I’m trying to develop a thought, and I suspect it’s already been worked out and articulated somewhere, but it sure isn’t present in the business world. It’s related to a point a friend made to me recently, that much of anthropology (and of qualitative research in general) is over-focused on language and ignores much of the pre-/non-linguistic concrete reality that constitutes our private and cultural lives.

As designers, language is a big part of what we work with, but as most people will admit, the best designs are great because they relieve us of the necessity to think in language. We just use our tacit know-how and accomplish what we wanted, without ever verbalizing the means or the ends. Designs that require users to stop and verbalize everything as they go are inadequate to varying degrees, based, I think, on the temperament of the user. I am convinced some people live their lives in verbal self-dialogue on most matters, oscillating between verbal thought and execution of what is thought, where others lose themselves in tacit activity, and every requirement to think verbally is an unwelcome interruption. This has serious UI design implications, because the former wants things spelled out explicitly, where the latter is feeling for intuitive cues largely invisible to many users.

I’m the second kind of temperament, and it really is why I don’t like to look at clocks, lists or timesheets, because it destroys the continuity of my activity. Even when I’m working in words, the words are not explicit questions and answers, but more like blocks I’m mutely playing with. I think this is a Wittgenstinean thought: I’m developing a tacit know-how in the use of language to do some particular thing that I can’t yet verbalize, not entirely unlike building a house using a command language.

I think language is a very flexible instrument, and based on how well developed it is, it is able to justly articulate much of what goes on in the tacit practical world, and once it is able to do this, it becomes instrumental, capable of being used in planning and executing. My real question is this: how valuable an investment is the development of language in design projects? What are the possible tradeoffs?

• We can inadequately describe the worldviews of our designands (sorry, experimenting with a coinage), and save time, and money at the expense of articulate understanding and design quality.
• We can adequately describe the worldviews of our designands, and gain articulate understanding and design quality at the expense of time and money.
• We can dispense with description of worldviews of our designands, and gain design quality for less time and less money, at the expense of articulate understanding.

Here’s a thought: when we write an ethnography, what we are really doing is designing language and models to help some particular audience cultivate some particular relationship with people of some culture. This sounds functionalist, but I think it sort of protects us from mere functionalism in the way that phenomenology protects metaphysics precisely by setting it outside the domain of its inquiry. This approach protects the dignity of informants by throwing out every pretense of comprehending them as people, and instead comprehending what is relevant to relating to them.