Red Card

Ethics, Letterpress, Politics

There is room for disagreement on immigration policy.

As a staunch agonist, I honor even extreme, bitter conflict on such issues.

Those who disagree with current policy have every right to protest it publicly.

There should be less room around enforcement of current policy. Policies are designed to narrow possibilities into practical particulars of enforcement.

Protesting policy by actively interfering with its enforcement is a dangerous line to cross, if we wish to preserve rule of law, which is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy.

But enforcement outside the bounds of policy is at least equally dangerous, and repugnant to any decent citizen of a liberal democracy.

Civil rights are non-negotiable and sacred.

This is why I have donated to the Red Card Campaign, and why I think every decent American liberal or conservative, ought to donate, too.

I am compelled to letterpress print Red Cards. All sacred ideas call me to the press.

Mission mistatement

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.

If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.

In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.

Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.

Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.

If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.

Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.

As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.

The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.

These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.

Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.

And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.

These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.

These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.

It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.

Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.

And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.

When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.

Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.

And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.

Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.

What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?

Faith.

Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.

Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies

The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.

Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.

A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.

Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.

That is our mission.

The world needs design so badly it rejects design.

Value exchanges, sahib

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Etymology, Love, Philosophy

I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.

In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.

At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.

As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.

To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.

To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.

I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.

I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.

I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.

When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.

“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.

But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.

(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)

Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.

And value? Value is just some portion of love.

Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.

Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.

We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.

But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.

If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.

Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”

Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.

Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.

Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.

And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.

It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.

But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.

Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.

Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.

Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.

This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.

Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.

And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.

We all need this so much more than we know.

Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.

Commonality

Enworldment, Hermeneutics, History, Politics

Back in 2016, stunned and demoralized by the election of Trump, I needed to get my bearings. We were in a new reality, and I felt unequipped to move around.

I read several books that helped. The most helpful was Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. Tragically, it was even more harmful than it was helpful. What I learned from this old-school leftist made new sense of recent history, at the cost of alienating me from my own social tribe. I’ve been politically galut ever since.

Rereading Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country also helped, and has continued to help. Whenever conflict with well-graduated Professional-Managerial class supremacists (thanks, Thomas Frank!) makes me doubt my own lefty bona fides, I can reread this book to recover the truth of who is left of whom. This I believe.

Then came Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. This book presented a series of vignettes meant to help the reader understand the surreal cynicism of Putin’s Russia. It was wild and disturbing to read about a world with no trace of shared truth, that could only be passively ridden like a carnival tilt-a-whirl, or bushwhacked with individual intuition and stubborn refusal to believe anything.

At the time, I felt I was getting a preview of Trump’s America. And in hindsight, I can see I was mostly right.

For about fifteen seconds this morning, I considered rereading it.

But I am terrified I would be unable to read that book now as I read it then. I fear I would recognize that Russia is just like America, but wonder “…but as opposed to what?”

Because that firm common ground that, despite our differences, could be assumed to provide support under our feet, is no longer there. The air of freedom, equality and universal human dignity that we once breathed from birth no longer circulates among us. The compasses that once reliably pointed North, now spins erratically and stops only to point insistently atthis, then that, arbitrary direction. All of this — however hokey and fake it was — is gone now, along with the memory of what life is like when all these commonalities can be taken for granted.

This is what makes history and reading works from other times so challenging.

Objective grasping of the material is trivial. What is difficult is recovering the particular faith that enworlds that material and makes it seem given by reality itself. )O+

Much easier is to grip everything with the fingers of now, and profoundly misunderstand it all.

L. P. Hartley, whoever the hell that is, is said to have said “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

One of the great challenges of youth is to finally, for once, internalize what this means, and to outgrow the callow, hubristic omniscience that practically defines youth. Presentist accounts of past events is the furthest thing from history. It is historical Dunning-Kruger. It is literally sophomoric.

Hannah Arendt was taught by her patch of history to quip “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”

Kids these days.

The old faith and its enworldment is gone forever. We couldn’t recover it now, even if we found the world-lever that could hoist our nation back into e pluribus unum orbit around some common sensical sun. It would have to be a new sun in a new orbit.

What concerns me most right now is establishing common faith and enworldment with a new community — the chimerical and kaleidoscopic society called myself. I need my own ground of given realities and given truths. I need my own spiritus atmosphere of virtues to follow, to honor and to aspire to embody. I need my own conception and orientation to truth, by which I can navigate work, chaos and confinement.

I have at least one viable option for the future.

Sadly, everyone still knows everything.

There is no room for what I know in anyone’s head but my own.

Laughing gas

Etymology

When greed meets bafflement, and the anti-aporia reflex of Masters of Reality is overridden by fever dreams of  striking it even richer, all kinds of awkward enthusiasm is released into the world. Some of it is true and most of it is tasteless. Market bubbles are inflated with the laughing gas of enthusiasm.

Few know that the word “enthusiasm” was originally a pejorative.

When bubbles burst, enthusiasm recovers its disgrace.

But never forget: spirit is also air.

It’s a gas, gas, gas.

Instauratio

Design, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Taoism

One face of all is material.

This material is not a materialistic material of science, politics or society.

This material is the stubborn resistance and graceful pliability of the world around us. It is the world we inhabit, in and among whom we live, in and with whom we participate as part, and to whom we belong.

One face of all is spirit.

This sprit is not the spirit of spirituality, religion or culture.

This spirit is awareness and oblivion, revelation and veiling of what matters most — infinite value in which all life, ourselves included, is rooted, on which all value subsists. Value is love.

Between these two faces is self — materially given, spiritually receiving, spiritually giving, materially shaping.

This self is not the self of psychology, economics or romanticism.

This self instaurates. The self discover-creates and makes sense of everything. It create-discovers and makes inspired works. This self is instaurated. As the self makes sense of everything and makes inspired works, the self begins to make inspired sense.

Instauration of material and spirit is instauration of self.

This self is singular and plural, I and We. Any singular self, of whatever scale, from intuitive spark to universal solidarity is e pluribus unum.

Material, self and spirit are traditionally known as Earth, Man and Heaven, the Great Triad.

Translating it for my family: Assiyah-Yetzirah, Yetzirah-Beriah, Beriah-Atzilut.

The concerted effort to convene Earth, Man and Heaven for the betterment of the world, with no attempt to reduce any one to any other, nor to allow any one to dominate or predominate over any other — but rather to find the right momentary constellation for present place, the present selves in the present time — this wants a name, but whatever has a name invites lust and conquest.

Perhaps the name “design” was as good a name as any.

Obfujection

Philosophy

Obfujection is a portmanteau of obfuscation and objection. It names a common and pervasive category mistake: taking a subject as an object, thereby obscuring subjective reality as attention is misdirected toward a phantom object with various objective properties.

A place where obfujection is the norm is selfhood. We obfuject ourselves into identities, roles, types, or personas — none of which is self, of course, which is subject.

Another place is virtues. Empathy is a big one right now. It is taken as a psychic virtue-thing that becomes an object of fascination, studied, discussed, extolled — but seldom actually done to acquire understanding of why someone perceives, conceives, and responds to things in ways that differ from us.

Another one that annoys designers: when appropriators of design language call an artifact they’re making “an experience”, they are obfujecting the subjective experience real designers aim to produce and replacing it with an object, which is a damn pity, since “experience” language was intended precisely to shift focus to the subject.

Religion is an obfujection wonderland. Atheists and theists alike obfuject God as a being who exists or doesn’t exist. Entire religious sects have been founded on obfujections that turned exemplary subjects, with whom we were to turn together toward God, into human idols.

We even obfuject academic subjects when we reduce them to factual knowledge.

Obfujection performs two useful functions.

First, it tames unnervingly incomprehensible realities by everting them into harmless graspable things.

Second, it absolves us from participation in realities that might threaten our current enworlding subject.

Polycentric and pluricentric design

Design

I have used the word polycentric to mean two different things.

The original meaning, used by Michael Polanyi and later by Elinor Ostrom, referred to things (usually social things) having multiple agential centers. Only by understanding the semi-automous operation of these centers within an irreducible system can a polycentric phenomenon be comprehended.

The other, less orthodox meaning came from design industry resonances. Starting with Don Norman, design has decentered the designed artifact in order to recenter it on the people for whom the artifact is intended. User-centered design, then, more generally customer-centered, employee centered, patient-centered, student-centered, citizen-centered, name-your-role-centered design. These have been generalized into human-centered design. I’m not sure what we call what Temple Grandin did…

To my designer ear, polycentric described a key difference between the old one-person-at-a-time-centricity design I had done in my former life, and the new focus on interactions among multiple persons in service design.

But the more I practice service design the more these two meanings diverge and seem to need two separate words.

Service designers are vitally concerned with the polycentricity ?of social systems. How do polycentric systems (which include but transcend project-sponsoring organizations) produce various outcomes, or fail to produce them? ?How are all these agential centers (“service actors”) interacting to strengthen or weaken the organization?

But that is only the objective third-person behaviorist understanding of the system. It gives us the What and How, but it does not give us the Why, which is the key to influencing the behaviors that produce the outcomes. To get at the Why we must understand the view of the system from within, from the perspective of each of the service actors who participate in it — who, based on what they experience, respond one way or another, supporting, undermining or abandoning the service.

I have been experimenting with using the word polycentric in its normal sense to describe in the third-person, the objective, emergent phenomenon of systems with multiple agential centers.

To describe the subjective, first-person interlapping experiences of multiple persons participating in an interactive social system (service or otherwise) I am using the word pluricentric.

As I’ve mentioned a half-zillion times before, service design considers the experience and agency of all participants in a service. We consider not only the people who receive the service, but also those who deliver the service, and those who support them. And of these who deliver and support the service, we consider more than just employees, but people outside the organization who partner with the organization. And often we consider indirect recipients of service, for example, members of a household, who influence the experience and actions of the direct recipient.

Every one of these service actors has a different experience of the service. A nurse, for example, almost certainly has a different overall life experience from many patients. When a patient and a nurse interact in a medical setting like an emergency room, that encounter is very different for the nurse, for the patient and for the patient’s spouse. Each wants different things from the interaction and experience it very differently. Part of what they all experience is what they perceive everyone else’s experience to be, so there is a feedback dynamic among participants. The nurse responds to the patient’s pain and the spouse’s fear, and both patient and spouse are keenly sensitive to the response and what it indicates about the person on whom they are suddenly so terrifyingly dependent.

The field of design is early in its development researching pluricentric dynamics and responding to them with design interventions capable of producing favorable polycentric outcomes.

The trends suggest retardation or regression rather than progress. So far, the emerging field of journey management has been monocentric. It is possible to hack it into a semblance of polycentricity, but doing so requires vigorous upstream swimming. Product management, after subjugating designers, and forcing them back into aesthetic and usability servitude, has rediscovered discovery to its great hubristic delight. Service design is whipped along at a trot too brisk even for adequate monocentric approaches. Economic hard times always hit designers first. But everyone says that ecomonic hard times are when the best investments can be made.

Silicon tabula rasa

Autobiography, Fables, myths & parables

“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.” — Black Elk

I am starting to believe I hallucinated a memory of Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, joining a company (called Meta?) on a mission to build a chip with the smallest possible inbuilt instruction set.

According to my own dumbed-down-to-pure-myth understanding, “instruction set” means hardcoded know-how. Meta wanted as much of this know-how to be softcoded. The chip aspired to silicon tabula rasa. It was a chip with no instincts, no reflexes, no presuppositions, no unconscious, no bodily autonomy. It was all explication, derived from atomic logical operations, infinitely flexible, constrained only by pure logical necessity.

It was the image of our ideal self. It was another of our those artificial Adam projects we compulsively spin up,

In my recollection, the concept utterly failed.

Now that my delicate, impressionistic dream-memory is safely set down, I will see how much of this is factually accurate.

Exnihilist manifesto, opening?

Exnihilism, Philosophy

Most endure the nihilism of our time with dull, dutiful complacency. Others blame and lash out at specific people as the cause of their deprivation. Others suspect unknown people and groups, and look for signs pointing to the source of this pervasive wrongness. Others hole up and shelter themselves against the times, hoping meaning will come to them in their solitude.

But meaninglessness is the air we breathe. Through emoting mouths, we exhale and exhale and exhale our remaining spirit.

Our time knows neither how to find meaning, nor how to make it. If, by some everyday miracle, meaning finds life, we do not know how to nurture it. Rather, we kill it in the cradle. In our vacuating ethos, such euthanasia is the only ethical thing to do. We may detest this world, but we love the ethics that sustains it.

Hifaluphemisms

Autobiography

Why excuse poor behavior, when you can romanticize it? Some hifalutin euphemisms:

  • “I abide in eternity.” (I am bad at time management.)
  • “I can’t get along with the other kids.” (I quarrel way too damn much.)
  • “Brimstone is my fossil fuel.” (I have a productive relationship with pain.)
  • “I have an industrial strength philosopher’s stone.” (All my best ideas are inspired by feeling like shit.)

Making me feel like I’ve never belonged

Autobiography, Philosophy

When I was four or five, my parents gave me my first album, Beatles Revolver. One of my favorite songs on that album, and possibly my favorite song ever, is “She Said She Said”.

Strangely, all my life, until quite recently, I misheard the lyrics. Even now, if I don’t pay attention I still hear it as:

And you’re making me feel like
I’ve never belonged

That has been the dominant feeling of my entire life.

Enneagram experts tell me I am a five wing with a four wing. I’ve wondered if I might not be a four with a five wing. Five, for me, is how four expresses itself. I’m almost a four with an everything-else wing. I cannot get along with the other kids.

Part of my belonging problem might be that my judgments are very much my own.

On all important matters, I know exactly what I think. It is a direct result of effort. If I find myself at a theoretical, practical or moral loss, that loss becomes a philosophical problem. I have processed mountains of lead into gold with my industrial strength philosopher’s stone.

Further, I have paid close attention to what I admire (even when others disparage it) and what I experience as contemptible (even when others praise or “normalize” it).

I take my own judgments far more seriously than those who have not put effort into forming their own personal opinions, but who, instead subscribe to general expert-certified opinion, as if it were another cloud service, like Spotify, NYT or Netflix. I find the streaming beliefs of the people around me to be wrong at best, and more often vapid and embarrassing. The worst of these beliefs are the beliefs these subscribers hold about their own personal virtues. Self-awareness. Critical thinking. Empathy. Justice. Questioning of authority. Radicalness. The belief that they epitomize these things is pure metacognitive incompetence.

For this reason, whenever I am praised to condemned, I don’t think any better or worse of myself.

But that does not mean lame beliefs, stupid political attitudes, negative judgments or failure to appreciate my contributions do not bother me. They bother me a lot.

But they do not bother me as judgments of me as a person.

I experience them as evidence that I will never belong to groups who subscribe to such nonsense.

And it subscription nonsense, by which most groups are defined. The subscription medium, not the steaming content, that is the message.

I experience it as the hopelessness of ever having a place.

In times like these, we are forced to choose between social alienation or self alienation. Most take the road of self alienation.

They’re making me feel like
I’ll never belong.

Confessions of a hedgehog

Autobiography, Design

“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.

Its been over a decade since I read this essay, so I cannot remember, but wikipedia assures me that Isaiah Berlin said Tolstoy was, by nature, a fox, but by conviction a hedgehog.

Maybe I need to reread it.

I wonder if he offers any examples of poor souls who were, by nature, a hedgehog, but by circumstance, the foxiest of foxes.

There is a fine and blurry line between cognitive impairments and a sense of purpose in life.

Behind one species of hedgehog — let’s call it the involuntary hedgehog — there is a small set of highly developed abilities, organized as a methodology. Part of the methodology is seeing the world that reveals applications for the methodology.

This hedgehog can do all sorts of things with this methodology — as long as he is allowed his methodology. Take the methodology away, the hedgehog’s quills are plucked and he looks like a shaved runt fox. Tragically, one of the methods in the methodology is not providing itself the conditions needed to apply the methodology. If the hedgehog’s quills are plucked, the hedgehog cannot defend itself long enough to restore or regrow them.

I can use design to solve all kinds of problems — but only if I have conditions to design.

If I am prevented from designing, I am well and truly fucked.

The thing about design

ANT, Design, Philosophy, Politics

Latour, from “A Cautious Prometheus”:

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

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

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

It is as if they have never designed.

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

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

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

The patron

Fables, myths & parables

An industrialist lived the first half of his life solely for wealth. He worked hard and now he was worth nearly seven zillion dollars.

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

So he devised a plan to become a patron of the arts — and not only a patron, but one of a stature exceeding his legendary reputation in  industry. He would power this achievement with the same strength of character that overcame all his rivals and put him at top of the top. He would utilize the same set of virtues that made him the wealthiest man in the world — but this now these virtues would win him a place at the apogee of culture.

His innovative approach to art patronage would be remembered as the crowning achievement of his life.

So he budgeted one-third of his vast fortune to fund a single great masterpiece. One third of his fortune — two and one-third zillion dollars — channeled into one painting! Whoever was chosen would become mindbogglingly wealthy. Never had any artist in the history of humankind been incentivized to this extreme of excellence!

The patron knew he would have to proceed very carefully. A third of his fortune was at stake. There was no room for mistakes. To ensure the desired result, he issued a Request for Proposal.

At the center of this RFP was a very demanding ask: Provide a matrix describing the proposed painting, at a granularity of quarter inch squares. In each specify number of brush strokes, and, per each, color pigment, brush stroke size and path.

Only by visualizing at this level of precision, could the patron understand what each painter planned to deliver, enabling him to compare proposals and to select the best option.

This was his plan, and he executed on this plan with the effectiveness that made him the man he was . Hundreds of the best painters submitted proposals. The patron carefully compared them all, and selected the best one. The selected painter painted the painting, flawlessly and exactly as described, and delivered the painting according to the FRP response timeline.

It was the best painting ever produced.

Smiling insistence

Design, Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

I refuse to despair, because I know better.

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

Susan teaches this: Warm demander.