This passage from Beyond Good and Evil, though universally relevant, is especially relevant for the designer who aspires to more than utilitarian goals (use-fulness and use-ability) and wishes to show our culture new ways of seeing, which in the parlance of the user experience industry is designated inadequately by the term “desirability”. These new ways of seeing can be quite trivial and have a strictly localized effect or they can penetrate deeply into a person’s experience of the world. What I am describing here is the essential continuum between design and true transformative art.
He who has followed the history of an individual science will find in its evolution a clue to the comprehension of the oldest and most common processes of all “knowledge and understanding”: in both cases it is the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience which are evolved first–it is only late, and then imperfectly, that our senses learn to be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of understanding. It is more comfortable for our eye to react to a particular object by producing again an image it has often produced before than by retaining what is new and different in an impression: the latter requires more strength, more “morality.” To hear something new is hard and painful for the ear; we hear the music of foreigners badly. When we hear a foreign language we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds we hear into words which have a more familiar and homely ring: thus the Germans, for example, once heard arcubalista and adapted it into Armbrust. {Armbrust: literally, “arm-breast”; both words mean “crossbow.”} The novel finds our senses, too, hostile and reluctant; and even in the case of the “simplest” processes of the senses, the emotions, such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotions of laziness, dominate.–
As little as a reader today reads all the individual words (not to speak of the syllables) of a page–he rather takes about five words in twenty haphazardly and “conjectures” their probable meaning–just as little do we see a tree exactly and entire with regard to its leaves, branches, color, shape; it is so much easier for us to put together an approximation of a tree. Even when we are involved in the most uncommon experiences we still do the same thing: we fabricate the greater part of the experience and can hardly be compelled not to contemplate some event as its “inventor.” All this means: we are from the very heart and from the very first–accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.
In a lively conversation I often see before me the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined by the thought he is expressing or which I believe has been called up in him that this degree of clarity far surpasses the power of my eyesight–so that the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been invented by me. Probably the person was making a quite different face or none whatever.
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One of my fundamental methods: to open out the meaning of individual passages I often string together scattered passages that inter-illuminate. Or, to say it as I experience it, I simply point out my own lattice of associations that spontaneously arise whenever I read something, even if I cannot articulate the connection. The form is analogical: a simple “this is like this.” The “this is like this, in that…” comes later – sometimes much later. My faith in my sometimes odd sense of analogy – my faith that is will lead me (nearly always along very uncomfortable paths) to insight – is one of my advantages as a designer and thinker, but it can lead me some strange places where people don’t really want to be.
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As anyone who has read Thomas Kuhn knows, it is anomalies that force scientific revolutions. Your sensitivity to anomalies and your readiness to question the structures and analogies that constitute knowledge determine the point where you break from the dominant paradigm and allow it to dissolve back into the anomalies (the phenomenal flux, the primordial chaos) from which it came before it was formed by language and logic into knowledge. This dissolution permits new analogies, new ways to makes sense, new ways to spontaneously experience the world, new ways to love.
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I like to place the words “design” and “designate” side by side and think about them together.
Design is a microcosm of culture. That is why I care about design.
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I’ve always liked the Shins “Mine’s Not a High Horse”: “These are the muddy waters / I’m swimming in to make a living / Were I to drown in them / Should come as no surprise.”