A career in four-and-a-half presentations

Autobiography, Design

I’ve done four pivotal presentations in my career, and I’m getting the itch to update them all together to reflect my latest thinking.

The first presentation “Dialogue”, was from 2008. It was a dense summary my thinking up to that point on the importance of gestalts in design, and the power of dialogue to generate sharable gestalts, which I associated with brand.

Since this point, I’ve developed a theory of psychic multistability that understands gestalt shifts from one perceptual stability to another, and hermeneutic shifts from one conceptual stability to another to be the result of what I’m calling a gestell shift — a shift from one subjective state to another, which changes the spontaneous sense we make of things. And brands are stable gestells.

I did the second presentation “Spiral Process” in 2010, and it was also about the importance of gestalts in design, but this time taking a practical approach.

I started by laying out a theory-space based on two contrasting ways of approaching composite things: 1) a parts-first systems approach, and 2) a wholes-first gestalt approach.

Like the good consultant I am, I laid these approaches on a 2×2 matrix. Like the bad esoterist I am, of course I had to assign gestalts to the vertical axis and systems to the horizontal one.

I defined domains in each quarter. The quarter where there is no gestalt and only system was assigned to Engineering. The quarter where there is only gestalt and no system was assigned to Art. The quarter where there is neither system and  nor gestalt was labeled “perplexity”; had I assigned it to a domain, that domain would have been Philosophy, for here we truly “do not know how to move around.” Finally, the quarter where there is both gestalt and system was assigned to  Design. Design seeks systems that are taken together as gestalts.

Then I outlined a process for getting to both, which I contrasted to engineering processes and creative processes. The engineering proceess more or less curve sstraight into systematizing. After the system is finished claps stories, style, value claims and similar meaning stuff onto it to make people care about it. Art (creative) goes the other way. It starts with a nice bright nebula of meaning, and then tries to build a system that more or less approximates the blob of brilliance, and gives it a nice skeletal structure to hold it up.

Design takes a much less direct route. It dives into perplexity and experiments there to find a gestalt that can be built out into a system that corresponds with the natural facets and articulations of that gestalt. This permits a team to systematize by the logic of a gestalt and produce design magic that is both meaningful and logically clear.

Since I made the “Spiral Process” presentation, I’ve improved the vocabulary. I continue to use the word conception for the process of instaurating and understanding a gestalt. But I now use the word “constructing” for the activity of building out a system, and “construing” for making sense of it.

I have also developed a more nuanced understanding of the experimental tacking process designers use to tentatively construct systems that might suggest a gestalt (or not) and to conceive possible gestalts and test them for feasibility. In design, construction and conception processes rapidly, informally alternate and are brought into dialogue together in iterative trials of multiple kinds.

The last two presentations are from my latest life in service design. The first, from 2019, wasn’t but should have been called “Service Design for UX researchers”. the second, from 2024, was called “Six Sensibilities of Service”.

“Service Design for UX researchers” was meant to clarify the relationship between service design research and UX research, but approached it by way of clarifying the precise relationship between the disciplines of service design and UX. In this presentation I described service design dimensionally.

One-dimensional design is design within one single service delivery channel. UX is a common example. Or industrial design. Or print design. Most design has been one-dimensional, single service channel touchpoint design (for example digital, in-person, voice, etc.. I pointed out, though, that a good single channel designer always makes a point of understanding other channel paths their user might take or need. This is part of the design context.

But in two-dimensional design the context becomes part of the design problem. Here is where omnichannel design, CX design  and experience design proper occurs. Here the designer takes full responsibility for all service delivery channels and shapes an end-to-end omnichannel experience for a user, customer, patient , employee, etc — whoever’s experience the team is focusing on improving. But in order to do a good job at this, the design team will need to understand the organization’s capabilities to deliver this experience, to ensure it is feasible.

In three-dimensional design, we have service design. In service design, an organization’s capabilities are no longer just constraining and enabling context but part of the design problem. Designers are now responsible for shaping the organization’s delivery of a customer’s experience (or the experience of whoever is receiving the service) in the “front stage” where they experience what is happening, and backstage where the service is supported but not directly experienced.

I explained that ultimately service design frames a whole system of interconnected problems. And it is these interconnected problems that UXers and other touchpoint designers. Service designers help UXers understand the full experientical service context in which their touchpoint will be experienced and will play a part in the customer’s journey, or the journey of the one delivering or supporting the experience.

Not be a damn braggart, but this made clear sense of a very unclear situation that many others had bungled and continue to bungle because they keep trying to flatten the space into domains of responsibility or overlapping toolsets, and other dead-end approaches to dividing up the work.

But this presentation also needs some updates. First it underplays the polycentric aspects of service design. It still privileges the recipient of the service over the people who deliver and support it. These latter service actors end up fading into the organizational capabilities, when in fact, service design tries to afford them the same importance and focus as the service recipient.

I also think it doesn’t need all the research content. That turned the presentation into a cognitive overload atrocity that no person could absorb in a single sitting. How do I know? This brings me to the fourth presentation

“Six Sensibilities of Service” was my final project for a course design course I took in 2024. One of the things this course taught me was that I was guilty of trying to teach too damn many things all at once in most of my presentations. I needed to simplify everything drastically.

“Six Sensibilities of Service” took as its point of departure the very goal of service design: good services. Many services are pretty terrible. I hypothesized that this is because many people faced with service problems misdiagnose them as other kinds of problems, and proceed to treat the wrong condition with the wrong methods. But by sensitizing ourselves to issues specific to services, we can better recognize when something is specifically a service problem that is best treated as such with a service design methodology.

As a gimmick, I warned everyone that if they cooperated with this lesson and acquired any of these six sensibilities, they would never stop noticing service problems, and that this would turn them bitter and crazy. I made them sign a form releasing me from liability if they were to suffer mental problems as a result of what I was about to teach them.

This presentation is more recent, and I think it still hold up pretty well. I’ve begun to think about pluricentricity as a separate issue from polycentricity (the former is first-person and experiential, the latter is third-person and behavioral, but I am not not sure this hair-splitting is worth the additional cognitive load. Something to ponder as I do the revisions.

I think I might see if I can revise these presentation and then record myself presenting them.

Oh, I forgot another presentation I made in between 2009 and 2019. It was basically a rude version of the “Spiral Process” presentation that called synthesis without concept “chickenshit” and and concept without synthesis “bullshit” and claimed that successful design is the shit. I presented this pottymouth material to a team at Coca-Cola in 2019, and I won’t pretend I’m not proud.

If I ever make a site dedicated to my design work, I think I will enable multiple languages and make it trilingual. The visitor can select the language of their choice: English, Esoteric and Pottymouth.

Design kapos

Autobiography, Design

My frustration with the field of design right now is that its doctrine and practices keep getting “replatformed” on inadequate faiths. It is this frustration that is dyspiring this endless stream of semi-schizophrenic design rants. I am so tired of my field getting ripped out from under me every decade or so, and I am sick of designers helping turn the wheel of this cyclical subversion.

As I’ve said a half-zillion times in myriad ways, a faith is not a magnitude of belief, but a particular configuration of Why and How that does the believing. It is qualitative first — intuiting, caring, seeking, noticing, perceiving, conceiving responding — and only from here is something understood and believed or disbelieved to some degree. Faith is a specific concave form a soul assumes, and that concavity is a capacity for receiving some experiential content and filtering what it cannot accommodate.

When I call something designerly, I indicate a particular faith which is behind design practice or theory or, better, praxis (a virtuous feedback loop of theory-guided practice, practice-informed theory). This faith wants a more palpably meaningful world — a world where we spontaneously experience things as intrinsically meaningful and valuable. There is not a trace of need to figure out the value or to justify it, and explanations dramatically fail to do it justice. We just like, desire, love, je ne sais quois, and respond with equal spontaneity, with minimal or no linguistic intercession.

Design seeks direct intuitive contact with reality and reality’s intrinsic goodness. Design works intuitively for the sake of an intuitable world.

But tragically, it is easy and common for one faith to appropriate the theories and practices developed by another. They take possession of their culture, symbols and style, and much more. They even sometimes claim to be a new and better version of the original that supersedes it! And then they compete for ownership and attempt to displace the originators of what they’ve assumed as their own.

When this happens, the theories and practices and lose their original purpose and meaning and are pressed into service of an alien faith, often against the old faith.

This in fact, is happening to design right now.

Adherents of technicity — that faith behind the maniacal drive to utilize resources to achieve objectives, which always themselves generate more resources utilized to achieve yet more objectives in an endless chain of In Order To’s — want to utilize design to acheive business objectives in order to, in order to, in order to… ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nihilo.

Designer professionals who accept a business-centric, ops-centric replatforming enter this technicity faith loop and, in participation, are gradually reshaped by it. Eventually, they become hard-nosed design consultants, who make a point of agreeing with nondesigners that all resources must serve business and only business. They agree, in the name of design, that design must fall in line. They become what an intensely angry, rude and slightly careericidal designer might call “design kapos”.

Design kapos still mouth humanisms, wear hipster uniforms, produce charming sketches and perform design theater for executive managerial audiences, but beneath the designwashed exterior, they now serve an entirely different Why. And the new Why gradually bends and twists How (“design tools and methods”) until the old Why is not only no longer served, but lost — altogether annihilated. The work feels soulless and empty because what used to make it alive, vital and meaningful has been evacuated and replaced. The discipline of design has been bodysnatched.

Of course, the world of language is ruled by the law of the jungle. Anarchy always favors the strong. So what design is or isn’t is an arbitrary matter of opinion in a world where some opinions are more equal than others. Never forget that in the world of technicity, the golden rule is: “he who has the gold makes the rules.” And he who makes the rules can define whatever they wish however they wish, and do so with increasing aggression.

Managerialism — unopposed, unopposable technicity taken to its natural extreme — wants a constructed totality with no reality beside or beyond it, where people believe what they are told over what they see, hear, smell, taste, touch or otherwise intuit. It wants a world where an alpha technocrat can decree that 1+1=3, and subjects see that and only that. It thrives on intuitive alienation and numbness of soul.

Design kapos sell their designerly souls for business acclaim and social prestige, and so their designless redefinitions of design carry more weight than those who have refused to make such deals. “Who are you to tell an important design personage such as myself what design is and is not. I have been coronated by the head-pats of the executive elite! I am the very embodiment of design.”

But arbitrary redifinitions and constructions aside, 1+1=2, designerliness is a real thing, and the word design still denotes it, even when that meaning is buried under a mass of technik bad faith, TLAs, dirt, filth and permafrost. Designerly design might (once again) go underground, and design kapos might dominate design for a time. But as long as a germ of design lives, there is hope. The soil will thaw, and the design kapos will pretend they were always designerly, and they will even believe their own story, and I suppose that will be okay.

Tacit vs pre-explicit

Autobiography, Design

Maybe I shouldn’t say things like this on my company slack:

…And this only counts the knowledge that could be documented in principle, but isn’t.

Even more lost — submerged in the oblivion of double-ignorance — is the kind of knowledge acquired only in apprenticeship — all that purely practical, entirely tacit know-how passed down from craftsperson to craftsperson.

Design craft is 75%+ intuition.

Wherever words are forced to intercede between hand and artifact, things get stilted and, dare I say it, corporate.

Or this:

AI not only privileges explicit knowledge. It filters out everything except explicit linguistic knowledge, and makes everything outside the wordworld seem nonexistent. If you can’t say it clearly, it is not real.

But as designers know better than most, it is precisely what cannot be said that is most real — and most interesting.

Or this:

Fun fact: The philosopher who coined the term “tacit knowledge” is the same one who coined the term “polycentric”.

Michael Polanyi is one of the philosophers I recommend to designers who want to learn enough about what designers do, to be able defend our practice against conditions that undermine our work and after a point, make design work impossible. He’ll arm you with words that will help you ineffectively but vigorously fight the obtrusion of words. Of course, nobody’ll bother understanding a word of it once they catch a whiff of philosophy and start automatically dismissing it as irrelevant. But you’ll at least have the satisfaction of speaking truth to power, albeit a deaf and numb one.

All this was in response to a pretty okay LinkedIn article “The Ground Remembers: Tacit Knowledge in the Age of AI”.

I say okay, although the author’s explanation of why we use cinnamon and cloves in apple pies exemplifies wordworld theorizing running amok. Really? The taste considerations were only a pleasant side-effect of the antibacterial function of spice chemicals? We keep using apple pie spices when baking apple pies primarily by force of habit? We follow apple pie recipes out of brainless conformist momentum?

Only a business consultant who’s gone intuitively numb from too many decades of peddling disruptive innovation could make such groundless claims without embarrassment. Ironically, the brainless momentum of conformity in the author’s own habitual application of constructionism and functionalism seems to illustrate his own point better than the baking of apple pies.

Coaxing bolts from the blue

Design

The main thing I’ve noticed working as a designer in project teams is the decisive difference between people who take nothingness at face value, and those who know better.

The people who take nothingness at face value are inferior collaborators because they kill possibility in the cradle. They “take absence of evidence as evidence of absence”. They mistake inconceivability as dead nonexistence. If such an inhospitable person points their eyeballs or minds at something, and nothing is perceived or conceived, to them it is pointless to engage. They cut it off, implicitly or explicitly, through a variety of tactics (* see note below), painfully familiar to anyone with a living designerly soul. They are invalidation tactics, meant to not only assert but demonstrate and enact impossibility, and to convince everyone involved that the incipient idea is not worth further consideration. In this way, they sap the enthusiasm, energy and hope required to invite the future into the present.

The best design collaborators, though, are vividly alive to the omnipresent possibility that something miraculous might irrupt into the world at any moment.

They adopt an attitude and receptive charge of imminent miracle. Kate Bush sung it well:

I just know that something good is gonna happen
I don’t know when…
But just saying it could even make it happen

Do not mistake this outburst for an optimistic prediction. These sung words are a speech act, that expresses, describes and invokes the conditions for coaxing the unconceived from nowhere into presence, ex nihilo. What is invoked is an acutely charged expectation that something shockingly new and good might shock us with its spontaneous appearance.

But the expectation is only a necessary condition. It is not in itself sufficient. The irruption ex nihilo emerges from efforts to summon it forth. Ideas are invited to consummation through participation in its development, emergence, strengthening and maturation.

But… If we deny this expectation, and refuse to cooperate and participate in its emergence, the idea’s worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes nowhere because we refuse to come along.

This awareness and attitude toward nothingness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Another insight into nothingness is crucial: the sober understanding that these miracles are cloaked with dread, and with this understanding a second attitude: courageous resolve to endure the dread, and press forward through the agony.

A delightful process will not yield delightful results. It will yield only frivolous and derivative drivel. It is the harrowing processes that produce brilliant breakthroughs of insight.

I once got into a surprisingly bitter fight over this matter. I had a philosophical friend who insisted that my tragic sense of creativity was passé. Maybe in his youth he had too much vulgar existentialism, with all its angsty melodrama and alienated brooding.

His claim — his doctrine, actually — was that we can generate novelty without any pain. We could frolic about in the world of ideas, and through pure play produce exciting new ideas with joyous profusion. His view was that it was much more blazingly and boldly original to reject the necessity of creative pain than to embrace it.

This pissed me off. Maybe it was because this vision of frivolous creativity reminds me of how nondesigners think design probably is or should be.

But annoyance became hostility, when I began to notice that whenever I tried to share with him one of my painfully won insights, he didn’t understand them. And he would sit and smirk, as my attempts to convey my insights failed to penetrate his skull. His own incomprehension and my frustration were amusing evidence that there was no point to my babble.

But then — eureka! My confusion had given him a new novel idea! Perhaps he would write it into the book he was writing.

And see? No angst. No suffering. Just floating playfully above, amused, detached, waiting for inspiration to alight.

And he would then proceed to paraphrase my own idea to me as his own, as if he himself conceived what he refused to be taught.

No wonder he believed that frolicking about in the playground of other people’s ideas was sufficient to stimulate original thought.

He couldn’t conceive the difference between kidnapping someone else’s insight and birthing his own.

Rejection of the radically unfamiliar, passive consumption of novelty won through distant ugly work — two facets of the same attitude toward approaching nothingness. Two strategies for avoiding the labor pain, strain, uncertainty and terror of giving birth to new being ex nihilo.

Note * — One common way to destroy possibility of radical newness is to interrupt. This kills the line of intuitive thought before it can gains flow, momentum, musicality. Chop the song into isolated notes, and interject each with soul-killing frustration, and the melody will stay dismembered and never come to life.

Or digress. Change the subject (“subject” in the most literal, egregoric sense). Or impose and reimpose an alien field of relevance upon the conversation. “What you are trying to say is irrelevant, and should therefore be snuffed out before it wastes more time.”

Or confront the fragile embryonic subject with some overpowering objection, and turn the nursery into an arena, where the infant must prove its right to eventual maturity by defeating gladiators and lions. Even if the infant survives the arena, the very deprivation of nurture and protection will turn the idea monstrous and ugly.

Pessimistically pick at the idea, and find innumerable reasons why it the idea can never come to anything. Destroy the ideas faith in itself until it is dispirited and ready to give up the geist.

In fearful organizations, another routine tactic is lethally effective. For the sake of efficiency or rigor, clap procedures, formalities and norms onto the collaboration. These misnorms afford credibility only to well-established, pre-comprehended ideas, Only sturdy, old, established, workaday idea-blocks are admitted, and the only innovation permitted is in permutations of stacking. One can build whatever out of the provided LEGO block set, but nothing on the order of inventing LEGO blocks could ever happen. However novel the stacking, the notion stacks never feel promising, only stalely sufficient. But it serves its true purpose, which is to check boxes that require checking, and make one’s colleagues more likely layoff targets than oneself. The output lacks all excitement, but never mind that. A marketing department will coat the quotidian with noncredible hype calculated to be adequate for making a fraction of a percent of a segment choose this option of that one. The experience of this bullshit coated chickenshit, is commonly known as “corporate”. It is the natural consequence of trying to add “desirability” at the end of an engineering process (often social engineering that mistakes itself for design because it considers “people”) that should have been designed starting from desirability.

It is commonplace — and by commonplace logic, it is the precisely the commonplace that determines all meaning — to call all vision-oriented planning design.

To design is to imagine a possibility with such specificity that specifications are produced that can serve as a plan. (“Design is the rendering of intent”, to use the poetically spare jargon of one typical design “thought leader”.) According to this definition of design, one designs a book or a service in the same sense as one designs a microchip or jet engine.

But we know, even when we can’t or won’t admit it, that design has a second, deeper meaning. And it is this meaning that gives design its mystique, and that is because design (in this second sense) it is rooted in the same soil as mysticism. Design in this sense taps into depths of human meaning, draws it to the surface and nourishes the world with strange new vivacity. There is something vividly alive, important and ineffable in a great design artifact — unprecedented, artificial (in the strict sense) but as natural as nature itself — enhanced, renewed, human.

If Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial” explored “rendering of intent” design, someone should write a followup: “Arts of the Second-Natural” to explore design that materially manifests meaning. The blurring of these two conceptions of design has made it far too effortless to lose the second, far more vulnerable design that serves an technocratic order that numbs and is numb to love, even of the minutest magnitude.

Chuang Tzu’s Useless Tree

Taoism

Have I really never posted Chuang Tzu’s “The Useless Tree” on this anomablogue?

Carpenter Shih went to Ch’i and, when he got to Crooked Shaft, he saw a serrate oak standing by the village shrine. It was broad enough to shelter several thousand oxen and measured a hundred spans around, towering above the hills. The lowest branches were eighty feet from the ground, and a dozen or so of them could have been made into boats. There were so many sightseers that the place looked like a fair, but the carpenter didn’t even glance around and went on his way without stopping. His apprentice stood staring for a long time and then ran after Carpenter Shih and said, “Since I first took up my ax and followed you, Master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you don’t even bother to look, and go right on without stopping. Why is that?”

“Forget it — say no more!” said the carpenter. “It’s a worthless tree! Make boats out of it and they’d sink; make coffins and they’d rot in no time; make vessels and they’d break at once. Use it for doors and it would sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It’s not a timber tree — there’s nothing it can be used for. That’s how it got to be that old!”

After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said, “What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs — as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don’t get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey. They bring it on themselves — the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it’s the same way with all other things.

“As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this — things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die-how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”

When Carpenter Shih woke up, he reported his dream. His apprentice said, “If it’s so intent on being of no use, what’s it doing there at the village shrine?”

“Shhh! Say no more! It’s only resting there. If we carp and criticize, it will merely conclude that we don’t understand it. Even if it weren’t at the shrine, do you suppose it would be cut down? It protects itself in a different way from ordinary people. If you try to judge it by conventional standards, you’ll be way off!”

Designerly nothingness

Design, Exnihilism

Complaint litany of an alienated designer:

This work harnesses none of my essential energies, but saps my will by extracting and utilizing resources I lack.

This work refuses my essential services while demanding from me what I do not have to give and, in fact, need to receive from others.

This work does not move me forward in my personal project. Indeed, it does the reverse: In pulls me backwards, by enslaving me to the very forces I feel called to challenge and overcome.

Regarding these forces I believe should be overcome — these forces we are forced to serve when our work feels most forced — they belong to an enworldment which Heidegger called “technicity”.

Technicity is essentially the utilitarian instinct driven to extremes.

Technicity creates an interminable chain of “in order to”.

In technicity we are all chained to “in order to”, and become links in that chain, with no purpose except to serve someone else’s “in order to”, who, in turn serves another’s “in order to.”

At the heart of technicity is one monomaniacal question “What is it for?”

This is true not only of “What?” and “How?” questions — even, and especially, questions of love and value. So when technicity asks “Why?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” And when technicity asks “Who?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” This is where the nihilistic damage happens

Design is a different way to work. It approaches questions of value and relationship as outside the realm of use. It provides a terminus for the chain of “What is it for?” It is for the sake of itself. It is useless and I love it for no reason other than love. Je ne sais quoi. Even tiny mustard seed sized specks of irrational love bring desirability to life.

But under the iron reign of technicity, design is reduced to an alternate toolset for problem-solving. And that problem is, of course, “how do I do x, in order to do y, in order to do z, in order to…” with no “because I just love it” anywhere to be seen.

Design is far too expansive to fit inside the narrowness of technicity, in any of its contemporary forms.

Of course — obviously — it does not fit inside corporate capitalism.

But neither does design fit inside managerial Marxism, which is the only viable mutation of Marxism in a mature industrial or senile postindustrial world! Your revolution, once inspired by material dialectic, has expired by it. It has been exnihilated by the fundamental fact that we are situated inside a dialectic with no exterior. We are always at the conclusion of an endless journey we are only now beginning.*

And, most relevantly to you, neither does it fit inside a technocratic administrative state, or a mini-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged organization, or a macro-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged global economy), or — most importantly of all, a nano-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged individual soul).

Design, properly practiced, attaches uses (“usefulness”), qualities of use (“usability”), use for businesses (“viability”), uses of technology (“feasibility”) in service of something higher, which is beyond the grasp and even reach of techniques and technologies — something that bears no fruit except a totally useless “I love this.”

The technicity world shovels this quality into the inadequate lust-adjacent category “desirable.” Lust is erosless urge to possess, as opposed to love which is transcendent, erosful pursuit of belonging. “Lovable” is a better word than “desirable”.

Note: * Hegel, Marx, and all other pseudo-prophetic avatars of Prometheus — all those who foresee inevitable futures as if they preexist behind some temporal curtain — seem oblivious to the fact that there is only nothing there to see. There is only the boiling chrome of nothingness.

They miss the insidious subtlety of nothingness. As if nothingness would be so hamfisted as to hide itself beneath something we can see. They think nothingness would marked itself with something so blatant as a shadows?

No, no, no — the surface of nothingness is reflective. If we stare into it, all we see is our own self. And to an omniscient soul, everything and everyone beyond omniscience is nothingness… So they look out at the nothingness of another and see only who they are. Thus “accusation in a mirror”. If in that mercury pool, we see racism, hate, intent to annihilate, genocide! — something to fight to the death. The designated nobody, the persona non grata, bears the sins of the judge and jury. Rememver this whenever a radical bays for blood. Technicity sees its own sins everywhere it looks.

In Soviet Russia, abyss stare out from you.

It is all in our choice of nothingness. Whether we think it explicitly, or simply live it out intuitively, designers must choose, now and perpetually, the pregnant nothingness of exnihilism. The designer who looks out into the world and sees no option but to sell himself into indentured servitude in the factories and towers and nowheres of technicity, will remain a designer only in title.

Remembering the value of Desirability

Design, Pluricentrism

Two venn diagrams are often used by designers to explain what they do.

Each triads presents design as pursuing an overlap of three primary values.

The first, and most common, formulated by IDEO, is the view of a designed solution from an organization’s perspective. A successful design solution is viable, feasible and desirable:

  • Viable: the solution is advantageous to the organization
  • Feasible: the solution is something the organization can actualize
  • Desirable: the solution is something people want and will choose over other options

The second, invented by Liz Sanders, focuses on what makes people choose a solution. A successful design solution is useful, usable and desirable:

  • Useful: the solution fulfills objective, functional needs
  • Usable: the solution removes obstacles and interference from fulfilling needs
  • Desirable: the solution is something people want, apart from functional needs

Notice that Desirable occurs in both triads.

Also notice that Desirable denotes a different concept in both diagrams, a fact easily missed by folks who think verbally.

But fascinatingly, despite this difference, in both diagrams it is always the element of Desirable that drops out first.

And this is because in both diagrams Desirable addresses subjective responses of people to an organization’s offering. These subjective responses motivate objective behaviors, and it is these behaviors that make a design system flourish or fail.

Subjectivity is difficult for most of us to think. This is because we naturally think objectively about physical and conceptual objects. When we use objective thought to understand objects (like engineered objects and object-systems and business objectives, and objective measurements of objectively observed behaviors) the understanding we develop serves our purposes.

But subjectivity confuses objective thinkers because any subjective difference projects a different objectivity into the reality we share. Each of us, walking into the same room notices different things in the environment, and these cause us to make different sense of things. A socially competitive person might look for signifiers of wealth or refinement. A germaphobe might see cleanliness or filth. An artist might notice the aesthetics and symbolic features of a room, indicating a personality or culture. An engineer might see an interesting device or mechanism. My wife senses a field of emotional interconnections, dense with possible stories. A police officer might detect evidence of what has happened or might happen in the room. A preoccupied person might notice only what they are thinking about or what they might be missing on the phone in their pocket.

This is why equating reality and objectivity is not only naive but reductive and, where people are concerned, inadequate. To know a person objectively is to impose one’s own objectivity upon them and to miss precisely those things that motivate behaviors that are, in fact, life and death matters for any organization.

But getting at these multiple objectivities requires a different mentality than business-as-usual objectivity.

This is what designers are supposed to do. But the demands to think objectively, strategize objectively, communicate objectively, plan objectively — these can interfere or even block subjective understanding.

I remember years ago I worked on a technical CMS implementation of a site I had designed myself. I had done extensive research with all the user segments. I had developed a nuanced understanding of where their needs, emotional motivations, perspectives and language differed and converged. I had sensitized myself to how each related differently to the same organization, and interacted with it differently. And the minute I began implementing this design system in this technical platform and started ranging with its myriad features and constraints, all that subjective multi-objectivity went right out the window. To get this engineering work done, I had to attune myself to the logic of this system, and I crystallized into single-logical engineer.

I could not be both an engineer and a designer.

This is why designers should not be shoved into slash roles. Designers need to focus on desirability, supported by a team where others focus on viability and feasibility and project management. If they are forced to do more, the desirability work will be eclipsed. A UX-Ui designer will become only a UI designer. A Service Designer who must also shoulder the weight of process engineering and business strategist might do a lot of service consulting and journey management coaching, but they’ll forget what it is to design.

Subjective understanding is both important and fragile. It requires cultivation and protection.

It is hard to develop and very easy to lose. After a point, it is not only lost, but forgotten.

And once it is forgotten the reasons for cultivating it and protecting it and valuing it are lost.

It starts first with loss of Desirability as something independent from Usable and Desirable. “If this thing is both Useful and Desirable, doesn’t that make it Desirable?” This collapse reduces designed things to mere utility. They work well, but no personal attachment forms between the person and the functional thing or with the organization who provides it. It is a functional transaction.

The next loss is Desirable as something requiring the same level of effort and specialization as Viable or Feasible. It is all leveled down to touch-points with useful features that do not introduce pain-points. Objects and more objects, measured objectively, producing measurable outcomes. The Desirability work is primarily a matter of identifying which parts of which objects to implement first in order to achieve which objectives. It is all easy to talk about, argue about, measure and reward. But, again, it produces nothing anyone can care about.

This is what happens when design is marginalized or refused the conditions required to do design work.

First comes the slash roles. Then come the slashed jobs.

Side note (mainly to myself): a general theory of Desirability. Desirability is rooted in service.

We need to serve — and to have our services needed, valued and received with gratitude.

We all need to be needed.

But we need to be needed in specific ways — according to our essential service.

If someone extracts service from us that is not the service we need and want to give — especially if our essential service is refused, devalued or made impossible — instead of feeling fulfilled purpose we feel used and degraded.

To understand a person’s essential service and to provide them opportunities to provide this service to others who will value it — and at the same time provide that person with services that allow them to focus on their essential services — this taps sources of value, motivation, loyalty, hope, resilience and a myriad other passions. An organization rooted in this kind of value will have charisma, soul, energy and je ne sais quoi far beyond a corporation that relies only on dollars and fear to drive its gears.

Fertile overlap

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.

Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.

Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.

Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.

The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.

Material, medium and goal

Enworldment, Philosophy

Philosophy is a design discipline whose material is language, whose medium is enception (capacity to take as given what is given), and whose goal is actualization of ideal enworldment: inhabiting reality freely received as an infinitely valuable gift.

Punchline

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

All pranking aside, the “Bubbler” faith is my own faith. The inconceivable-from-here being is Atzilut, but Beriah scrubs the eternity spotless every nanosecond of every day with a cloaking coat of nihilude, leaving us collectively, personally, and intuitively finite, both in the underheaven of Yetzirah and down here in the actual, factual earthiness of Assiyah.

Scholem on originality and tradition

Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics

A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:

“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.

Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.

But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.

Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.

There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.

Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.

The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.

It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.

Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.

It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.

Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)

To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.

This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.

Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.

And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.

“Bubbler”

Fables, myths & parables

I might have to invest a few mornings to read Etgar Keret’s newest collection of short stories. It may be directly related to what I’ve reading and thinking about for the last year.

A transcript of one intriguing bookstagram outburst, probably AI-generated:

The uncanny background of “Bubbler”, never fully explained, is the pervasive presence of a secretive and perhaps not fully benevolent cult that has come to believe that the bulk of a person’s life is spent wandering about in a sort of parallel universe, more real than the universe we inhabit. This parallel universe is lived in a category of consciousness entirely outside of waking or sleep. This state is far from unconscious, but inaccessible to consciousness and memory. According to the cult, how a person conducts themselves in this parallel universe determines the mood and themes of that person’s waking hours and the fragments of dreams they can recall. The obtrusive and, as we will see, quite distressing public rituals of the cult are claimed to improve life in the putative “real world” enjoyed by adepts.

Or maybe I’ll skip reading the story, and avoid purchasing yet another bulky and costly book, and for once settle for the review of the story. With both fiction and business writing, I find I get more than what I need from the writing about the writing.

It is probably no accident that an Israeli author (even a secular one) would weave such Kabbalistic (or Kabbaloidal?) ideas into absurdist short stories.

It brings a passage from Scholem to mind, and makes me wonder if Keret ever read it:

It is generally believed that the attitude of mysticism toward history is one of aloofness, or even of contempt. The historical aspects of religion have a meaning for the mystic chiefly as symbols of acts which he conceives as being divorced from time, or constantly repeated in the soul of every man. Thus the exodus from Egypt, the fundamental event of our history, cannot, according to the mystic, have come to pass once only and in one place; it must correspond to an event which takes place in ourselves, an exodus from an inner Egypt in which we all are slaves. Only thus conceived does the Exodus cease to be an object of learning and acquire the dignity of immediate religious experience. In the same way, it will be remembered, the doctrine of “Christ in us” acquired so great an importance for the mystics of Christianity that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was quite often relegated to the background. If, however, the Absolute which the mystic seeks is not to be found in the varying occurrences of history, the conclusion suggests itself that it must either precede the course of mundane history or reveal itself at the end of time. In other words, knowledge both of the primary facts of creation and of its end, of eschatological salvation and bliss, can acquire a mystical significance.

“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay,” “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics…

In a way, “Bubbler” provides a real, if extremely silly, theory of how “time” preceding and anteceding time might transpire within a lifetime.

And now that I think about it, this also reminds me of an obscure little meditation I wrote on the conspicuous presence of oblivion in meditation. I’m probably just making up connections that aren’t there, but now I can tell I’m going to have to buy this book. I guess I’ll have to move something to storage to make room on my limited shelf space for another book, that no doubt will also end up in storage.

Lead… then gold!

Design, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

When a person loses their soul, the very soul who could intuit the loss is absent. All that is left is unreality feeling the unreality of unreality.

I’ve quite a bit on ethnomethods — those mostly intuitive behavioral conventions that permit us to participate in some particular social setting. To belong to a culture is to know how to produce and how to interpret a repertoire of meaningful behaviors. We learn how to understand other people’s behaviors and to make ourselves understood by them; then we adopt them as habits; then we internalize them and they become second-natural, and eventually we forget them entirely and they recede into nature.

Many ethnomethods are never explicated. We learn them mimetically — by direct intuitive mirroring. We just pick them up.

Very few people can deliver a lucid lecture on the ethnomethods they use. Nor can they be relied upon to talk about them, mainly because it would not occur to an interviewee to bring them up, since they operate outside of linguistic direction. Understanding ethnomethods — a sociological approach known as ethnomethodology — requires direct observation and experiment.

But also, and I am sure I am nowhere near the first to say this: language is ethnomethodic. Cultures adopt a shared active vocabulary. And they speak in certain ways about their shared world. This relationship between words, communicative behaviors, referenced realities and speech acts produce mental ethnomethods. Through ethnomethods, people adopt cognitive behavioral habits, and become “inwardly” likeminded through their outward conformity to the intricately inter-related heterogeneous outward norms.

Why do I bring this up? Several reasons:

  • Ethnomethods are the meaningful substructure of organizations, and organizations are the material service designers shape. When we do this shaping, ethomethods are a huge, elusive and difficult part of that shaping.
  • Scholars who have studied how designers work and teach new practitioners (like Nigel Cross and Donald Schon) have observed that design practice differs in distinctive ways from other professions. When these practices are taken up by communities and become a disciplinary field, and are intentionally transmitted through education, training and apprenticeship they become an ethnomethodic tradition. Cross invented an adjective for indicating belonging in the repertoire of behavioral, linguistic and cognitive ethnomethods: “designerly”.
  • Design practice has, since the pioneering design research work of Lucy Suchman, adopted ethnomethodic practice — but ironically has adopted and transmitted it purely ethnomethodically! Very few designers have any explicit knowledge of where our methods came from. Ethnomethodology is embedded in many of our methods, and when we use those methods we function ethomethodologically. If the ethnomethodological tools happen to cycle out of our work, the ethomethodological ethnomethods disappear with them. And designers, who are nine-nine parts technician, and maybe one part intellectual, are ill-equipped to notice.
  • Service design, as a field, has its own evolving set of ethnomethods. Of course, like all fields we have our methods (tools) and our methodologies (systematic use of tools), and when people ask us about how we work, these are what we talk about. But beneath all this is a layer of ethnomethods that guide how we do our work and even how we think about it. I suspect many service designers see themselves as more intellectual than other designers. It is partly because we are required to explain ourselves, our value and our methods to so many different stakeholders. And it does require a degree of articulateness beyond that required of other designers. But this is not intellectual articulateness, but, rather, a technical articulateness.
  • And, perversely, for this very reason, I think service design has lost almost all its designerly ethomethods. It started with “meeting business halfway” and learning the language of business in order to communicate the value of service design in meeting business goals. Then it became mastery of that language and fluency in speaking it, which means learning to think in it. Then it became immersion and active participation in business practices. Then it became learning new methods and approaches to managing journeys and products within journeys. Designers began meeting business halfway from the previous halfway point. And then halfway from that… then that… then that, until eventually, Zeno-paradoxically, our service design stopped being designerly at all.

And this brings me to the thesis I have been working and reworking, which I just summarized to one of the few service design intellectuals I know:

I’m coming to you with a growing suspicion about the field of service design that I think cannot be discussed by most practicing service designers.

I believe that the tacit philosophy that underlies and unconsciously shapes and animates service design practice has never been fully adequate to the problems service design is meant to address. The whole field has always stood on a shaky intellectual foundation, and this has weakened our disciplinary praxis.

But in the last several years, I think even that foundation has eroded away, until that now service design has devolved to total submission to that tacit philosophy that shapes and animates business management — a vulgar subspecies of what Heidegger called technik.

The intellectual foundation upon which service design was erected needs to be dug out and re-laid, so service design can bring design to the business world.

As it stands, service design offers nothing to business that is not new-and-improved business management consulting. And it is this non-designerly sameness that sets dull eyes aglow with recognition when service design gurus speak their language. Service design now sees eye-to-eye with business because it is no longer design, but utterly safe, unchallenging, non-disruptive business as usual. It is no more revolutionary than corporate progressivist activism, and just as phony.

Service design has gone native in the world of business. It has, in the process lost its soul and cannot even sense it.

A methodological note:

I’ve joked that brimstone is my fossil fuel, and that rage is my muse.

I’ve waxed bad-poetic about my daggerscalpel. Something bothers me dreadfully and gets me all murderously angry. I grab my dagger and lunge at it with full intent to kill. But as the weapon tip plunges toward the heart of the matter, it changes midair into a surgical instrument of healing. And now I know something that releases me from resentment.

Most recently I’ve spoken humorously about my philosopher’s stone as a bludgeon — I smash it into some leaden stupidity and watch it transmute into golden insight.

And so on.

Let me see if I can transmute all this ragey negativity into something beautiful.

Design is a very different way to enworld our world. It is not meant to replace other enworldments, but does retune them so we can all collaborate in harmonious difference to solve shared problems.

Design wants to solve these shared problems in some distinctive ways.

It wants to bring things into existence that people value, and which makes life in general more valuable. That is, it wants to offer things that people freely choose and want to have in their lives.

It wants these things to be beneficial to all involved. In the case of a service, the service should not only be beneficial to those who receive the service but also those who deliver that service on the front lines, or who support the service behind the scenes. The service offers opportunities to serve and to be served in ways that are meaningful and rewarding and make people thank their lucky stars that this service exists.

It wants this rewarding involvement to be true of its own services. Anyone who gets staffed to a service design project should immediately feel a palpable change for the better. Anyone who works as a service designer at a service design agency should feel this as well. They should feel that they are bringing a gift to their client. If they do not feel this in their hearts, the designer and the agency need to look into the design of their own service and get right with their craft.

It wants to do what all design does: make things that are useful, usable and desirable. Useful is the easy part. It is about what the design does for whoever uses it. Usable means we can use it intuitively, without massive cognitive effort. It means working with simple gestalts and purely intuitive interactions. And desirable means reinforcing a person’s values and overall sense of value. It means inviting relationship.

It wants to shape a reality that can be enworlded but shared in a variety of ways by a variety of participants. Each participant approaches the artifact in a different way, experiences it differently and responds to it, interacts with it, and changes it from their own point of participation. The single reality is actualized by the distributed agency of participants, each of whom experiences the reality in their own way. In Christopher Alexander’s words, a service is a semilattice experienced by a plurality of participants, not a tree-structure experienced in one way.

Design wants to create a world where a diverse range of people who might inhabit the same world very differently all feel at home and grateful to be here together.

This is why I design.