Protected: Justice models
Protected: Gestellen
A Service is not a tree
Reading Christoper Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree” I am realizing the extent to which a service, also, is not a tree, — and the extent to which we, service designers try to force them into tree-structures.
Alexander’s signature move, dating from his earliest work, is what I would characterize as polycentralizing design: identifying the multiple centers and fields of activity, noting where the fields overlap and interact, and how these overlapping fields are embodied and changed — most notably, vivified, strengthened, weakened or killed — by physical form.
Alexander’s eternal enemy is orders that abstract and simplify the complexity of life, and design structures reflecting this simplified abstraction, that are intended only to support this partial understanding, and end up severing vital connections that allow built environments to live.
Why is it that so many designers have conceived cities as trees when the natural structure is in every case a semilattice? Have they done so deliberately, in the belief that a tree structure will serve the people of the city better? Or have they done it because they cannot help it, because they are trapped by a mental habit, perhaps even trapped by the way the mind works — because they cannot encompass the complexity of a semilattice in any convenient mental form, because the mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception?
I shall try to convince you that it is for this second reason that trees are being proposed and built as cities — that is, because designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act.
Weird coincidence!
I went down a set theory rabbit hole this morning.
Charles Stein (in his book Light of Hermes) was discussing infinine divisibilty and transfinitive sets. This reminded me of the weird math we Gen-Xers learned as kids. We were taught set theory in like 2nd grade. We were learning rudimentary Boolean logic. I’m convinced that this is why all designers of my generation are always making Venn diagrams. I found a cool book in the political history of new math — the origin of all the set theory curricula. That inspired a long and odd post on my bizarre relationship with math.
So lately I’ve working on a top secret project concerning product management practices, especially Teresa Torres’s “opportunity solution trees”. I am interested in what product management tends to exclude, and what service design might be able to reintroduce. And suddenly the word “tree” jumped out at me, and I recalled this old Christopher Alexander paper “A City is Not a Tree”. And I thought — Wow, maybe opportunities and solutions are also not a tree! And maybe these tree structures are the kind of thing that makes silo-ization inevitable in organizations. And of course, silos fragment services and introduce discontinuites, gaps, inconsistencies and all the other stuff of bad experience.
So I start reading “A City is Not a Tree”… and here is how it starts:
The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction.
I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been deliberately created by designers and planners artificial cities.
Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.
It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.
Both the tree and the semilattice are ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems goes to make up a large and complex system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets.
In order to define such structures, let me first define the concept of a set. A set is a collection of elements which for some reason we think of as belonging together. Since, as designers, we are concerned with the physical living city and its physical backbone, we must naturally restrict ourselves to considering sets which are collections of material elements such as people, blades of grass, cars, molecules, houses, gardens, water pipes, the water molecules in them etc.
When the elements of a set belong together because they co-operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.
I think what I’m trying to say is this:
Protected: Yet more design grief
Math weirdness
I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.
It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.
I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)
I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.
It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.
The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.
My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.
An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:
James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.
When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.
All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.
I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.
For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.
In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.
Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.
There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.
I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.
I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.
I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.
Materials, media, messages
Each design discipline works in its own materials, through some particular medium and deploys methods systematically in ways suited to its materials and media.
At first the distinction between material and medium is unclear. They seem ambiguous if not synonymous. An artist might speak of working in some medium, and then characterize the medium materially. But artists (at least visual artists) work mostly alone to produce a finished artifact for others to experience after the production is complete.
Designers work in teams to produce an artifact for others, and therefore must communicate intent, methodology and projected output with a far higher degree of technical precision.
But, as usual etymology helps us tease out distinctions when then sharpen on closer inspection. Material — Latin materialis, “of or belonging to matter,” from Latin materia “matter, stuff, wood, timber”. Medium — Latin medius “in the middle, between; from the middle”.
Medium is something placed between — most often in order to convey something else.
When waves travel through the water, the material water becomes the medium through which waves move. When a spiritual medium channels a spirit, a person becomes a channel conveying a message from a source beyond the individual.
Material is the substance from a thing is made — the ingredients of a thing, considered apart from its form or function.
Let us now apply this to design.
Materials are that from which a designed artifact is formed. These are include, but are not limited to physical substances.
The form itself — which must consider the materials from which it will be actualized in implementation as an artifact, but which is not yet materialized — is the design.
So what is the medium? The medium is that which conveys being through heterogeneous materials, once the designed, actualized artifact is activated — set in motion and used by people who will complete the designed system by participating it.
While we are splitting hairs, let us make another rarely acknowledged but crucially important distinction:
The essential difference between a designed artifact and an engineered artifact is a difference of ontological scope. An engineered thing is complete when all its parts function together as a system of objects. A design is only complete when its parts and participants come together in a social system of interacting subjects and objects.
An engineered system can be tested and assessed apart from their eventual contact with humans. The system is complete (and testable) prior to use by people.
A designed system can only be tested and assessed if humans take their place in the system and participate in it. Their experience and their participation are intrinsic and inseparable from the design.
Bruno Latour named systems that mingle subjectivity and objectivity “hybrid systems”, and argued that societies are irreducibly hybrid. According to Latour, any attempt to understand “the social” abstracting the subjective aspects from social systems is bound to give an incomplete or falsely complete picture of how societies are.
Design intentionally shapes social subsystems, understood to subsist within more extensive social systems. To say it again, social systems are understood as hybrids of subjective and objective being, interacting, combining and producing hybrid effects that are, more often than not, difficult to unravel into objects and subjects.
Of course, very few designers use this kind of language, or even think explicity at this depth about what they do when they design. Most adopt pidgin MBA language, enhanced with designy jargon, but the words roughly refer to shaping hybrid systems involving a range of materials that include people acting in various formal roles.
Now the medium function of design can seen clearly against the enabling materials.
Medium is concerned with the being circulating through the various materials — the being in which each participant partakes when they experience the designed system, responds to it, and interacts within it, and in so doing, contributes to the being of that system. The habitability of materials, what which affords an animating flow of life of some specific kind — this is medium.
Marshall McLuhan famously and insightfully said “the medium is the message.” What he meant was that the being of society is conducted through social systems, which draw us into distinctive kinds of participation, and shape us as people into participants of some species. This participation is the “message” of the medium, and the content we consume in this process is secondary.
So visual designers, regardless of what materials used for surfaces, pigments, dyes, light-emitters, or whatever physically conveys light patterns into a person’s eye works in the medium of visual composition.
Architects famously work in every imaginable construction material to work in the medium of space.
Communication designers, regardless of what materials convey light and sound to a person’s sensory perception works in the medium of information.
Service designers go even broader and combine every material available to an organization (a hybrid system) to work in the medium of value exchange.
And the discipline of service design — in the brief moments when it unforgets what it exists to be — carries a message of exchanging functional, emotional and social value through densely woven, intensely intended win-wins. The message is not, however, the explicit offerings, nor is it the implicit “jobs to be done” by these offering, but rather, that everything good in this world circulates through such exchanges.
The minute service designers forget this, they cease to be designers — service designers or otherwise — and become social engineering business consultants. Such designer-branded professionals may dress up in hipster costumes, but, whatever they wear, beneath the cloth, you find the same corporate stuffed suit filler.
And the message of that medium — the medium of corporate consulting — is that human beings are resources to be utilized by organizations to meet quantifiable organizational goals.
A hermetic design discipline would take seriously that design is concerned not just with form, material and function, but also, and perhaps most of all, medium. And the crucial importance of medium in the life of human beings — not only at its climactic moments, but in everyday mundanity between — might be the heart of its message.
Additional notes, Cinco de Mayo 2026:
The discipline of engineering works on many of the same materials as design. But its medium is different. The medium of engineering is control, to six sigma exactitude.
This is no argument against engineering. Engineering is indispensable. We must control some aspects of reality, often with precise exactitude. But this control must not be the sole — or even dominant — medium of social existence. ? If our organizational medium is engineered, regardless of the words it says, its message message ?cannot avoid being “submit to control”. ? Conform to your role and ?perform it consistently, efficiently and professionally. Be corporate.?
A few days ago I re-read Christopher Alexander’s classic essay, “A City is Not a Tree”. In it, Alexander contrasts two formal structures, the tree and the semilattice. A tree is how things are given to one logic. It is monostable. A semilattice on the other hand, is multistable. When a reality is invested with semilattice structure, different logics? can encounter it and perceive in it two or more different, but harmoniously related, tree structures.
Alexander makes a passionate argument that we model our ?cities on overlapping semilattice structures, because it is only in this overlapping that life emerges.? I believe this is equally true of any designed reality, especially organizations.
A semilattice supports psychic diversity, by giving the same reality in different but harmonious ways, not as social constructions? to be laboriously figured out part by part (construed), but as perceptual and conceptual gestalts, understood spontaneously as intuitive givens. Semilattice structures are shared “boundary objects” that allow people to be together in difference.?
So engineering is one tree, but it must function within a semilattice. Whatever is contained within engineering — whatever is forced to be a limb, branch or leaf on an engineered construction will be animated by merely mechanical forces.
Protected: Suffocation
Protected: Pascal’s Void
Generation gaps
Youth is generative oblivion.
Protected: Madness options
ASCII sigil
The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.
+O(
- Plus sign: The four directions. Earth.
- Letter O: Cyclical life. Man.
- Open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.
The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!
It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.
This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.
Asphyxiating
The little air remaining in the field of design — after its professionalization, after its submission to technicity, and after its deemphasis and almost complete abandonment the first-person perspective at the heart of its work — has been sucked out by the myriad promises projected upon AI by terrified, ambitious, manic managerials.
Intuition has been squeezed out of design, and what remains is calculation, explication, prediction, profusion of words.
The workworld is closing in on me and I can no longer breathe.
Younger design professionals seem perfectly fine with this evolution of the field.
And now I am recalling a passage from Richard Rorty said about institutions:
Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.
This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”
They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.
Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon…
Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.
The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.
Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”
In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic,” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.
I long for the days of mere claustrophobia, when I could still sneak a breath of inspiration and now and then make a leap of intuition, provided that upon landing I pulled on my Hermetic cowboy boots and carefully backtracked from where I arrived, paving a path of logical footsteps. +O(
Intellectual sacrifice
From Charles Stein’s Light of Hermes:
Mathematics as sacrifice: one sacrifices one’s woolly fantasies for the orderliness of collective positivity. But the sacrifice is only satisfied or completed when the entire mathematical project becomes a noetic mandala and one’s sacrifice is of one’s phantom apparencies only as requiescent unto Being. What one believes or supposes to be real is accepted only in so far as it can be relieved of its ontological positivity which it offers up to unique, undivided Being itself.
My interpretation of this passage: Mathematics is a kind of tradeoff, or exchange. Give up personal, idiosyncratic, intuitive knowing and in return, receive a more disciplined, shared, public knowledge. But this tradeoff is only an intellective gain if we fully understand — (I would argue in a different, everted mode of metaknowing) — that all these various ways of knowing, these subjects (each with their own special objectivity) together belong (as all things do, including ourselves) to Being, who can be approached numerous ways but never reached and possessed in the form of positive knowledge.
In this everted metaknowing we situate ourselves… as comprehended by infinitude. And it is our situation we comprehend, not the comprehension itself. — This is suprehension: everted metacomprehension of comprehension.
Mathematics is one sacrifice to public life.
Another is exalting liberal democratic order above our own policy preferences and passions. Out of loyalty to our way of self-governing, we champion another citizen’s right to slander what we hold sacred, or we uphold a law we abhor because that law was established lawfully.
Jewish law is yet another. It is beyond silly to refuse to eat a cheeseburger in order to be neurotically certain we are not accidentally eating a baby goat that was cooked in its own mother’s milk. But we decided this matter together and that sacralizes the decision and makes it the furthest possible thing from silly. (This being said, I do not observe this particular prohibition.)
But I gladly make Judaism’s highest and most sacred sacrifice — the sacrifice that replaced the bloody, smoky, visceral Temple sacrifices, and founded rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple and subsequent Babylonian bondage. This is the sacrifice called Machloket L’Shem Shamayim — sacred conflict.
In Machloket L’Shem Shamayim, we vigorously argue our side against another, while suprehending that a higher truth always and eternally transcends my side and yours. I’ve heard this expressed as “The argument itself is truer than either side.”
Above our own certainty is agreement, but not mere compromise for the sake of practicality, but dedication to Being who permanently transcends any single truth, and ultimately all truth.
Those mystics who sneer at liberalism, believing they are wise to it, and in fact superior to it, demonstrate by this attitude that they are not even equal to liberalism — much less to their own religious tradition.
Higher sacrifices are sublimated Golden Rule, carried far beyond rule of computation, law or ideal — the metaprinciple of principle.
I, like you, am finite and limited in some unique way.
I, like you, am limited, but situated at the I-point heart of the world, which is one enworldment.
I, like you, cannot help but believe what seems most true to me.
If we can know this together we can dwell together in holy irony of comprehension within suprehension.
The fruit is restored to its orchard.
Protected: Design industry implosion
Protected: Subjective multistability
Instaurated instaurateurs
Another book for the reading queue, Herbert Guenther’s Matrix of Mystery: Scientific and Humanistic Aspects of Dzogs-chen Thought:
Whether or not the so-called “insights” of any tradition are essential, will be determined by the extent to which they are, firstly, comprehensible to whomsoever chances to focus on them and, implementable, that is experientially accessible, so that they may become relevant to one’s own life by allowing for the means by which those who seek a more satisfactory, and less fragmented mode of being, can open up their limited and limiting perspectives regarding what is, in fact, experientially possible. With respect to comprehensibility this means that the language used to explicate such putatively essential insights must be culturally consonant with both the cognitive and aesthetic complexities of the person trying to probe these insights. In addition, the process of making comprehensible such insights necessarily entails a concerted confrontation with the pregiven prejudices that have sedimented — and continue sedimenting — into and as one’s “natural attitude” toward both what “we” are and what the “world” is supposed to be.
One cannot implement or experientially access that which one does not understand (is not made comprehensible). Although implementation necessarily lies outside the scope of this book, the fact that comprehensibility is so closely intertwined with implementation, makes reference to the latter unavoidable. Here, however, only a few general remarks need to be made. It is a mistake to assume that accessing in the light of a new perspective can occur in isolation, for man by his very nature is always situated with-others and hence “experiences” (even himself) in the midst of and in relation to others. Any attempt to artificially fabricate a lifestyle that would cut one off from social situatedness is based on a lack of comprehension of what the tradition under consideration regards as valuable and healthy. This does not mean, however, that one will have to continue being enmeshed in a social situatedness with one’s natural attitudes intact. Indeed, it cannot be emphasized enough, that to comprehend essential insights means, at the very least, to be forever severed from one’s former (natural attitude. It is equally, and perhaps even more damagingly, a mistake to assume that accessing the essential insights of a tradition means fixating one’s activities on another person judged (more properly speaking, prejudged) to be the locus within which such insights inhere, and that accessing these insights will occur merely by being in the presence of such a “special” locus. These two mistaken approaches to the problem of “how to” access the value and meaning of a tradition are, in fact, avoided only to the extent that one has honestly and carefully acknowledged what is and what is not comprehensible in the light of one’s own experience, for it is only in the light of such sincere acknowledgment of one’s own engagement with the task of opening up that one becomes sensitive to, and can thereby accurately identify, those growth-enhancing patterns which are reinforced by other like-minded individuals. It is only when such sensitivity begins to stir that one finds the “seemingly” inner dimension of spiritual growth “outwardly” mirrored in others and recognizes this mirroring as an incentive to further accessing. Indeed, it is the community of such individuals, sensitively attuned to the essential insights of a tradition, who sustain, by having become the existential embodiment of that tradition, that ongoing process which, like a beacon light, guides man in his measure and value of being human.
Protected: Cost of admission
Service design’s core mission
It is a terrible thing to be prevented from giving what you were born to give, and, instead, to be forced to give what you don’t have.
It is the gift of gifts to give what you were born to give to others who need and value it, and, in exchange, to receive what you lack but badly need.
And one of our greatest needs is to give.
The mission in the heart of service design, buried beneath mechanical rubble and organizational slime, is a holy thing.