Back in the day, I had a business with my dear friend Vanessa.
Vanessa and I are both profoundly and intensely Gen X, and sometimes (~90%) we communicated with one another in the native language of our generation. If our client happened to be Gen X, and was sufficiently unshitty, sometimes we would speak to them that way, too.
Our little business was as bilingual as Canada. We were prepared to express every one of our key ideas bilingually. We spoke in Business Casual to uptight people, and in Pottymouth to cool people. If you made us nervous, we’d give you an FAQ on the importance of design research. If we trusted you, you got an FUQ that enumerated the horrible things that befall omniscient dumbasses who leave Frequently Unasked Questions unasked. If you asked us what we did and you seemed like an asshole we said usability and innovation. “You know, ” we’d say, with sphincters well-clenched, “Making the right thing, or making the thing right. Ha. Ha. Ha.” But if we liked the cut of your jib, we explained that we’re always either “fixing some seriously fucked up shit” or “fixing to seriously fuck some shit up.”
I mention this now because I just wrote a post in a third language, which is my first language, Flakiness. That language is infinitely less socially acceptable than either Business Casual or Pottymouth. This is a crying shame because Flakiness is the only language that does any justice at all to design. Flakiness is the language I use when I am speaking to myself about things that matter most to me.
If my last little post on hermetic design left you cold, confused or irritable, maybe try this Pottymouth post on bullshit and chickenshit, which says more or less exactly the same thing.
To get physical and logical materials cooperating in functional units is a triumph of technoscience — convergence of earth and man.
To inspire people, to touch and move them, to form, to ensoul, to animate community, both inwardly and outwardly, is a miracle of culture — convergence of heaven and man.
To do both — to draw heaven and earth together so they touch, interpenetrate and dwell in us, through us, among us and around us — this is the highest aspiration of alchemy. Or, as some of us know it today: design.
What a world-spanning miracle a successful design is.
A successful design has successful engineering. Myriad components (physical and logical) are assembled into an elaborate system that functions together in concert as a unit.
But a successful design has more than just successful engineering. Design focuses on human responses to engineered things. Where an engineered system works objectively, building objects out of objects, design concerns itself with subjects in relation to objects. Subjective beings experience, respond to and interact with engineered objects, and, in their participation, complete the design. Design instaurates hybrid systems of subjective participants and objective parts.
But human beings are not solitary. Human beings are profoundly social. For one thing humans swim in shared linguistic meaning. Our heads are full of words. Words enter through our ears, words spill out through our mouths, words swirl about in thoughts, inner dialogue, imagination, poetic inbursts, looping self-talk, babbling. But our environments are overflowing with signs, signals, symbols, meanings, most of which were molded by and for human minds, hearts and hands. Most of what we see around us is only heard and read, but the best of it reaches through the words and touches or strikes our hearts. Our hearts. First person plural. We share our loves, concerns, cares and cultivate, protect, honor, repair them together. When we lose these things we let the world around us deteriorate and decay. We might even want to help it along. A successful design gives us a shared object, inspires shared concern, draws us together, condenses us around common love, gives us shared being with whom, in whom we identify. Without common objects of love, identity devolves into mere typology, classification systems, schema, categories, criteria, reified imaginary constructions.
But best of all, successful design requires us to leave the insular certainty of our own expertise and mastery. Design demands that we let go of what we know and how we know it, so we can expand our understanding to accommodate how truth and reality is given to others. We must, again and again, pry apart the grasping fingers of our all-knowing minds, force open our own comprehensive omniscience, and expose our tender palms to what is not yet graspable. To “open the hand of thought” is not a gentle release. It is a terrifying sacrifice, entailing the loss of everything our hand death-grips as its own possession.
Only in this opened state does our hand momentarily apprehend the incomprehensible vast richness of being, and it does so by allowing itself to be held in its openness. Vanishingly few can allow this at all, and almost none of us can do it for long — but this unfolding of comprehension is the one thing needful for inspired, inspiring design work.
And this is why the world is overflowing with unwanted garbage, forged in the closed fists and hard skulls of technical masters of design — experts in convincing heard-headed executives to build useful things, spray-painted with desirability, calculated to achieve measurable business goals. These design experts might complete many successful projects, but they do no successful design, and so, despite their best intentions, whatever they construct drains yet more love and care from the world.
In oppressive times, disorderly culture breaks bonds, loosens constraints and opens possibilities.
Disorder, having won freedom, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over order per se, until “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
In anarchic times, orderly culture offers bonds of belonging, defines generative constraints and narrows the field of possibilities to a focused mission to actualize.
Order, having secured Pax Imperium, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over disorder (including destabilizing alternative orders), and proceeds to dominate, constrain, suppress or destroy any possibility of alternative to itself.
Every extreme hates its opposite, even in trace amounts. A microdose of the detested essence is a gateway leading inevitably to deadly overdose. So attack it with excessive force in the cradle before it has a chance to toddle about as a minidose or walks confidently as a mezzodose, because we foresee where it is headed.
The true enemy of extremism, whether an extremism of excess or deficit, is temperance.
Someday temperance may discover that its golden mean and golden rules for maintaining that mean is not a mere averaging of extremes, but something of its own
Someday temperance may discover that its centrism is not a mediocrity between two forms of inertial unreason, but principled centeredness.
Extremists will sneer at this and feel wise to it. There is a word for this conceit of feeling wise to wisdom.
Scholem: “While Christianity and Islam, which had at their disposal more extensive means of repression and the apparatus of the State, have frequently and drastically suppressed the more extreme forms of mystical movements, few analogous events are to be found in the history of Judaism.”
Judaism was too weak and unimportant to effectively persecute its mystics! And that is why Kabbalah flourished and matured enough to become integrated back into its classical religious form.
This reminds me of something my friend Stokes said to me once: the reason design was able to develop its own genuine social scientific practices — and avoid suppression of scientistic management practices (imaginary scientific rigor, and its attendant misnorms, which, paradoxically, make scientific method impossible!) — was only because design was considered unimportant and unworthy of management attention. Design could do science only because it flew under the scientific management radar.
Indeed, the more important a design project is — the more scrutiny it receives from the top floor of the glass tower — the more tippy-top-down control is imposed upon it, the less doing design is possible. It is still called “design”. It looks designy. There are cool hipster costumes, profuse post-it notes, kraft paper, masking tape, markers and general arts n’ crafts creativity signifiers. There are calculatedly messy sketches and pretty polished graphics.
But the freedom, soul and joy has been driven out by fear, control and ambition.
The more I move back-and-forth between hermetic mysticism and design, the more a book on hermetic design wants to be written.
We look for meaning, and all we see is nothing. But this is exactly what meaning always looks like the instant before it irrupts out of nowhere ex nihilo, flooding the world with divine importance.
“But this time is different!”
Of course it is.
This time is always different, and in this respect, it is always the same.
If I ever get this maxim into a form that can penetrate real existential despair, and at least pry it open, if not dispel it, I will letterpress a zillion copies and leave them everywhere.
Most of our making is construction. We build systems of meaningful units, glued together with logic and causality.
We do precious little craft.
In fact, we do not even know what craft means.
We are dead to craft.
Because we are dead to craft, the material world is dead to us.
We are cursed with a midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to word. On contact with our skin, words to turn to more words — words about words — entire universes of words — packing inward, denser and denser, within our word stuffed suits.
We cannot touch the world. We cannot feel anything against our skin, except the texture of text. Words have woven themselves around us, webs, cobwebs, soul mummies, whited cocoons.
We can speak fluently about galaxy clusters, theories of relativity, subatomic particles, but we have to sit down with a computer to figure out what love is. We understand how things happen in supercolliders, distant laboratories, radio telescopes, but our own kitchen table, and the things sitting on and around it? It is all inscrutable epiphenomena.
Walter Benjamin quoting Stanley Eddington, made this same point:
I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.
Bruno Latour, crypomarian ethnographer of Sciencestan, said this:
When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.
…
Religion does not even attempt to race to know the beyond, but attempts at breaking all habits of thoughts that direct our attention to the far away, to the absent, to the overworld, in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was before misunderstood, distorted and deadly, of what is said to be “what was, what is, what shall be,” toward those words that carry salvation. Science does not directly grasp anything accurately, but slowly gains its accuracy, its validity, its truth-condition by the long, risky, and painful detour through the mediations of experiments not experience, laboratories not common sense, theories not visibility, and if she is able to obtain truth it is at the price of mind-boggling transformations from one media into the next.
What is it to be alive to craft?
How does the world feel on our fingertips when we remove the thick mittens that control our hand movements?
We feel what material suggests. We are medium. We, our instruments, the being coming are fused in medium.
My eye, my hand, the pencil in my hand, the vibration of pencil tip against paper tooth, that trace of graphite my pencil leaves, the form on the paper, the urge for a line here, a shading there, my eye and my heart — they are inseparable. Words, memories, stray emotions drift about discreetly. They know not to get in the way. Something comes into being through the work, among the converging materials, borne on media.
An unknown goal draws the present toward its desire. This is how it is to craft.
In craft we are alive to reality. In this state, we receive reality, take it in, incorporate it, grateful for what is given. We finally know that we do not need much, only a handful, but this handful makes us and the world real. Without that, there is nobody present to possess a retirement fund the size of the entire S&P.
Do you feel the unreality of what you take for life? Do you suspect you are living in a simulation? Entertain the reality that it is true. You are living a simulation — and this lingering suspicion is your last tenuous contact with reality.
Our being streams out into the world around us. Every soul is nebula-shaped and its ethereal arms radiate to the ends of the cosmos. The world streams into us, and its tendrils convey light and life from oblivion, the benevolent mask of infinitude. The streams crisscross, interweave, and each brightly knotted nexus is someone.
For thirty-four years I inhabited one world as one self.
I say inhabited, but I dwelt nowhere, in an unreality of habitual inhibition. I was a pious heretic, an obedient radical, dedicated to satisfying the criteria of being a good person — and, even more importantly, of avoiding being a bad one. School had equipped me with critical toys for dissecting alleged beliefs of the past, still held, believe it or not, by contemptible fools still stuck there. I had it on good authority that authority was to be questioned, interrogated, tortured until it broke. In school I’d also received a beautiful set of broken idols, and I enjoyed subjecting them to ritual reshattering. But the greatest gift of my education was a headful of disdainful ideas about the commercial world, a disdain reinforced by all my entertainment heroes. But despite all these cynical thoughts about the rat race — and all those careerist rats scrambling beside me, and, hopefully slightly behind me — in my heart (and, come to find out, also in my hands and feet) I preferred death to being a bad employee.
But one deep-frozen Toronto winter, I exited. I vanished into nowhere, and returned as a new self in a new world, as crazy and wordless as a newborn. Nothing was different, but everything had changed. Urban petrichor whispered dog wisdom into my opened nostrils, in concurrency of ammonia, maple syrup, motor oil and wet gravel. The subway was overflowing with international angels. I rode my bicycle everywhere, singing and babbling nonsense, poems flowing around me. Everything was here, real, superphysical, important.
Somehow, though I was here, capable of welcoming myself into this new world. Somehow, I reparented myself, sometimes patiently. Somehow, I retaught myself speech. New meanings remapped themselves to old words. Ironic bilinguality was set like a wafer on my mother tongue, investing each word with humming, glowing irony. The daughter tongue of Pierre Menard, reauthor of the Quixote became legible in my ears. Somehow, I could still use the old meanings of the old words to communicate whatever I needed to say, provided it was nothing anyone could possibly care about.
From the outside, nothing much was different. I was the same guy — maybe happier and definitely more cryptic.
I raised this baby to a second adulthood, with a few minor rebirth setbacks along the way.
We sit in meditation awaiting spectacular apotheotic experiences. This distracts us from receiving the incessant gift, offered, re-offered, again and again: the insight of distraction. Who, exactly, decided to seek spiritual orgasms, flashing divine lights, the face of God? Who, exactly, decided to depart the seated now to revel in magical ambitions or to struggle with past sufferings? And who, exactly, summons us back to now, to feel the faint tickle of breath on nostril and lip, the aching or vibrating body? Nobody did. Nobody does. It is the same nobody who flees the here and now and sees me from a nonexistent elsewhere, most minutes of most days, between birth and death.
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.
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.
