All posts by anomalogue

Contemplating aloud

Design, Hermeneutics, Kabbalah, Polycentered design, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

Here is the latest version of the Well-Tempered Kabbalah.

This little one page-book of mine is sprawling out, with a fourth table column, “truth”. PaRDes is no longer covering understanding or truth. It is now “word” — meaning any communicative form. And I have reversed the order of Remez and Derash. I am intensely nervous to change the sequence, but it is right for my present purposes. If it is a mistake, it is an honest one, and it is a mistake I have to make all the way. My rationale is bobbing about in the prose below.

Truth is now the knowing essential to each world. I have found beautiful Hebrew and English words for each of these truths, and rather than translate they complement one another to convey meaning. Nitpas — grasped or captured truth — are the givens we use to construct truth in Asiyah. Hashkafah means roughly viewpoint or worldview, and I give it the English word “conceptive” — what enables and limits the perceived and conceived givens available to us for our experiences and understandings. If Nitpas are the grasped givens, Hashkafah is the receptive capacity required to do the grasping — a state of Ruach. If the Hashkafah of Ruach changes, Ruach itself changes, as do the givens it receives in Asiyah. Hitgalut is revelatory, which I call enceptive. Where Hashkafah does the conceiving, Hitgalut is aware that it is conceived within an encompassing intellect of which it participates, and this intellect is the ground and source of other possible conceptions. It is from here radically new understandings emerge ex nihilo from inconceivability. The etymological meaning of Hitgalut is “self uncovering”, and it shares a root with galut, “exile”. Hitgalut is welcoming home of exiled Ruach to the source of its self. And finally, there is Devekut (cleaving) — mystical union beyond thought — the goal of Kabbalah and all esoterisms.

What is slightly tragic about this work is that I am reducing Kabbalah for a focused purpose. Kabbalah is abundant with Remez, but this work is Derashic. I am choosing less evocative and open ended words, and it affords less multiplicity of interpretation. It is one application of something greater and richer and far more beautiful, to which it belongs, and remains loyal as an expression.

What I care about most is how communities may enworld themselves in shared truth, practice and artifacts.

What efforts must we undertake, what ordeals must we undergo, what resistance must we overcome to find more expansive and accommodating orders, when our own is sufficient for our own needs but insufficient for others?

This is what I want to distill as simply and beautifully as I can.

But before we can distill a truth we must mash it, mix it and let it ferment in the alembic.

I am struggling with the sequence of Remez and Derash.

I cannot avoid belief that Derash is the expression of an accomplished stability of understanding — manifested as lucidly understood content, but manifested by a spiritual “container” — which is a capacity for perceiving certain forms of reality, for conceiving their significance and implications, for expressing and insinuating these implications, and conversely, an inclination to be persuaded to belief by presence of certain conceptual articulate forms. I have called this structure of receptive capacity which does the believing of believed-in content, but does much more than that a faith. Increasingly I am choosing to call faith by the Hebrew word Ruach.

We know Ruach only by its words and actions, and so we tend to disregard everything except the fruit — the stuff we can see and grasp. We forget the tree, the roots, the soil, the whole spiritually environing garden and fixate on sensory and conceptual objects. All these forgotten origins of the objects of our objectivity and the subject by whom this objectivity exists is Ruach and the realm of formation in which Ruach lives is called Yetzirah.

To express its existence, Ruach presents concepts and descriptions of sensory objects and events (the graspable things of the actual world of Asiyah) in a way that galvanizes or reinforces or illuminates a particular way of experiencing and understanding — the manifestation of Ruach. When we participate in the life of Ruach in this way, — actively showing or receptively receiving — this mode of language is Derash.

When liberal arts managerial thought leaders sagely reveal that, they are, at bottom, essentially storytellers, and then extoll the power of story, this is Derash. When sociopolitical commentariat speak of “narratives” underlying news stories or other commenter’s ideological distortions and omissions, all this is Derash. When we notice the strangeness of the past, the awkward or graceful artificiality of its gestures and expressions, this is Derash of an alien Ruach of a past era, a zeitgeist. Romcoms are highly stylized Derash, which is why they have a short shelf-life — vividly accessible for a moment, before wilting and repelling all but the nostalgically enchanted. Scientific paradigms guiding theory choice and formation, and even the instrumentation and practices within a scientific program — the common pre-rational conceptions are scientifically disciplined Ruach.

Derash takes the standpoint of one particular Ruach, and coherently presents reality from where it stands, relating an event or unfolding series of events from its own perspective, according to its own field of relevance and interrelations, conveyed in language optimized to communicate its experience of truth, infused with its moral valences, its own sensibilities and tastes.

By my understanding Remez is the hint of significance in expressions that we, caught within the limits of our current Ruach, are unable to understand coherently or clearly. We sense tantalizing but uncanny signal in the noise, and we are drawn to it even as we are repelled by it. Remez is how transcendent possibilities of faith and understanding call to us from beyond our current limits. This is the voice of Neshamah, the Siren of Wisdom, our higher self, and her music is Remez.

Remez is destabilized polysemic chaos, belonging to a higher realm into which we may ascend. This is the realm of Beriah. This chaos is not a chaos of absence of order, but a chaos of too many simultaneous orders — an infinitely signal-rich static requiring filtering for reception by finite Ruach. Ruach ascending to Neshamah, may be reconfigured for more expansive formation, and this is newly manifested in Asiyah, narratable as new Derash.

New self, in a new world, with a new story to tell, with new responses and new responsibilities…

In my practical experience as a designer, everyone tries to understand one level too low.

People try to prematurely construct systems using current conceptual repertoires, and often they are out of tune with one another, or as Kuhn put it are unconsciously operating from incommensurable paradigms. Each misalignment is adjusted, bridged or fudged piecemeal, and consequently the system has no sense of wholeness however systematically sound its integration.

Or people use force to impose their own limited understanding upon all others, who must adopt that understanding or work with incomplete understanding. Or they go to war with other groups in their organization who see things differently with the intention of winning enough power to impose their views.

Teams rarely transcend Ruach. Their stories are Derash of their own Ruach, and the villains of Derashic stories are often those of other Ruchot.

Part of the problem is that many of our political ideologies are considered by its adherents to be ultimate truths. Whoever is outside of the ideology is outcast. All more local understandings must fit inside the ideology and harmonize within it.

I am trying to develop a framework for talking about these levels of understanding, the challenges of communicating across them, the difficulties in overcoming them, as well as the hope and importance of succeeding.

From the moment I began designing, this has been the ineffable Why driving my need to understand what I am doing when I design or when conditions obstruct my efforts to design.

I will repeat my definition of design. Design is the crafting of any kind of system in which people participate as intrinsic parts of the whole. Paul Rand was right: Everything is everything, even when those doing the designing are unaware. And when we do this we mistake the non-human systematic components for the whole, neglect the “people part” and leave the designed whole languishing in semi-oblivion.

Another random note on Remez. When an artist crafts, the art collaborates in its own making. The artist is moved to say or make poetic forms whose meanings are charged with mystery. The artist cannot fully explain the meaning intimated by these expressions, but the expression is intuited to be right. This intimation is Remez, and without Remez, the art is cut off — exiled from what gives art life and meaning.

This is why true ideologues are unable to produce art.

Ideology makes tidy fables with tidy morals.

Traversing the star grid

Autobiography, Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, History, Ideas, Kabbalah, Philosophy

I am pretty sure I first read whatever it was that implanted the myth of the star grid in my head when I was eight or nine, and I was at an apartment building playground near where my friend Devlin grew up. My mom was friends with a woman named Chichi (or something like that). She lived in an incredibly cool ring-shaped house, with a garden in the center. My mom would visit with Chichi and my sister and I would play on the playground with the kids who lived there. Years before we became friends, I encountered Devlin on this playground, wearing a Frankenstein mask chasing shrieking kids all around the pinestraw and cheap playground equipment ubiquitous in the mid- to late-70s, whose white, scarlet and royal blue paint was always sunbleached and chipping under rust rot, and always missing several bolts and, like our moms, barely holding together.

I must have been in the habit of bringing books to that playground, because I have two vivid book memories from that exact spot. One was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and specifically a part of the book where Charlie is menaced by vermicious knids. The other was an astronomy book, whose name I do not remember, which introduced me to the notion that from some point in the universe an observer could look out into space, and in every direction see the stars in orderly array.

This idea embedded in my imagination, and might even be my first philosophical experience. It is certainly the first philosophical idea I remember, unless we count the insight I learned from Mark Twain, that evil could be comical, which, of course, paved my path to Nietzsche.

This star grid insight, however, set me on the way to Thomas Kuhn. We could, it turns out, change what we see by changing how we see it; and one way to change how we see is by changing our own position relative to what we see.

And suddenly, transformed by that image, a new perspective on seeing crystalized in me. The difference between arbitrary scattering of stars or data-points and diamond-clear faceted order was a matter of aspect, of relative position and orientation. You can toil at mapping the vast mess you see from your seat, and scry whatever meaning you find there. But you might find something shockingly simple if you just unchain your head from its fixed point, stand up, walk around, resituate your body and eyes and observe from many positions and perspectives how things present themselves.

I’ve told this star grid story before, but I’m inspired to tell it for a specific reason today.

Today I am hearing it as a story of multistability. Gestalt psychology was, as far as I know, the first systematic study of perceptual multistability. Philosophical hermeneutics approached texts as a matter of semantic multistability.

But my core interest is psychic multistability — because when we find a new perspective of semantic stability in a text, that change reverberates in us. The meaning of the text transforms before us, and in some elusive way, we change with it. This inner change is why books linger with us and change the mood and tone of our lives.

Philosophical texts, though — and this includes philosophical fiction — induce stable, lasting shifts in our conceptual order, which extend beyond texts and reading experiences, and apply directly to the givenness of the world. We effortlessly, spontaneously perceive and conceive some part of reality differently, and experience it in a new way, intuitively, prior to any thought or language. We experience a new given truth.

And sometimes even the bounds of the text’s subject matter are breached, and these same concepts and percepts appear unexpectedly, and equally spontaneously across many fields of experience, in the intuition of analogy. (“This is just like the star-grid!”) A form (what Plato, speaking Greek called “idea”) that orders one domain applies also to other domains, otherwise unrelated.

But some psychic reorderings break the bounds of analogy and all figuration, and reveal reality as a whole in a completely new aspect, changing literally everything all at once, opening entirely new previously inconceivable meanings, the most important of which are outside the domain of form.

This is why I care about the different modes of reading and writing, and the forms of truth they indicate and induce.

These are all gestell shifts, and they are known only by their fruits. They are known inwardly by their experiential fruits in the articulate gestalts we perceive and conceive across the What, How, Why and Who of our experience; they are known outwardly by observable responses to these experiences.

We have fixed notions of what these gestell shifts essentially are, why they occur and what behaviors should result from them. We tend to admire them, at least from a safe distance. Because they are admired, they are pursued by some who lack intrinsic interest in what induces the shifts. Some try to induce the inward transformation through strict self-control, by adopting outward behaviors of those reputed to have been transformed. They want to become admirable. Others ape the outward behaviors of transformed souls, in order to win admiration for what they are not.

I am not sure how helpful these old criteria and conventions are. They may just reflect what humankind required at its point of development between 300 BC and 300 AD. Earlier times admired radically different qualities. We must change our individual and collective selves in response to what new technologies enable us to self-inflict, to cope with and to achieve. Different technologies create new self-inflicted conditions, copes and possibilities.

Religious language relies on spatial metaphors. Spiritual journeys involve ascensions to higher planes, and risks of falling into lower ones. Mediums leave their bodies and rise heavenward. And when expressing intellectual experiences, we speak optically and spatially about standpoints, perspectives, points-of-view, aspects. Many of the most consequential shifts in understanding I have experienced can only be expressed geometrically. A person can lie in bed dreaming, or sit in a dark theater watching a stationary screen, or sit in a ramshackle playground reading a book and be transported to distant imaginary, intellectual or imaginal places. How many transports are there, and how many are yet to transport us?

On respect and design

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

A friend observed: “You have a serious problem with being disrespected, don’t you?”

That is correct. I definitely have a strong aversion to disrespect. Most people do.

But my aversion might be more intense than usual, and it is for a very specific reason that accounts for the intensity.

It is not that I need other people to esteem me.

I have a pretty clear sense of my value and also where I’m not valuable. I appreciate being valued, of course, if the value is genuine. If another person can inform my own judgments of me that is valuable — for instance, if they can perceive clearly, where I am unclear or oblivious. If a person has a negative judgment of me, but it is poorly informed, or their judgment is faulty, it only makes their negative judgment less valid than my own. It is unpleasant to be judged negatively, of course, but it doesn’t influence my own judgment.

My specific problem with disrespect is that it obstructs dialogical collaboration. And without dialogical collaboration, design problems can never rise higher than constructing uninspiring little systems of known bits.

And system construction is not what I do.

I am after shared holistic understandings. My work is to understand divergent perspectives, each from a first-person perspective, and then, through philosophical effort, transcend perspectival limits in order to find higher and more comprehensive understandings. These new understandings illuminate practical problems in revealing new ways, affording solutions that are both novel and valued together by a wider array of people.

I call this work precision inspiration.

If work offers a possibility for precision inspiration, every task associated with the work is charged with purpose.

If it does not, it all becomes intolerable, soul-deadening tedium.

Here is where respect becomes an existential issue.

Precision inspiration work can only be done in conditions of mutual respect. It requires people to actively care about what other people think, how they think, and why it matters to them. That is what respect is: being concerned about another person’s What, How and Why.

Disrespect is an attitude toward others that is averse or incurious to another person’s What, How and Why. It makes dialogical collaboration impossible. It makes epiphanies impossible. It reduces design to system construction.

This is why, for me, working in conditions of disrespect is an existential threat.

I’m cool with people not caring what I think. I’m used to that. My thinking is not for dull people, lazy people or people so ideological, or brilliant or narcissistic that they do not need to hear what you think. And sadly, under these political conditions, that is a rapidly growing majority of people. I’m not for people like that, and I don’t need to be.

But I cannot work with — and certainly not for — people like that. Wherever I work, I need conditions of respect, if I do not have them, I cannot work. Some people can. Some tough, combative types even enjoy it like a game.

Fighting to win respect from people who wish to withhold respect is not a game I will play.

Know thyself.

Hyperactive listening

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Love, Polycentered design

Susan and I have a new method for fighting.

We start with her expressing what is pissing her off — pure stream-of-consciousness thoughts, feelings, memories, plans, images, etc.

When she is done, I steelman her grievances, speaking as much as I can from her perspective — as if she were addressing me. I attempt to method act her point of view, adding sarcasm, emotional digs, humorous abuse and expressive flourishes to indicate insight into her feelings as well as her thoughts.

Then Susan joins in and piles on, with additional points I neglected to mention, which I integrate into the overall argument.

Essentially, we collaborate on kicking my ass as thoroughly and brutally as possible, until she feels everything has been said as thoroughly, clearly and forcefully as possible. She tells me that this process helps her feel thoroughly understood.

Only after she ratifies my understanding do I try to answer her points. Obviously, it’s pretty easy to steelman my own perspective, since it’s the perspective that persuaded me.

Then we try out possible resolutions of our differences. For each candidate possibility we do the same steelmanning, method acting and collaboration until we find a shared perspective and common ground to use as a new point of departure.

This is essentially polycentered design applied to domestic conflict.

I feel fortunate to belong to a two-person organization with this kind of collaborative culture.

Articulating truth and word

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

I have been thinking of PaRDeS as modes of understanding, but I have been losing confidence in that conception.

And now I am having to rethink the being of the self and of how truth is known at each level.

Buber’s duality of I-Thou and I-It strikes me as a choice of Ruach.

When two or more Ruchot encounter one another Ruach-to-Ruach, each chooses: descend to Nefesh or ascend to Neshamah.

If both choose ascension, dialogue transpires. In the spirit of I-Thou, each relates to the other as Thou and implicitly assumes a shared transcendent being in whom both participate. Neshamah is that shared transcendent being in whom dialogical partners become participants.

Hans-Georg Gadamer says that in profound conversation, the conversation has us. Neshamah is the being of the conversation, who animates each Ruach together within itself. When we “conduct” a conversation, each participant is a medium through which the conversation flows.

From participation within Neshamah, revelations ex nihilo irrupt from Chayah, source of selfhood, bringing with its influx direct intuition of ultimate wherefore.

In being, Chayah becomes medium of Ein Sof.

In revelation, Neshamah becomes medium of Chayah.

In dialogue, Ruach becomes medium of Neshamah.

In subject, Nefesh becomes medium of Ruach.

In life, matter becomes medium of Nefesh.

But matter and Ein Sof are one, and this unity is Shekhinah.

Raw notes:

  • Mode of world
  • Mode of self
  • Mode of truth (of knowing)
  • Mode of word (saying or hearing) (PaRDeS)

Is the table: world, self, truth, word?

World Self Truth Word
Atzilut (emanation) Chayah (source) Union Sod (mystical)
Beriyah (creation) Neshamah (intellect) Epiphanic Derash (homiletic)
Yetzirah (formation) Ruach (spirit) Subjective Remez (allusive)
Asiyah (actuality) Nefesh (soul) Objective Peshat (literal)

Here is what is bothering me. I committed Well-Tempered Kabbalah to a perspective from the standpoint of Asiyah, which — it seems to me — is less a choice than an acknowledgment of a necessary constraint. But this “word” column is radically Asiyah-rooted. A word links an actual finite thing in Asiyah to some kind of truth within or beyond Asiyah.

  • If Peshat is a literal word mode… observing and recording objective givenness… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Remez is a figurative word… observing and thematizing subjective difference in concrete experiences… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Derash is a homiletical reading… lucid spiritual participation in transcendent being… (Neshamah is always one in whom Ruach participates)… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Sod is a mystical reading… immediate disclosure of our source of being… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?

Philosophical-Kabbalistic mapping

Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

For the last 25 years I have been iteratively refining a set of technical distinctions. These are the heart of my philosophy and design practice. Kabbalah accommodate these distinctions and gives them language. Are these understandings already there in Kabbalah, waiting to be recognized? Or are the latent possibilities, realized by configuative instauration? I am suspending this question for now.

Construal belongs to the mode of system. We construe a logic of construction. We figure something out and comprehend the relationship between a set of objective givens and a systemic whole they constitute as parts, linked logically or causally. This is the objective understanding of Nefesh, in the objective world of Asiyah.

Conception belongs to the mode of gestalt. We spontaneously receive a given gestalt whole. We are given gestalts both perceptually through the senses and conceptually through the mind. Each whole spontaneously resolves into given sub-wholes. The sub-wholes do not constitute the whole; rather, each whole comprises sub-wholes articulated within it. This is the subjective understanding of Ruach, in subjective world of Yetzirah.

But we do not experience our own subjectivity. Our own subjectivity manifests as given sensory and mental objects, as reality as we know it, as “objective reality”. It is only when we notice differences in responses to or beliefs about “objective reality” that subjectivity is indirectly discernible. This is only possible, though, if we do not naively invalidate other subjectivities as mistaken or deceptive. If we take other subjectivities as valid, we learn that objective understanding is rooted in subjectivity, and that material reality constrains objective understanding but does not determine it the way naive realism assumes. This process is dialogue.

If we pursue understanding of other subjectivities, and persevere until we succeed, success manifests as acquisition of new gestalts in new forms of objectivity. We are able to spontaneously perceive and conceive new gestalt articulate wholes. This acquisition is insight.

Pursuit of insight into other subjects — fellow Ruchot — is not straightforward, however. It is intellectually, emotionally and existentially demanding, and this is why we neglect or actively resist doing it. It is easier to ignore or invalidate other subjects, and subjectivity in general.

The most difficult aspect of trans-subjective understanding is the challenge of loosening and overcoming our own subjective limits. Those limits are uncannily enforced by nothingness. Each Ruach has an implicit ultimate conception of everything, beyond which there is nothing. In pursuit of inter-subjective understanding we must become skeptical toward our own sense of everything and the apparent nothingness beyond it. Everything becomes only everything to me within my own Ruach, and nothing becomes only that of which I am as-yet oblivious.

This introduces an entirely new attitude toward reality that intuits reality as largely — and in fact, overwhelmingly — transcendent in essence. This is the world of Beriah — the world by which Yetzirah and, consequently Asiyah, are given ex nihilo from nothingness.

To find our way to fellow Ruach we must puncture the roof of oblivion, and ascend to Neshamah. From there we may descend back to Ruach who can accommodate my old understanding and that of my fellow Ruach. More important than the present expansion, though, is something else: an immediate intuition of the eternal inexhaustibility of ex nihilo epiphany. This faith is intellection, also known as gnosis, the root of both subjectivity and objectivity.

Intellection is revelatory-creative, epiphanic. In intellective faith we press into the outer limits of everything as we conceive it, through the oblivion of nothingness, and intuit that nothingness is eternally pregnant with infinite moreness. The insight into nothingness resulting from this intellection immunizes against naivety of nihilism, and I call it exnihilism.

Entirely beyond philosophy is the absolute in Atzilut. From here I will observe Wittgenstinean silence.

What bad design wastes

Design

Ever since I read Eric Ries and went into a decade-and-a-half sustained tantrum I’ve been thinking about how impoverished our conceptions of waste are.

I haven’t revisited this topic since AI reduced the time to code from weeks to hours.

Where even three years ago designers could appeal to a manager’s or engineer’s fears of wasting months building the wrong thing and suggest adding two weeks to the process to reduce that risk, it is much harder to suggest spending two weeks to reduce the risk of wasting two days, much less two hours.

But this was never anything more than pandering to the impoverished conception of waste. What is really at stake in this question is wasting something much more fragile, and much harder to measure.

Product releases that neglect testing with users are even more wasteful — it is just that they externalize waste to users, and, consequently waste relationship resources.

In the days before Agile and its many offshoots, UXers felt something very few designers feel anymore. We felt fiercely protective of our users. We lived in horror that we might confuse them, inconvenience them, frustrate them or otherwise alienate them with our design mistakes. For this reason, the idea of putting something out without first testing it was unthinkable.

We didn’t want to waste our user’s time, comfort, or good mood, not only because they would leave and not use whatever it was we were designing today — but because this would damage the relationship long-term. They might never want to try again. It might even damage their overall relationship with the brand.

So, yes, we wanted to learn how to improve the design, and consequently improve the experience of using the design — which was our real goal.

But we wanted to learn before we put the thing before users, because learning after the release meant that we’d already inflicted pain on the user and damaged the relationship.

But Eric Ries not only saw nothing wrong with learning from user pain, he perpetualized it by making this learning-from-pain a continuous never-ending process. He, like way too damn many engineers and product managers failed to distinguish between improving his product (as a thing) and improving his user’s experience (which is how it is to use the thing, now and over time):

I’m a cofounder and chief technology officer of this company, which is called IMVU. At this point in our careers, my cofounders and I are determined to make new mistakes. We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly — much too fast by traditional standards — shipping new versions of our product dozens of times every single day. We really did have customers in those early days — true visionary early adopters — and we often talked to them and asked for their feedback. But we emphatically did not do what they said. We viewed their input as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.

Traditional business thinking says that this approach shouldn’t work but it does and you don’t have to take my word for it. As you’ll see throughout this book, the approach we pioneered at IMVU has become the basis for a new movement of entrepreneurs around the world. It builds on many previous management and product development ideas, including lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile development. It represents a new approach to creating continuous innovation. It’s called the Lean Startup.

But now, as vibe-coders careen ahead at top-speed — cutting designers out of the process and throwing whatever UI slop AI cranks out as fast as they can rub their magic genie-lamp machines — the practice of externalizing waste to customers will be the norm. We will learn to expect wasted time, effort, calm, and happiness from our dealings with organizations.

And, our relationships will devolve accordingly. Seething resentment, anxious mistrust and disgusted alienation will characterize how we feel about organizations who provide us ever lowering low-touch, low-care, low-thought products and services — designed for learning from the pain to which we are incessantly subjected.

Think about your service providers and ask yourself if this isn’t already mostly true.

Craft vs craftmanship

Design

Apparently the word “craft” is trending in the design world right now. I’ve been hearing it said around my own organization with suspicious frequency, always connected with building things that are well-built.

But when I hear how most designers — or at design consultants — talk about craft, what I hear is craftsmanship, which has less to do with the mode of making and more about the characteristics of the artifact.

I swear most people only say “craft” to avoid gendered language or awkwardly degendered language: “The craftsmanship… er, craftspersonship… uh… CRAFT on this deliverable is unacceptably imperfect!”

The distinction matters, though, and it is not academic hairsplitting, because it pertains to design practice on multiple levels.

By my understanding:

  • Craft describes qualities of how a thing is made.
  • Craftsmanship describes qualities of what has or is being made.

So what is this mode of making called craft? And how does it differ from other modes? Craft, as opposed to what, exactly?

Craft is material dialogue.

Craft — or at least good craft — is responsive to what is crafted. What is crafted responds to the crafter in sometimes surprising and inspiring ways. An aphorism: Craft is material dialogue.

Craft has several characteristics that differentiate it from other modes of making. Craft is:

  • Rapidly iterative. Rapidly means as close to real-time as possible. The longer the delays in the feedback loop, the harder it is to maintain craft.
  • Emergent. This means the looping feedback creates unpredictable qualitative changes to the crafted thing.
  • Responsive. This can be seen as a corollary of emergence. Because the craft generates emergent qualities that cannot be foreseen, the making cannot follow a set plan. The plan must change with the changing conditions the craft itself produces.
  • Reflexive. This means that the crafting changes not only the crafted artifact, but the maker as well. The changes might be a mix of theoretical understanding, or it might be purely intuitive, but at the deepest levels of craft it can be transformative.

So here are modes of making that are not craft, or modes that aspire to minimize the need for craft.

  • Planning
  • Specification
  • Implementation
  • Fabrication

Any process where the outcome is defined prior to the shaping of materials is not craft.

A plan, specification, implementation and fabrication can be said to have great craftsmanship if its construction is sound and flawless.

Today, though, I am seeing something very new in this 16-year-old idea.

Over the last eight years I’ve thought a lot about materials, and how important it is for designers to have a feel for them, if they are to effectively form them. In connection with this I’ve said the material of service design is organizations and, because organizations are so complex and heterogeneous, service problems are often far too large to fit inside any one person’s (or even team’s!) head — and that this is why service design collaborations involve a staggering number of people from many disciplines.

Somehow, though, I never put these two ideas together:

  • Craft is material dialogue.
  • The material of service design is organizations.

A craft of service design would be dialogue with organization as material, and this is incredibly hard. Real craft would require iterative rapid prototyping and testing with a representative cross section of the organization, with freedom to respond to emergent qualities of the service, which might transform the understanding the team has of the service problem itself.

Much of the time, what designers say they are designing is not in fact what they are crafting.

So a UX designer who says they are designing an experience, but lacks access to people who will use what they design, is not crafting an experience, because the experiential material is lacking. What they are crafting is a digital interface.

I’m thinking out loud, so bear with me.

A designer’s true material is the material available to them to craft.

Watch what a designer is touching and shaping, being surprised by, responding to, learning from, and changing them as a practitioner — and that is their true craft.

Ok, now I’ve said it messily. I’ll work on cleaning, compacting, simplifying it later. Because conceptual language is my craft.

And this, by the way, gives me an excuse for being so damn repetitive. These are iterations searching for emergence and profound, transformative shock.

Perplexity, again

Design, Ideas

Note: This post was originally written in July 6, 2010, but left in draft form. I was digging through my writing to see when I first defined craft as material dialogue, and this is the earliest form of the concept I can find. I’m publishing it now in raw form, so please excuse any typos or weird anachronistic outbursts.

When a situation we face is palpably problematic, but we do not know what to do with it, what we face is not yet a problem, but a pre-problem: a perplexity.

What does it mean, to “not know what to do with it”?

Obviously, part of the trouble is a lack of clear definition of the problem. We cannot explain what is wrong, or what needs solving, or what a resolution would look like. The whole problematic situation is just “wrong” and a resolution is imagined entirely negatively: the perplexity must go away.

But there is much more to a perplexity than inability to think or speak clearly about it. We resolve problematic situations all the time without thinking or speaking. We intuit our way through things, wordlessly, and usually with great success. (It might even be the case that we only think explicitly when our intuition fails us. See note below.)

When we fall into perplexity, our intuition is paralyzed. This is usually where we fall back on explicit thinking. We think about what we should do next. But in a perplexity, we find nothing in our intellectual repertoire to help us. But it doesn’t even end there.

The worst part of a perplexity comes when we grope for an approach to think about our situation and our intuition fails us again. Not only do we lack any sense of what to do; not only do we lack thoughts to help guide our action — we have no feel for how to go about thinking about it.

We do not understand how to understand the situation.

(Note on tacit action: This certainly appears to be the case with most tools we use. If you have to verbally recall how to use a piece of software — or any tool — in order to use it, the tool feels “unintuitive”. We want to be absorbed in dialogue with the artifact we are crafting (craft is dialogue between creator and creation), but the dominates the conversation with incessant interruptions. Dialogue can only happen when the medium of conversation is not itself a distraction. This is why people instinctively impose linguistic constraints around subjects they wish to make undiscussable.

Truth of religion

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Wheel

Regarding religion, here is what I know, limits and all:

Our finite minds are inadequate to the relative infinitude of reality.

Whatever objective truth we craft from the raw givenness of reality, it is irremediably selective and approximate.

Our focus of attention and involvement determines our subjective being, and this, in turn, determines the objects of our perception and conception we receive as given, and this determines our focus and involvement, and so on, in the reinforcing cycle of subjectivity and objectivity known as the hermeneutic circle, universally symbolized by the mandala.

We have some degree of choice with regard to our givens, but it is far from an arbitrary choice. It is mysteriously constrained, and the craft of theosophy instaurates truth within these constraints. These mysterious but real constraints and resistances vary from subject to subject and material to material, but they must be observed and answered to, and the degree of faithfulness to these constraints is the degree of truth in what we do and say and are.

Over time we materially reform our environments in ways that require us to renegotiate the truths we adopt and live by. Our truth comes out of alignment from our social reality, and we lose our capacity to make sense of the world around us, to interact with it effectively and to receive and appreciate its value. Our enworldment loses its What, How and Why, and to recover it we must redesign our enworldment, starting with theosophical craft.

Why start with theosophical craft? The core problem is loss of clear, effective, sacralizing truth. If we allow the deteriorated former-truth to select our focus and direct our efforts we will only deconstruct and reconstruct new structures by the logic that made everything broken in the first place. We’ll re-institute the worst of the old, while thinking we are overcoming it. We must revive first the judgment that will guide the rest of the work.

We court this judgment by pressing toward the nothingness that veils inexhaustible moreness, forever pregnant with inexhaustible shock, and enduring the ordeals of aporia.

None of this is speculative. I have lived this year many times. Naive nihilism has been shocked out of me.

But this should not be taken as disparaging speculation. Speculation is an indispensable and unavoidable design device. Upaya is the interface between finitude and infinitude. It reveals, conceals and imaginally masks the essential oblivion.

Designing for counterbalance

Philosophy, Wheel

In monotonously over-ordered times, a handful of heretics find inspiration in transgressive, dissolutive ideas, while the conformist majority continues to extend and enforce ever-increasing order, believing correctly that this trace of defiant resistance is the seed of anarchy.

In cacophonously under-ordered times the philosopher’s situation reverses with the conditions. Now the majority automatically stampedes over any and every order, toward the maximum dissolution, decay, and liberation in the purest chaos — while a dissenting few seek order. The latter pursues shelter from storms and buoyancy against floods. This is done not from love of order or hatred of disorder, but from loyalty to the mean.

Because our time is an anarchic, cacophonic time, I am inspired to design countervailing philosophies of order.

And here I will discredit myself, as if I had credit to lose, by invoking Nietzsche.

In excessively Apollinian times, a Dionysian philosophy restores tragic integrity; but in excessively Dionysian times, an Apollinian philosophy is in order. Loyalty to the mean: this explains why my bookshelves are filled with apparent opponents to my ideals. Our deepest loyalties eternally transcend every contemporary stance:

…the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today.

So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement.

Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said: “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home.” Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish everybody into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher — if today there could be philosophers — would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility. …

The last thing this time needs is more deconstruction, more defamiliarization, more disorientation, more strangeness and estrangedness, more arbitrary fantasy, more liberation, more disorder — to pour yet more buckets of chaos into the chaos in which we are drowning. What is most needful in this time is to bail out our boat before it capsizes, submerges and merges with its watery ground.

Pragmatic design maxim

Design, Pragmatism

The pragmatic meaning of a designed thing is the set of behaviors that follow from its activation.

There are other meanings of a design, of course, but from the perspective of business viability this is the literal cash value of any designed thing.

Artificial style

Art, Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism

My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial taste is not taste.

In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.

The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.

By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.

I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.

I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.

Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.

I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.

Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.

It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.

Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.

The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

Letterpress, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

When I called the second edition of my Kabbalah reference sheet a “one-page book” I mostly meant it as a joke. As so often happens, however, this silly irony has become serious. I am thinking of it now as a book, and its title has become The Well-Tempered Kabbalah. I am continuing to work on it. I’ve corrected the English transliterations and now they are entirely and strictly consistent.

But I am also evolving the deeper meanings of the chart, and it is changing some of my fundamental understandings of Kabbalah. I am leaving my older change log intact, because it is a record of a thought process, and I want to show my work. Today’s most important change is so important that I am making a new start, with a new change log.

The change that changes everything is relabeling the last column. It was labeled “givenness”, but now it is labeled “truth”. The headers are now “world”, “self”, “truth” which is not only far more true, but also looks and reads better.

Here is why this is necessary: Givenness is one thing, but conveying and sharing that givenness is quite another.

Today I realize clearly and sharply that the world itself is the givenness. That is all the world as a distinct “thing” is — a mode of givenness vis-a-vis our finite self, specifically in the givenness of asiyah. From the givenness of atzilut the worlds are indivisibly one. And the perspective of The Well-Tempered Kabbalah is very strictly the snake’s-eye view of realities that transcend it. So if any column should be labeled “givenness” it would be the first one.

Truth is how a self conveys this givenness to itself in prayer, meditation or study (or all three at once!) or across selves in teaching and learning, pursuing and sometimes achieving a harmonious fourfold ironic richness. Daat, the omitted quasi-sefirah, is present in The Well-Tempered Kabbalah as a conspicuous nothingness of faculty, and this is why the letters of the tetragrammaton are carefully lined up with the missing daat in Jacob’s ladder in each of the rows.

And this is why Derash is of Beriah. There is no way to convey the givenness of Beriah apart from redescribing the entirety of Asiyah. The kind of subject-transcendent and object-transcendent revelation is revealed ex nihilo by neshamah to ruach as a new capacity for formation. In subjective-objective terms the revelation is pure potential — a “revelability” or “creatability” or “instaurability”. It is pure gestell, in which new gestalts are spontaneously given to nefesh in Malchut in Asiyah.

This is why converts speak of reborn self in a transfigured world. The trans of the transfiguring is, first, a new capacity for figuration from neshamah, second, a subjective doing of new figuration by ruach, and, finally an objective experiencing of a new comprehensive articulate order of gestalt objects — which is the content of the conversion.

I have been trying to articulate this reality for decades now — a reality in which I’ve intuitively participated as a designer — and, miraculously, Kabbalah has symbolic language capable of doing this reality full justice.