In the late 90s I went to work for an IT consulting company that had just acquired a renowned design shop, and was attempting to integrate the two cultures. I joined at the precise point where the honeymoon ends and life together begins, and was privileged to witness a universal trauma of human life. (Young fiances think they will append the happiness of togetherness to their respective lives. Perhaps later they will add the happiness of offspring to their couplehood. The metamorphosis of child to lover, lover to spouse, and spouse to parent, etc. is psychologically violent and painful, and for good reason. [* See note below.])
The software engineers were excited about the addition of creatives and what later came to be called “user experience (UX) professionals” added to the mix. They knew their user interfaces could be made more user-friendly, and were eager to collaborate. But then the reality of the situation hit.
The addition of UX did not constitute an addition at all, but a challenge to the whole vision and practice of IT. There was no way to maximize the value of UX in the software development process by simply adding capabilities to an existing process.
The whole enterprise had to be rethought, from top to bottom. First there was a distressingly deep change in how the product of the work was conceived. Many of the software designers thought of what they were producing as code, and the code needed to function solidly. Others placed more focus on the user interface, and thought of what they were producing as software that had to some degree a quality of usability. The UX vision, however, shifted the focus away from the artifact. What was being created at the most radical level (as it appeared at that time) was an experience, and not only the code, but the user interface were just means of delivery of this experience.
The entire field of software development was shifted from an ontic vision (conceiving truth in terms of things) to a phenomenological one (conceiving truth in terms of subjects encountering and making sense of phenomena). This shift did not invalidate the importance of code or of good user interface design, but it certainly put it in a new context with new considerations and new priorities, and to address these consideration, the processes of software development had to be reconsidered.
This is what is meant by paradigm shift. The way things are seen changes on the whole, this new vision makes new, previously unnoticed or dismissed considerations relevant; to accommodate the new vision and new considerations, new practices become necessary, and these new practices force a reordering of the overarching approach, which in turn changes existing practices. And of course, this also changes where each role fits into the work.
[Note for nerds: It could even be said that UX represents the emergence of a pop phenomenology, a practical echo of an earlier poetic popularization, existentialism.]
Of course, these types of shifts are complex and slippery. The human mind finds it extraordinarily difficult to transcend an ontic perspective. We prefer to think about discrete, definable things we can point to and say “this word signifies that.” When a super-ontic perspective gains cultural power, the power itself becomes attractive especially to ontic minds which wish to acquire some of that power. So what tends to happen is the language of the movement is adopted and remapped to the old, unchanged ontic perspective, which gains some exciting new synonyms. So now, when you think about the user interface that you’re designing, you don’t call it a “user interface”, you call it an “experience”. When you do your requirements gathering, instead of just talking to people inside the company you also interview people outside the company and gather “user requirements”, and this activity is called “user research”. Not only that — you can also QA your new user interf… er, “user experience” with usability testing. And all this new vocabulary and techniques distinguish you from competitors who still don’t know these new words and techniques. They have not experienced the “paradigm shift”.
What happens in these cases, is you have a set of people who have some to see by the new vision, and use the new vocabulary and methods because these are the logical and practical extension of seeing this way, and you have a much larger group who become also “fundamentalist” converts, who change opinions and behaviors and become among the most fervent advocates of this new way, but who remain at bottom unchanged in their vision and values, and unaware of that fact.
And this process happens constantly. The whole notion of emotional design and brand experience is in collision with the UX world, and has put UX practitioners in the position software engineers were put in a decade ago. In 1999, everyone wanted to be the one who got to do the wireframes. There was great prestige to doing them: you were a jewel in the crown of the New Economy. (The romantic intensity of this position was a hundred times that of social media today, as hyped as it is. Social media borders on mania, Information Architecture was full-on manic.) People talk about wireframes very differently now, and those who do them have gone from feeling pride in their task, to being tasked with something slightly onerous. They may love designing experiences, but they hate what it means to be a designer of the specifics of experiences, and so they seek to escape it (into “strategy”) for the sake of social status, and further, anyone else who pursues something beyond experience design is also seen as a status-seeker. Everybody wants to be a strategist, because that is “higher”. If only it were lower so only those fit for the role would want it.
I remember a friend explaining to me that coders were becoming like plumbers. Now experience architects are plumbers.
But why do we have so little respect for plumbers?
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Why do we respect plumbers so little? (And don’t say you do respect them, then become angry if someone calls you a plumber.)
But also, if our standard for prestige is to function at the most radical level of understanding, why do we have so little respect for philosophy? Philosophy, after all, is precisely the discipline of discovering and settling the most radical level of understanding!
We want to avoid doing philosophy. But we also want to feel superior to philosophy. But perversely, we want the status of one who has philosophized.
We want to work like plumbers, refining a known discipline and excelling at it, but the status of craftsperson is too low for us.
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But it is easy to know when you have transcended another perspective. You can see the limitations of the other’s thinking almost like edges, in the form of what they fail to consider. (This is known in phenomenology as a horizon.) However, what does this look and feel like from within the horizon of one transcended? It looks like a bunch of irrelevant and complicating concerns being imposed on a situation that is already well-understood. It looks like theoretical hair-splitting. It looks like obfuscating language. It feels like venturing into undefined territory for no good reason. It feels irritating and anxious. It feels like pointless frustration.
It is the feeling of popular conservatism.
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Reading philosophy is the discipline of confronting superior perspectives and rising to know them and in the process deepening one’s vision of the world. In the process one plays the part of lower in relationship to higher, and then higher in relationship to one’s former lower self. One can then speak etically of one’s former emic existence, which means to acquire a new emic existence to transcend. And one acquires a taste for surpassing greatness.
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Thomas Kuhn, the popularizer of the term “paradigm shift” effected a paradigm shift in our understanding of scientific progress. Before him, science was understood to be a linear accretion of scientific facts. The body of knowledge was supposed to grow in spurts, and the spurts were scientific revolutions. Kuhn showed that, in fact, science progresses rapidly, stalls and stays stalled until significant and deep conceptions of current scientific thought are questioned, challenged and finally rejected. The body of knowledge needs frequent pruning to keep growing. Perhaps because we are mammals we look upon a pruning of the body of knowledge with horror as if it were amputation or castration. At any rate, we are hostile enough this state of affairs to rewrite our science books after each revolution to maintain an appearance of steady, additive progress.
Nobody minds learning new facts. It is the unlearning of facts that we hate, especially facts that orient us to our world, constitute our sanity, and endow us with the aura of expertise. We have to die to an old reality, forget what we know, wander through darkness suffering the darkest perplexities, faithfully resisting the compulsion to look back, until we come out the other side with a new way of seeing the world.
We want to acquire a new vision without suffering the pain of doubting, then losing then living without the old one. But “only where there are tombs are there resurrections.”
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[Note: I remember as a kid reading a review of American Werewolf in London, where the reviewer remarked on the insightful treatment of the transformation experience. 29 years later, I am still fascinated that the reviewer remarked not on the technique of the special effects, but on the significance of the intention and the success of the attempt.]