sadism and destruction. Part of progressivist immorality consists in a stubborn incuriosity to look into who they support and the practical implications of their beliefs. This allows them to water down their immorality with amoral ignorance, and to dissociate themselves from what they passively support, while also enjoying a sense of tribal belonging and security.

Ethics is fidelity to the behavioral rules of an ethos, which includes linguistic behaviors. It is entirely possible to be highly ethical within an amoral ethos. To be truly moral, one must actively choose a moral ethos. But most people are not morally responsible, and do not make such choices. They are merely ethical, and fail to make moral choices of any kind.

Richard J. Bernstein on evil

Ethics, Existentialism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have been observing an uncanny moral blind-spot among many people I know. They are apparently oblivious to an obvious distinction — that between 1) a violent desire to annihilate another people and inflict and savor their suffering, versus 2) an unavoidably violent defense against those who wish to annihilate and inflict suffering.

It is as if they need to skeptically dismiss out of hand making such distinctions.

Or maybe they know how to make this distinction among individual people, but cannot discern these distinctions among groups of people. (I do think an incapacity to understand political bodies plays into this problem, and in the compulsivly identitarian politics of the illiberal left and right but I do not think the bizarre amorality I am witnessing is attributable to this incapacity.)

These morally-blind people try to see the difference between better and worse strictly quantitatively: How many people have died on each side of the conflict? If the tally on one side is too big, the side with the larger numbers is morally abhorrent.

I am deeply bothered by this seeming incapacity of so many people to see perceive moral truths. I feel pain over it. And I intuitively blame them for their blindness. But I have not clarified this intuition, articulated it, or justified it.

This might be why Richard J. Bernstein’s 2001 book Radical Evil leapt off my shelf and caught my attention a couple of days ago. It opens with this gut punch:

In 1945, when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and the full horrors of what had happened during the war years were just beginning to emerge, Hannah Arendt declared, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Later, when Arendt was asked about her first reactions to the rumors about the extermination camps (which she first heard in 1942), she said that it was as if an abyss had opened. “Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us can.” Arendt, like many others — especially the survivors of the camps — felt that what happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical form of evil. “Auschwitz” became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and has come to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century. We might also mention Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia — names and sites so very different, yet manifesting horrendous events that we desperately try to understand, but to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Yet there is something extraordinarily paradoxical about the visibility of evil in our time — a visibility that can be so overwhelming that it numbs us. Andrew Delbanco acutely observes, “a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. Never before have images of horror been so widely disseminated and so appalling — from organized death camps to children starving in famines that might have been averted. … The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.” We have been overwhelmed by the most excruciating and detailed descriptions and testimonies; nevertheless the conceptual discourse for dealing with evil has been sparse and inadequate.

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

This brings the problem into the heart of my existentialist project.

For many people, what is thinkable limits what they will accept as real.

By “thinkable”, I do not merely mean what can be explicitly spoken about or argued. I mean what their faith can grasp. What exceeds the reach of their faith’s intuition, they regard not only as inconceivable, but unreal, non-existent. “If I cannot conceive the holocaust, it must have been exaggerated or invented.” If I cannot conceive the murderous mindset of Hamas, it must be sneaky Jew-propaganda fiction.”

I’ve noticed that people who approach the world this way resist whatever threatens this obliviousness. It is as if they viscerally need whatever realities transcend their faith to not exist. And they harbor semi-secret contempt for philosophy, so nothing can really challenge the solipsistic omniscience of their gnosis.

As an existentialist, I truly believe that existence precedes essence — “thatness” precedes “whatness” — that reality far exceeds the scope of our actual and potential faiths, which means completeness of truth content is the least of our worries. We lack the mental fingers required to grasp the truth of a great many realities.

And today, some of these realities loom directly before our faces, staring malevolently directly into our eyes, unseen.

By finding ways to conceive and speak about these unspeakable realities, we can detect them and respond to them. This is why philosophy is urgently important, especially right now.

But precisely those who need it most feel superior to philosophy. They see it as irrelevant, idle, speculative, abstract. They see it as a clumsy approximation of their gnostic omniscience. How wrong they are.

Jewishly

Judaism, Love

For my entire adult life, I’ve returned, again and again, to C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, usually to re-critique it from a subtle variation on the same basic complaint. In his meditation, Lewis observes a beam of light from the side, and has an insight that this looking at the beam of light from the side does nor reveal the light the same way that looking directly up into the beam does. My complaint is that maybe there are better things to do with light sources than examine their beams or stare directly into them. Perhaps I am just weird, but my preferred use for light sources is to illuminate spaces and the objects in those spaces.

I mean this both literally and metaphorically.

Today’s version of the complaint is no different, except today I want to suggest (or re-suggest) that this complaint I’ve been making is a Jewish one. And by “Jewish”, as always, I mean in accordance with Buber’s fundamental insight of I-Thou, which is the whence of my faith — the from-where — or to translate it into hippie, “where I’m coming from”.

Here is what Buber says in I-Thou, which I read as an expression of my complaint.

When you are sent forth, God remains-presence for you; whoever walks in his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, he cannot attend to God but he can converse with him. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the world movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the world movement of turning toward.

It might be helpful here to re-quote Saint-Exupery:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

I believe, with my entire stubborn Jewish faith that the famous Jew that so many people want to face, contemplate, love and worship, never wanted to be loved face-to-face in that romantic  way that lovers love, as they stare into each other’s eyes.

With Buber, I believe that this exceptional Jew very Jewishly wanted us to stand next to him in the light of creation, our backs warmed by his Father’s radiance, and look out upon a divinely-illuminated world with him.

Please do not hate me for saying these things, which I fully believe and consider of highest importance. I love Jesus, Christians and Christianity, but my love is a thoroughgoing Jewish love.

Hineini and amen.

Two senses of polycentric

Design

For a while now, I’ve been referring to service design as a polycentric design discipline. I picked up the term from Michael Polanyi. Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, also adopted the term and made it mainstream in the wonkier regions of nerddom.

Polanyi and Ostrom use the word polycentricity to describe social systems where agency is distributed throughout the system, not centralized or imposed from above.

I’ve been using the word in related, but distinctly different way. I use polycentric to describe design disciplines that design for multiple interacting people, all of whom are treated as I-centers of their own experience. I use it to contrast service design from older design disciplines that placed one person — a user, or customer, or employee, or patient or citizen, etc. — at the center of their design work, the person experiencing the designed artifact. Service design is polycentric, where older human-centered design (HCD) disciplines like UX design or industrial design are monocentric.

But what if we also thought of service design as polycentric in the same sense as Polanyi and Ostrom? From that perspective we could say that polycentric design establishes conditions where mutually beneficial social arrangements emerge, as spontaneously as possible, sustained by voluntary choice.

This is not just theoretically interesting. It has practical importance. With increasing frequency, my clients are coming to me with situations where they are trying to persuade partners who are outside their direct control to collaborate with them to deliver services to their customers in specific ways at a high standard of quality. Problems of this kind absolutely must be approached polycentrically.

This connects with something I’ve noticed many times in my three decades as a designer. Design thrives where people have choice and agency. Wherever people have choice and agency, we must abandon coercion and manipulation, and instead appeal to them as people who make free decisions based on their experience.

When the internet opened a broader range of choices to consumers and equipped them with more information to make smart choices, their agency increased, and this sparked a sort of design methods renaissance.

But now, due to a variety of factors, employees and non-employee partners also have more agency and more choices, and access to information required to choose options that works for them.

We are still not yet in an economy where all organizations need service design.

As long as an organization can command their employees and partners to behave however they want, a polycentric approach like service design is not necessary. The organization can just engineer rules and tools for service delivery, and everything will work like a well-oiled machine.

But if you are not in a position to boss your service delivery people around, either because they don’t work for you, or because they can choose to stop working for you if they don’t like being bossed around, service design is your best choice.

So, to summarize, when I say “polycentric design”, polycentric refers to two kinds of center: 1) experiential centers, and 2) agential centers.

Psychic common sense

Enworldment

The body has five senses. The soul has a various and variable number of senses.

The common sense of the body is the material world given to us through the five senses. From what we see, hear, smell, touch and taste, the world is given to us. And this given sensory world is what we have in common with all persons and all peoples.

The common sense of the soul — psychic common sense — is reality given to us by the soul’s various and variable senses. This psychic common sense cannot be assumed to be held in common with all persons and peoples. But we need to have it in common with those nearest us. (A shared psychic common sense is what we mean when we refer to close relationships.)

As the soul’s senses emerge and die out, the psychic common sense reconfigures to reveal and conceal different realities and different actual relations among them. These realities and relations are, to us, the meaning of the world.

By the psychic common sense of our moment, we notice or neglect the people and things, significance and beauty, of what surrounds and environs us. And by the psychic common sense of our moment, we recall or forget, anticipate or suppress, believe or deny, value or dismiss the testimony of present, future, past, always and never.

The givens of our life, sensory and psychic, unconfined from the mind, transcendent of mere self, come to us or hide from us in the swirling chrome clouds of oblivion that forever envelop us in partial nothingness. The tone and color of the world’s meaning changes ceaselessly like seasons and weather.

Let’s call the various and variable emerging-dying psychic senses “enceptions”.

Let’s call the common sense arising among the enceptions “faith”.

Let’s call the world given by our sensory and psychic common sense “enworldment”.

People are hopelessly confused about what faith is, when they treat faith as a will to believe. Faith is nothing other than the common sense of the soul.

To be a faithful person — spouse, friend, community member, devotee — is to maintain ourselves in a stable psychic common sense, so that we stay continuously reliable and familiar to those around us who need to to be who we are to them. An unfaithful person can suddenly become strange to us and estrange us.

Don’t we all need room to grow and change? Yes, but we must instaurate a continuity, through justifications, accounts, explanations, stories and reconciliations.

The storyline threads in the experience mesh of our lives together are forever coming undone. We must never stop repairing and reweaving the fabric by darning our own storyline thread back with the threads who neighbor us.