Another book for the reading queue, Herbert Guenther’s Matrix of Mystery: Scientific and Humanistic Aspects of Dzogs-chen Thought: Whether or not the so-called “insights” of any tradition are essential, will be determined by the extent to which they are, firstly, comprehensible to whomsoever chances to focus on them and, implementable, that is experientially accessible, so … Continue reading Instaurated instaurateurs
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 … Continue reading Instauratio
When I first learned the word “instauration” from Latour’s magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, I was thunderstruck. Latour described precisely how it is to find the kinds of truth we discover-create in design research. But now, I am thunderstruck all over again, recognizing that the creation and revelation essential to Beriah is … Continue reading Instauratio ex nihilo
The distinction between discovering what is, versus creating what yet isn’t covers over a region of action that is far more important and common than either — a region Bruno Latour (after Étienne Souriau) called instauration, the act of discovering-creating in collaboration with the thing being brought into existence. Anyone who actually crafts real things, … Continue reading Instaurationalism
Once we finally recognize the degree to which truth is instaurated through our own participation in our own local and contingent patch of reality, we are faced with a decision, which is an ultimate matter of faith: We can take this recognition of truth’s being as somehow absolute, or We can take this recognition of … Continue reading Instaurationalism’s fork
Most “truth is a construct” type constructivists appear to have retained a vestigial correspondence theory of truth; that is, they take truth to be a little mental duplicate of, or model of or, in extreme cases, a substitute for, reality. Truth is true to the degree that it corresponds to reality. According to a correspondence-constructivist … Continue reading Instrumental-instaurationism?
From Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence, a discussion on the concept of instauration (underlines added by me): To say that something — a scientific fact, a house, a play, an idol, a group — is “constructed,” is to say at least three different things that we must manage to get across simultaneously — and … Continue reading Instauration
If we imagine being as a ladder, we might situate ourselves at the base. But what if we imagine ourselves elsewhere, neither at the base, nor at the top of the ladder. Something is gained if we situate ourself at a permanent middle — metaxy, media res, thrown — with superscendent rungs always beyond the … Continue reading From mid-ladder
Before any beginning is infinitude. Pure infinitude. Ein sof. Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut. At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, … Continue reading Designerly metaphysics
More than once, in the depths of hangover I have yogiberraed a lamentational oath: “I am never drinking ever again, for at least a week.” The griminess suggests crass oxymoron, but beneath the grime is a Bergsonian paradox — a paradox of time. Oxymoron and paradox are both species of irony. They are both operations … Continue reading Ordinances of time
I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not. Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. … Continue reading Crossing design with Kabbalah
I have connected design and gifts for a good while. When I understand the core service design concept of value exchange in the clear light of gift exchange, so that it includes, but also transcends, transaction, and enters the domain of freely given gifts, service design gains importance and universality. Let us define transaction as … Continue reading The Medium
From Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives, “Weeping as Mystical Practice”: I shall begin my description of the techniques by focusing on a practice — unnoticed before — that can be traced back through all the major stages of Jewish mysticism over a period of more than two millennia. I refer to the recommendation of the use … Continue reading Sophia
I get excited when I meet service designers who entered the discipline from practical need. Such service designers encountered some problem or set of problems they recognized as beyond the reach of their own methodology. This is much harder than it sounds: The adage “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a … Continue reading Knowing the absence of knowing
The body has five senses. The soul has a various and variable number of senses. The common sense of the body is the material world given to us through the five senses. From what we see, hear, smell, touch and taste, the world is given to us. And this given sensory world is what we … Continue reading Psychic common sense
I think I’ve found my next book, Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. My likely story unfolds as follows. The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is superficially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a … Continue reading Campagna
Here is why I’m reading Fritz Perls: The interlacing intellectual traditions that birthed gestalt psychology also birthed human-centered design. They are sibling traditions with much to learn from one another. There is an issue, a problem; and there are opposing parties: the terms in which the problem is stated are taken from the policies, vested … Continue reading Permanent designer hat
All my interests concern psychic multistabilities — gestalts of perceptual, conceptual (hermeneutic), relational and behavioral kinds. My whole life is a story of successive stabilities, punctuated with perplexity, anxiety and chaos. Somewhere along the way it became a story of finding durable stability through understanding multistability. Design is about forming multistable arrangements between persons and … Continue reading Multistability
I am desperately trying to find much simpler ways to convey how service design works. Here is one of my recent simplifications. And it is a simplification that intentionally errs toward over-simplification. It not precisely, exactly accurate, but it is directionally true and helps illuminate the logic of the methodology. It is a helpful heuristic. … Continue reading Palindromic structure of service design
Most of the time, when we say “common sense”, assuming we bother meaning something precise by our words, we mean one of two things: the sense of things we all (should) have in common, or the sense of things common people (should) have. Conversely, lacking common sense is failing to understand what is self-evident to … Continue reading Common sense