A friend of mine just taught me the word “murmuration” — the movement flocks of starlings make.
The “swarm of intuitions” concept is improved by the expression “intuitive murmurations”.
All posts by anomalogue
Faiths and doctrines
I was talking to some religious friends this morning, and mentioned some things that seem worth recording:
Everyone has a faith of some kind. Faiths are that by which we believe.
But religious faiths are oriented toward what transcends objectivity, and, therefore, toward what transcends all belief.
Religious faith has beliefs toward a kind of being that defies objectivity, where irreligious “belief-systems” end where cognition ends.
Fundamentalists are people with irreligious faiths who try to believe in the truth of religious doctrines. They are “believers” because believing is something that takes constant effort. They try to force themselves to believe something their faith cannot actually believe, and it makes them irritable and aggressive toward anything that arouses their doubts and sets them back. Atheists are people with irreligious faiths, and are therefore unable to believe religious doctrines and have no problem admitting that fact.
This is why fundamentalists and atheists prefer to debate each other. They have commensurable ideas, and differ mainly on the question of whether these ideas are true or false. Religious faiths make no sense to fundamentalists or atheists, and people with religious faiths often avoid debating truth or falsehood of doctrines with people who conceive them in irreligious terms and miss the point. Such debates focus on irrelevancies.
*
For a religious faith, doctrine is an expressions of something that defies language. The doctrine expresses and supports the faith — so doctrine is undeniably important — but faith is not reducible to the doctrinal content — not even close.
For “believers” faith is primarily a matter of accepting the truth status of the doctrinal content, despite the fact that it has little support. When people talk about faith that way it indicates that they haven’t yet experienced a change in faith.
List of disbeliefs
If an atheist were to make an exhaustive list of all their disbeliefs, they would likely match the items on my own disbelief list.
Yet, I am not an atheist.
*
I share the disbeliefs of atheists, but I share the faith of the religious.
I respect the former, but the latter is more important.
If atheists were able to focus less on the objects of religious belief, and more on the religious subject, they might make progress toward understanding religion. But this is where objective thought hits its limits, and that limit is the uncrossable horizon where there be dragons — irrationality.
*
Arthur C. Clarke is famous for saying “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Religion is such a technology.
Truth as antierror and antifalsity
“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt…” — C. S. Peirce
*
For the Boomers and for Gen X, that massive heap of post-everything glopped together as postmodernism was an exotic novelty that either liberated or infuriated depending on your temperament.
For Millennials, postmodernism was simply what was taught as current thinking, combined with Kahnemaniacal cognitive scientism, to produce a confused paradox — or is it an oxymoron — that fears cognitive distortion of… what, exactly? I have yet to hear anyone address the doublethink at the root of the Millennial generational faith.
For Gen Z, postmodernism is another conventionality to ridicule. When a Gen Zer says “That’s just a construct” they say it from a minimum of two ironies layers if not more. For them there is nothing beneath the irony, to contrast with it, and there never has been. Postmodernism is all they know. They are thoroughgoingly faith-fluid.
*
What we miss in the constructivist vision of truth and the deconstructionist vision of skepticism is two crucial questions.
The first is a question of practicality: Does reality cooperate with what we assert as true? We can claim all kinds of things, but our claims can be demonstrated to be wrong. They can also be demonstrated to be at least to some degree — but never conclusively — right.
The second is a question of intellectual conscience: Do we actually conceive a construction as true, and does a deconstruction cause us to conceive something as doubtful? Nobody can demonstrate sincerity of belief, disbelief or doubt, nor can they prove that a provisionally held assertion can never someday become sincerely believed. This hope is actually held by some, and for others is a ruse and a crutch.
How can discern the difference between actual and feigned belief — or sincere hope for future belief and willful delusion? Even if discernment were possible, how could we ever prove it? We cannot, so charlatans abound.
Where the first and second converge — where a truth is demonstrably true and conceived as true — this is where truth exists. It may not be a truth that satisfies a metaphysician’s fantasies, but it is a truth defined against demonstrable error and faithless falsity.
*
I think younger generations are barely in touch with demonstrated truth, and entirely alienated from intellectual conscience. Everything is a construct and no construct has anything to recommend it over any other, except…
…
Taking my own best advice
I have been making myself observe my wordless responses to other people’s beliefs, apparent core conceptions, enworldments. I may feel impatience, or irritation, or futility, or sympathetic embarrassment, or fury — or best/worst of all, profound dread! — and I’m trying to see if I can trace these back to differences in conceptive taste or habits. “Why this tradeoff?” “Why did I choose differently?” “What is at stake in this choice?” “What does it reflect about my own root preferences?”
Inwardly observant; outwardly respectful.
Soulswarm
My soul is a swarm of intuitions.
This swarm knows how to fly in various formations to meet reality and respond to it. The intuitions know one another through these reality-responsive formations. Without reality’s mediation, without common objects, my intuitions would be unaware of the whole to which they belong.
No realities, no enworldment, no self. New realities, new enworldment, new selves.
My soul swarms with other souls. Some formations are made across souls, alighting upon and responding to reality. We understand together, share truth, share enworldment.
My soul has learned new formations, and new partial-formations, and these have changed how I enworld myself, and how it is to play my part within this world.
We are imprisoned within our selves only if we refuse to notice otherwise.
The reality of the world and each another is manifest if we accept it.
Self-respecting faith
I didn’t want to talk about souls in my book, but I am going to have to. The whole point of all of it is souls.
*
When we think, we construct logical syntheses, and offer them to the conceptive mind.
The conceptive mind may accept an offering as a whole, as second-natural — and take it together as a given.
The conceptive mind may reject the offering as a mere construct, as artificial — and regard it as a put-together claim.
It is true that a synthesis might, with time and practice, become habitual and what started artificial might become second-natural.
But it is also true that some syntheses stay artificial forever.
*
An overwhelming need to assert the truth of some synthetic claim — as often happens with religious dogmas or political ideologies — seduces a soul to dishonesty about how they experience truth, or to a permanent commitment to artificiality.
Let’s refer to such souls as synthetes — people who impose their synthetic truths on themselves, and almost always, eventually, on everyone around them.
The intense need of a synthete to believe certain sacred claims is produced by a faith, and a change of faith would relieve this need to believe. But a new enworldment entails the death of the existing enworldment — and nothing wants to die, least of all a faith. When a religious fundamentalist fears eternal death caused by sinful thoughts, or when a political ideologue claims that some language (really, some ideas) are a form of violence, this is the terror of a synthesis-armored faith facing its existential death. The conceptions it holds at bay — all the givens it must suppress, discredit, shout over, excommunicate, ostracize and deplatform — threaten to flood in and force reconception of everything and every thing.
If there is one thing a born-again fundamentalist rejects as a matter of faith, it is the fact of death and resurrection of soul. If there is one thing a political radical rejects on principle, it is revolution and liberation of mind.
Both types of synthetes want to dictate what is true, to limit questions to what its doctrine answers, and to produce a mirage of reality through artificial consensus by compelling all around them to support their unsupportable beliefs. They want the mechanical immortality of the belief system, the only form of duration their bad faiths can both conceive and accept.
*
Faiths believe, and are not themselves made out of beliefs.
Bad faiths also believe, but they believe they are made out of beliefs of their choosing. They think they can tell themselves the story they want to believe, and that saying they believe it makes it believed — if not now, eventually. So the synthete fantasy goes.
*
This does not mean our faith is fixed, or that we must take what is given as given.
We can change our faiths, and through our faiths, our enworldments.
But we cannot change through force of will. Precisely that element in our soul who calls itself I, the self who dictates belief, is the being who must change if we want new and better faith.
We must treat our whole souls — the entire intuitive swarm who is ourselves — especially wordless intuitions, who only feel, or respond, who are incessantly talked over and talked down — with perfect respect.
A new self-respecting soul self-organizes and emerges liberally and democratically from a liberated intuitive swarm who has learned mutual respect.
A self-respecting soul does not impose beliefs on itself, but offers possibilities as gifts which may be taken as given or politely refused. A self-respecting soul must not tell itself what to believe, but ask itself — its whole self — what is actually believed.
We must be brave and inventive in making gifts.
We must learn to do without beliefs until we are given one we can accept.
We are not who we think we are.
Pro-establishment and anti-establishment authoritarians
Groups seeking total authority cannot often directly impose their vision. They face opposition that must be weakened and dissolved. An important part of this dissolution process is making the population doubt everything that might undermine or challenge the authoritarian’s replacement order.
What is the target of this doubt? It depends on whether the authoritarian employs a pro-establishment or anti-establishment strategy.
For pro-establishment authoritarians the target is all individual judgment that might question or defy institutionally established truth.
For anti-establishment authoritarians the target is institutionally established truth that discredit truths developed around a kernel of specific individual intuitions.
The pro-establishment authoritarian will deploy institutional power to attack the legitimacy of intuition, intuitive sense of truth and personal conscience by emphasizing the unreliability and deceptiveness of individual judgment. To be certain that we are not forming wrong beliefs with cumulatively catastrophic results, we must suspend our highly-fallible individual judgment and go with the superior judgment of authorities. It might be a religious priest class combatting the influence of demons and heretics, or it might be a scientistic expert class discrediting naive “system 1” common sense notions, and replacing them with carefully-constructed counter-intuitive “system 2” truth. In both cases, the individual is made to doubt all personal conceptions of truth and instead to adopt official doctrines of elites. And yes, these doctrines feel stilted, artificial and counter-intuitive — but one is to trust them even more because they feel wrong, because intuitiveness is a symptom of seductive error and succumbing to sin, motivated reason, bourgeois values, etc. The faith of the pro-establishment authoritarian says: “adhere to this truth because it is absurd!” Trust the institutions!
The anti-establishment authoritarian, on the the other hand, confronts and defies institutional authority with claims of gnosis, of insights and practices that go deeper than reason into the heart of metaphysics. This strategy exalts individual intuition — or at least those intuitions that resonate with and reinforce the universalized intuitions of the gnostic leaders of the movement. According to the anti-establishment faith, these intuitions that have been long suppressed and persecuted by the existing Establishment, which has been corrupted or which was corrupt from the start. Institutions must be discredited top to bottom — their purpose, their truth claims, their practices — their legitimacy. This is why revolutionary right-wing movements (as opposed to right-wing conservative movements who are pro-establishment) so often combine esoteric, mystical and romantic belief systems with extreme skepticism buttressed with conspiracy theories that habituate one’s mind to automatically intuit all competing accounts as doubtful. Anti-establishment authoritarians instinctively, intuitively gravitate to whatever clears the ground for their own authority. It starts with “Question everything!”, proceeds to “we think with our blood!” or “trust your feelings!” and continues that way until some new Establishment can be founded, at which time the movement goes pro-establishment, while their formerly pro-establishment authoritarian enemies go anti-establishment.
In times like these, when the pro-establishment authoritarians and anti-establishment authoritarians change strategies en masse, when post-modern radical skeptics start demanding trust of institutions, and the God & Country types learn to despise and distrust their own national authorities — it is hard to get our bearings. Who is the oppressor, and who is the oppressed? Who has the power, and who is subjected to it? Who is conventional, and who is radical? Who is the elitist, and who is the anti-elitist? How do we distinguish righteous anger from elitist rage, righteous offense from elitist fragility, counterbalancing from gratuitous vengeful humiliation?
Who decides? How is it decided?
Generally, it takes a bloodbath to re-teach all the assorted pro- and anti-establishments omniscients the wisdom of liberal-democratic institutions.
Polycentric virtues
Until quite recently, design has been monocentric.
All the various x-centric design disciplines were named after the single protagonist of the design. User-centered. Employee-centered. Customer-centered. Citizen-centered. In search of something more general and accommodating, most designers have settled on “human-centered’.
Human-centered design centers design on the experience of a person. While “human” can, of course, mean more than one person, in actual human-centered design practice — in the methods employed — it must be admitted that human meant one human. Designers nearly always focused all attention on the segments of people who might wind up a person at the center of their design, and they did this in order to ensure that it is useful, usable and desirable for whoever that might be.
Lately something new — much newer than it seems at first glance — has emerged: polycentric design.
In polycentric design multiple protagonists are simultaneously experientially centered. Multiple storylines — each an experience some person is having — weave together, converging and looping at points where people interact with one another, separating where people experience things alone. Polycentric design concerns itself with all the storylines equally, and attempts to make every point in this complex mesh of experiences useful, usable and desirable for everyone.
This new development in design began when human-centered design principles were applied to service design.
Even as far back as the early-90s (two decades before service design became human-centered) service design considered the entire service — not only the receiving of the service, but also the delivery and the support of the service — as a single designed system. The delivery and support of the service is not secondary to receiving the service, but of equal dignity and deserving equal focus.
So, when a human-centered design approach is applied to service design, then, the humans who are centered multiply. Any point in the experience where any person experiences anything in the receiving, delivering or supporting of the service — including where people experience interacting with one another — is framed as a design problem. It is a design problem part (a service moment) embedded within a design problem whole (the service) and the success of that moment and that whole is assessed by whether everyone valued what happened and feels that they participated in a win-win.
Designers debate whether service design is a species of human-centered design or vice versa. There is truth to all sides of the debate. I think they were both decisively transformed in the process and I like calling that transformation polycentric design.
*
Part of the reason I like to claim that polycentric design transcends both human-centered design (one person considered in first-person) and service design (originally multiple people considered in third-person) is that polycentricity challenges so many of our basic views outside of design — ideas bound up with what I believe are rapidly-obsoleting moral attitudes.
For instance, often we try to temper the natural egocentricity of children by telling them they are not the center of the universe. But why not instead tell them “you are not the only center of the universe“?
Or social activists will speak of decentering privileged groups. Why not instead extend centering to those who have been marginalized or excluded, and polycenter all people?
And consider altruism’s reflexive exaltation of martyrdom. Good people sacrifice their interests to the interests of others. But with polycentrism the selfless refrain of “not me, but you!” can be humanely transcended with an unselfish but also unselfless response: “not any one of us, but all of us.”
When we learn to think polycentrically, much more is possible than me getting my way, or you getting yours, or each of us compromising. We can rethink situations, we can philosophize pragmatically, and find entirely new ways to conceive what we face and find solutions preferable to all than the relatively impoverished conceptions we began with.
*
Oh, am I being an idealistic dreamer? Am I not tough enough for the hard truths of reality? for waging war for what matters?
I will argue the opposite.
I see tough-guy refusal to compromise, and resignation to the necessity of losers to produce winners as evidence of philosophical cowardice.
I see it as bullshit macho posturing of people who cannot handle the unknowability of the unknown and the dreadful apprehension one feels confronting what exceeds us and defies our language and even our thoughts.
(I overstate my position, in order to remind us that anything can be redescribed to look brave or cowardly, or realistic or delusional.)
*
What does it take to do polycentricity?
In individuals, it requires rare goodwill toward I-transcending We. It requires courage in the face of incomprehensibility — an ability to feel intense anxiety and antipathy, but not to obey it. It requires faith in the inconceivable becoming conceivable — so that our blindness to what might emerge if we approach problems in I-transcending We stops being evidence of impossibility.
And sadly it requires more that one person to possess polycentric virtues. In fact, it requires everyone involved in a polycentric situation (which is all situations) to commit to these virtues.
Most of all requires us to change our relationship to apprehension. Whatever we apprehend — a That we can touch with the tip of our mind — but which we cannot comprehend as a What we can grasp — makes us feel apprehensive.
When we take apprehension at face value, and conceive either the phenomena in question, or the other person forcing these phenomena to our attention — or both at once! — as signaling an offense or threat, we cannot entertain any important possibility that stands outside our comprehension.
And outside our comprehension is precisely where polycentric possibility stands!
*
For quite some time I’ve been arguing that it is helpful to reconceive philosophy as a design discipline.
More recently I’ve realized it might be even more helpful to reconceive philosophy as a polycentric design discipline.
Uniquely qualified
Each of us has our own good reason to believe we are uniquely qualified to teach the rest of humanity about reality — not least of which is the fact that each of us can truthfully say: I was born into the center of existence and have experienced reality from that privileged vantage point my whole life.
This is why — though many other people know many different things — when it comes to what really matters, what is most relevant, what gets to the heart of it all, you are the authority. You concentrated on the one thing needful. This is why wise people come to you for wisdom.
Conceiving pluralistically
In my book, I make a distinction between concepts and syntheses. Concepts are spontaneously experienced as givens, where syntheses require effort and explicit thought.
The line dividing concept and synthesis is not absolute or even sharp, and the blurry boundary differs considerably between individuals.
Some (but not all!) syntheses can, with practice, be internalized and become concepts that we simply conceive in our experiences. Metaphors that indicate or isolate conceptual likeness can become so immediate that the metaphor can be bypassed or forgotten, freeing the concept to operate autonomously, even wordlessly, like a perception.
This distinction matters to me because I am terrible at synthesis. My memory is poor and my skill in manipulating complex knowledge structures is limited.
To compensate, I work hard to make syntheses conceivable — most of all in my professional life as a designer. In the workplace, if I cannot think quickly and speak fluently and persuasively I will be deprived the conditions I need to function. So instead of doing what most designers do, accumulating technical and theoretical knowledge and manually managing it all, I approach it philosophically. Whatever synthetic knowledge I acquire, I interrogate. I take it apart and put it back together in various ways. I turn it, walk around it, and examine it from multiple angles. I search for simple animating concepts that can be integrated with the rest of what I can conceive. I don’t just want to know about my craft — I want to master it, internalize it and make it second-natural.
But what has given me the most challenge and the greatest rewards has been understanding the implications of pluralism in design work. Here, I was assisted by both philosophical reflection and constant practice confronting subjective difference. For me, pluralism is no longer an epistemological principle that I hold true, or a means to explain or legitimize reasonable differences of opinion.
I conceive pluralism directly in my experience of reality. The world for me is not an objective reality that different people see differently. For me, it is self-evidently a confluence of objectivities belonging to a plurality of subjects. When I experience the world with others I can feel the reinforcing and canceling interference patterns of overlapping fields of objectivity.
I write this because I suspect pluralism is still synthetic for the majority of people. Most people I meet still seem to conceive the world objectively even if they use objectivist conceptions to synthesize a pluralistic belief system. Our journey to liberalism has still only started.
Unique identitifications
Perhaps every particle of reality is a unique participant of existence.
Perhaps the uniqueness of each participant is expressed primarily in how it looks out upon the other participant-particles from its own I-rooted objectivity, conceiving patterns of sameness and difference in the unique objects environing — conceiving parts, wholes and the enveloping reality in a unique way from its own unique existence.
Perhaps one participant may recognize and respond to the I-rootedness of another, a fellow who reciprocates, producing a new we-rooted objectivity that now conceives a shared world — a polyphonous world — a pluralistic world where color, form, movement, number, poetry, history and physics, for instance, can now overlap and layer in chords of harmony and cacophony — can now interact and interfere in contrapuntal tension and release — can now coexist as subject with subject, subject within subject, subject subjugating subject.
(A variation on the Pascal’s Sphere, Indra’s Net. I recommend actually following these links today. They make pretty chords.)
Christopher Alexander, 1936-2022
I just learned that Christopher Alexander died March 17.
It is so strange. He has been very much on my mind the last month. Writing this book, I’ve realized how deeply indebted I am to him.
Changed by writing
I can feel how this process of writing a book is changing me. It is changing how I think, feel and speak, which is strange because what I believe I’m doing is conveying a philosophy I’ve been using, more or less unchanged since at least 2014 and maybe as early as 2011 (basically, once Latour and ANT helped me transcend my natural ideocentric brain-in-a-vatism).
Yet, here I am, experiencing a real change in my enworldment, interspersed with intense apprehension — so clearly my code-freeze has thawed and substantial philosophical work (not just conveyance) is happening.
In some ways this process has been a recovery of simplicity that I’ve gradually lost over years of elaboration on my core philosophy. Perhaps I’ve suffered scope-creep trying to incorporate concepts from ANT and ethnomethodology into my repertoire. Some of this knowledge remains undigested synthesis, and has not really been conceived and fully integrated. (Nietzsche mocked this condition as “indigestion”.)
My earliest experiences of metanoia were simple and overwhelmingly powerful. They shifted — everted, in fact – my fundamental understanding of the world to one that was more intensely felt, more immediately intuited and more practical in orientation. These qualities map to Liz Sanders’s desirability, usability and usefulness, respectively, and I will develop this extensively in my book.
By contrast, the thoughts I had as a young man tended toward abstraction and uselessness. The thoughts were mostly aesthetic. My thinking produced works of art to contemplate and savor, not beautiful tools to carry out into the world and use to do things. In other words, my early thoughts focused exclusively on desirability. I used the concepts I’d passively acquired from school and work for usefulness. And usability was all on me. Complicated ideas would become usable with practice.
I was using philosophy exactly the way many people use religion. Weekdays are for usefulness. Weekends have one day set aside for profane desirability and another for sacred desirability. And on all seven days of the week, life is complicated. Learn what you can figure out, and trust experts for the rest.
This all changed for me starting in 2001, when I emerged from the worst depression of my life, able once again to see in color, furious with the work ethic that preferred death to professional disgrace. I decided that despair was something I owed nobody, and that I would reorganize my life around different, more immediate principles. I checked myself into a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, the fifth day of which was September 11, 2001. So, I missed the collective national trauma, the looping image of plane hitting the World Trade Centers, the bewildered phone calls where we worked out what to make of this. I sat in silence, working out what to make of it by myself, turning and turning and turning it, allowing my opinion to change, untethered by any stand-taking. When I came out of the course, there were flags everywhere – more flags, bigger flags, aggressive flags –suffocating flags. I never got back in joint with my people. What I chose to read in the years following made it much worse. Christopher Alexander set my mind on fire and made me feel the importance of design all seven days of the week, and along with Grant Peterson shifted and liberated my aesthetic ideals. Jane Jacobs gave me a whole new understanding of how cities work, and inspired Susan and me to move up to Toronto. And up there, I became so disgusted with my Canadian colleagues – their slavish obedience, their desire to be given a purpose by other people, their willingness to be pushed around and told what to think and feel, their appalling passionless passivity that I was moved to read Nietzsche, just to understand the “slave mentality”. Except… I was the slave. I decided to end that. And that is the point when I became feral. It tooks years to find any reason to cooperate with anyone. But thanks to the deep humane genius of American Pragmatism, I did, so here I am.
Anyway, I should probably edit out that digression, but I suppose I won’t.
So, I want to get back to some of that immediate, intuitive and meaningful simplicity of my earlier philosophical work. The requirement to find a red-thread to narratively and logically connect all my areas of interest, capable of relating ideas belonging to different times and regions of my thinking, has forced me to edit — to choose what is essential and central, and to omit what distracts or complicates it.
And I’m trying to control my linguistic palette, to limit my vocabulary and to discipline it, so that once someone understands the wacko way I’m using a word, they can count on it to keep that meaning. Years ago, usability god, Jakob Nielsen taught me “learn once, use often.” Having learned it, I use this principle often, and plan to use it in this book. But doing this requires a much deeper integration of concept and word than my sloppy self usually bothers with. I’ve lost weeks on dead-end or swamp-end attempts to nail down my words. I think I have it now, but I’ve thought I had it several times, only to excise major sections and move them into my scrapheap doc.
But the process has been worthwhile, and I think it is forcing new, deep integrations between older thoughts I’m trying to incorporate. This is like all design. The design is far, far more than the sum of the features. The parts and the whole develop together, and both change. I’m noticing I’m far more ready with words, now – more able to really nail explanations of ideas that I used to have to talk around indirectly.
Sorry for the rambling. I’m venting all my slop on this blog now, and reserving my hardass discipline for my book.
Design and behavior
I’ve gotten my overview of design instrumentalism as nailed-down as I can get it for now.
I’ve moved on to the design part of the book. This is what I worked on this morning.
Every organization depends on human behaviors for its continued existence and flourishing. An organization needs its members to behave in certain ways that support and sustain the organization, and to not behave in other ways that harm it. It also depends on behaviors of people externally associated with the organization. If the organization exists to serve other people, it needs those people to notice, accept and use its service. If it relies on external partners to supply it with needed materials, products and services, it needs them delivered reliably. Big changes in internal or external behaviors can put an organization in crisis.
Businesses are a common example. A business needs its employees to work effectively, efficiently and harmoniously to produce or deliver whatever product or service it offers its customers. It needs its customers to notice and choose its product or service, to keep choosing it, and to recommend the product to others. A business also has partners upon whom it relies to supply the business with needed materials, products and supporting services. If the behaviors of employees, customers or partners become erratic or interfere with the goals of the business, it must respond to the change or risk damage, decline and dissolution. It will work to restore the old behaviors, or it will try to produce new behaviors wherever and however it is able, to cope with the change, perhaps through reorganization, changes in marketing approach or formation of new partnerships.
When power is unequally distributed, behaviors are often controlled through coercive means. When employers hold most of the power and are aware that employees have limited employment options, they tend to demand more from them and manage their activities more closely. Likewise when employees hold power and are aware that employers are competing for employees with their skills, they become less tolerant of authoritarian management styles, and expect more benefits and amenities from their employers. The same is true with partners. If a partner is the only provider of a needed product or service, they will behave differently than if they are competing with others for the partnership.
But when power is more equally distributed, coercion gives way to persuasion. People give up on controlling one another’s behaviors and instead try to influence their decisions. When competition to persuade and influence becomes sufficiently fierce, design becomes important. Design is a symptom of equality and freedom.
This does not mean that design is essentially a behavior-influencing discipline. It does, however, mean that design is a behavior-influencing profession. It is the need for influencing behaviors that motivates organizations to employ designers and pay them money to do their strange kind of work.
Design work is strange because conditions of freedom have made it strange. Very early on its rapid evolution, the plans for industrial production of artifacts to be offered on the market – design’s initial purpose – became plans for more competitive products – products that customers would prefer to competing products. But what made a product preferable? Functional quality, of course, is always important, but constant improvement and technical innovation (plus, extinction of companies unable to keep up), soon brings products to rough functional parity. When functional quality stops driving preference, what makes one product preferable to another? A list of some of these more refined preferences shows hints of the future development of design: better aesthetic qualities (depending on individual taste, of course); more specialized functionality, optimized for particular uses (valued by some individual users and not others); better value trade-offs (striking different balances of cost, function and aesthetics, each appealing to different value priorities).
With each ratcheting-up of competition, the definition of preferable is increasingly relative to individual values, and the subject gains importance relative to the object. Every question must be qualified with “for whom?” And the answers, to be understood sufficiently that they can be applied to practical problems, are no longer straightforwardly factual, but require perspectival shifts into that of the people in question. For those who remain trapped in an objectivist outlook (still the majority of people), the shift seems mostly “subjective” – learning what the emotions a person feels, when they encounter various objects or events – cast in psychological terms, against a background of universal objective truth. But if the current trajectory holds, soon it will be impossible to ignore the truth that these emotional responses are only the emotive tip of a deeply objective iceberg, and that until the objectivity and emotion of a person’s response are comprehended together, the subject is most likely misunderstood in terms of one’s own subjectivity.
This is an important event in my life. Usually I write blog article that make it into my book. Today I wrote something for my book that I’m sharing as a blog article.
Embracing abnormality
A friend of mine sent me an online autism test and asked me what my thoughts on it were. It inspired a pretty decent email:
Here’s where my mind went: I want a test to measure organizational autism. Back in the early 00s I used to say that UX is a cure for corporate autism, until I got worried that might upset someone. But it is true! We impose rules on organizations that require a level of explicitness that cause them to become mind-blind behaviorists. These rules are important, of course, but they come with tradeoffs that we should be aware of and weigh against the benefits.
And I guess that brings me to a second thought: I think we have become too quick to diagnose difference. We live in really strange times, where we’ve forgotten that normal isn’t necessarily good and abnormal isn’t necessarily bad. When I was a kid I was into punk rock, and we thought abnormal was the greatest thing ever. I’m pretty sure a lot of what I was into was aestheticized autism, OCD, and other quirks, all of which were mined and made beautiful or at least intriguing. If you ever want to watch a touching story of redemption, watch End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones, and get ready to cry.
Everything on this Earth is tradeoffs — every room in this palace of life is furnished differently — there is no single standard of goodness. I think some of what is plotted on the autism spectrum I’d prefer to call an inflexibly quirky personality, not a disorder. And when inflexible quirks are put to work generating technical or artistic innovations, that becomes a feature of a personality, not a bug.
So, that challenges my first thought. Cure for corporate autism? Maybe some organizations ought to be aspie. Some people ought to be aspie. Therapists and designers can help individuals or organizations make tradeoffs toward empathy, where “get organized” self-help books (like Checklist Manifesto) or OE/Six Sigma consultants can help people make tradeoffs toward more autistic virtues. So that’s another thing.
I guess I want to relativize mental health and most other social norms so people aren’t so freaked out and obsessed with being called normal. I want us to get back to the Gen-X perversity of treasuring precisely our abnormalities.
Rivendell
After 20+ years of intense yearning I finally got my ultimate bicycle, a Rivendell.
I love beautiful objects, especially beautiful useful objects. This is why I am a designer.
But the most beautiful and most useful object of all is the bicycle. Inconceivable amounts of intelligence, love and effort — heart, and soul and strength — have been poured into perfecting the diamond frame bicycle by innumerable passionate people.
The bicycle is the ultimate object. And the Rivendell is the ultimate exemplar of the ultimate object.
What makes Rivendells so special is the old-school fabrication, which uses lugs to join steel tubes together. The artistry is stunning.
But the significance of Rivendell goes even further. The bicycle and the words of the bicycle’s designer, Grant Peterson, gave me my first deep reconception of an object.
It was a conversion experience. Before, the conversion, I wanted a minimalist bicycle fabricated from the highest tech materials. But then I read what Peterson had to say, and Non-Rivendell bicycles were magically transformed into variously deficient approximations of Rivendells. Rivendells became symbolic of what I care about.
My overall aesthetic changed. My preference shifted from pristine, unadorned euclidian mind-forms to symbolically-ornamented heart-forms. A beneficiary of this change was Susan, who was suddenly liberated from modernist austerity, and freed to transform our house into the odd, colorful, semi-psychedelic warmth cocoon it is today.
This experience gave me my first glimpse of what design can be and do, not only with physical forms, but with conceptions. Later, many of the key ideas Grant Peterson demonstrated were articulated by Christopher Alexander as life-changing general principles of design that guide my practice today.
———
Here are some of the more memorable things Grant Peterson said that got into my heart.
This:
We love lugs. We don’t build frames without them. We like the look, the art, the way they’re made, and we like designing smart, beautiful, and unique ones. We also like knowing that a Rivendell, Atlantis, or Heron frame is unmistakably itself beneath the paint, because the lugs identify it. Fifty and even a hundred and fifty years from now, when all of today’s frames have been retired or repainted or rusted away or whatever, a dumpster diver will come upon a paintless, decal-less Rivendell or Atlantis or Heron, take it to a bicycle historian, and there won’t be any doubt what kind of frame it is. That notion may seem silly to you, but it’s a small part of what makes lugged frames special for a lot of people. They have a face and a personality that is unique. No big deal, maybe, but it’s there.
And this:
“Form follows function” works for nature, but too often with people, it’s used as an excuse to rush to market something that’s fully functional but still not so good looking.
(Have you noticed that old things usually look good? Manhole covers, typewriters, ’50s station wagons, chairs, hand-saw handles, buildings, bells, letter openers, kitchen appliances, almost anything. They were designed slowly, on a real drawing board, by people who were part industrial designer, part artist, part engineer. When you mix those qualities with manual involvement and patience, what finally hatches usually looks good.)
When it comes to bicycle frames, we like them to look low-key from a distance and interesting up close. Lugs look good to us, and a little fanciness is fine, too. We want a Rivendell frame to be recognizable, even if a robber steals it and repaints it, and our signature lugs guarantee that.
It’s hard to dwell on points such as appearance without coming off like a snob; and rest assured we do see the beauty in rusty, homely, utility bikes that get ridden and help Save the Planet, etc. But at some point in the design and building of your frame, we make some decisions that affect aesthetics, and although we aren’t the final arbiters of good taste, we know what we like, and always look after the frame.
Highlights from Susan’s and my weekly conversation
Every Saturday, Susan and I have a deep conversation. This week’s was short but momentus. I want to list some of the highlights.
- Susan asked about Vipassana (Buddhist insight meditation) and how it relates to her Jewish faith. As happens so often, she drew an explanation from me that simply did not exist until she made space for its existence through the intelligence of her questions. I advised her to think of the concentration she would develop and maintain for maybe no more than a few precious minutes out the hundred-plus hours she’ll spend seated in meditation as Genesis 0:0 – the preconceptive divine spark that existed the moment before Genesis 1:1, before “God began creating heaven and earth,” when “the earth was void and desolate,” and “there was darkness on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved over the waters.” From there, she can witness regenesis.
- We discussed the two most common enceptions, which tend to project as metaphysical objectifications, materialism and idealism. She asked if either was more likely to be sociopathic. I don’t think they are more or less likely, but the form of sociopathy differs. Idealist sociopaths tend to become solipsistic and to believe the meaning they experience is the only one that exists or matters. Materialist sociopaths tend to become nihilistic and to believe there is no meaning, that nothing is true and anything is permitted.
- I finally caught the deep connection between everting objectivism and the idea of reenworldment. This is extremely unlikely to make any sense, but I’m recording it here just to mark the insight: Those intermediate conceptions where our differing understandings of the world are found are anchored at two points and suspended between them. One one end is the primary conceptions that give us our concrete experiences of reality (our primary givens), and on the other is the ultimate enception that gives us our sense of reality as a whole (our ultimate given). As long as these two points remain anchored, the intermediate conceptions that bridge primary conceptions with that enception are held firm, and are unlikely to change at any depth. Conceiving ambinity – not just having a synthetic grasp of it, but really spontaneously, immediately intuiting it – is our best opportunity for loosening and dissolving intermediate conceptions and their givens, so they can be reconceived.
- In ambinity, we are no longer required to subject primary conceptions to the standards of any one metaphysic. They are permitted to simply be primary. If we see something and experience it as good, that is what makes it good, and an account that justifies its goodness according to a theory of morals is not necessary.
- I repeated an old idea, that today seemed new: “Things are not your fault. But you are responsible. You have response-ability. That is what obligates you, not some debt on a moral balance sheet.”
Givenness
I’m experimenting with a different angle of approach in presenting concept, synthesis and enworldment. This might replace a much longer section in my book.
1.
What is a given?
A given is what is effortlessly taken. It is taken so effortlessly that, unless we are paying close attention, we fail to notice that taking happened. We notice only the given thing, “the given”.
This effortless taking is conception. Conception means “together-take”. Conception is spontaneous, immediate, effortless, wordless taking-together of something that wasn’t together until we took it that way.
So when we call something given, what we are referring to is not really “givenness” but takenness.
2.
The things given in experience, the primary objects of our experience, are conceived in many ways – in perceptions, in intuitions, in intuitive interactions – our fundamental conceptions. The primary givens of our experience are rooted in our encounters with reality, but what is ours is what is conceivable, and only what is conceivable.
Whatever is inconceivable is, to us, less than nothing, entirely beyond experience.
Whatever is conceivable is, to us, not only something we experience, but something real.
What we experience is taken-together in some conceptual form, and remains underwritten in our minds by their conceptions. This conceptive underwriting makes the content of experience intelligible.
We ambiently know what is going on around us. We wordlessly walk into a room, pick up a cup, drink from it and put it down. It all makes immediate sense.
3.
But our primary givens are not our only givens.
Just as given as the things we experience, we conceive reality as a whole, too. When we say “everything”, we refer to this all-encompassing ultimate conception, which we could call enception. This is the sense of ground – of what kind of reality we inhabit.
We each have our own all-encompassing enception, but it is so pervasive, so without any outside or background against which it can be defined, it escapes notice. For most, it is simply what is, and it is assumed by each to be shared by all, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
Most of us rarely think about metaphysics, but our experience is saturated with metaphysical assumptions that make our experiences take place within a world.
4.
Between the givenness of things and the givenness of everything is a complex matrix of intermediate givens that relate given conceptual parts with the given enceptive whole. These intermediate givens produce the self-evident truths we intuit around us and believe without any possibility of doubt, because it doesn’t even occur to us to question them.
Nobody doubts that mathematics is true. We buy things with money. When we feel weight, we intuit gravity.
5.
Let us call this complex system of givenness, rooted in primary givenness, enveloped in enceptive givenness and laced between with intermediate givenness, an “enworldment”.
Enworldments are not thought about, at least not directly. What is thought is the given content of experience, conceived by the enworldment.
6.
When we think, we are no longer primarily taking-together.
We shift from an effortless taking-together, to an effortful putting-together, synthesis.
Synthesis means “together-put”. What gets put together are givens – primary and intermediate conceptions – but synthesis focuses on what it constructs with these givens.
Sometimes, with our thinking, we manage to put together a synthesis that forms a conceivable whole. In an instant, we have an insight and its meaning becomes clear and immediate. It is no longer something we need to think out. It is now intuited in reality itself. It has been taken up conceptually in integrated into the the enworldment as something that is obviously true.
But often the syntheses we construct cannot be conceived as a whole. We might through step-by-step inspection see that each part of the synthesis is correct and from this conclude that it is, on the whole, correct. But the synthesis is known distantly and derivatively, primarily though its parts, which are primary conceptions, and the logic that makes the parts adhere. It must, with effort, be remembered, re-thought through and manually applied, as a theory separate from the reality it explains. Without links to intermediate conceptions that connect it to the ultimate enception, the synthesis is only tenuously connected to the enworldment, not integrated.
Syntheses are accepted as true. Conceptions are believed.
7.
Enworldments can be changed, and when an enworldment changes, everything changes.
Philosopher on my business card?
For decades I’ve been telling people that I want the title “Philosopher” on my business card at least once in my career.
But thinking philosophically makes life in business painful for the philosophically-minded. Business is not a philosophically flexible environment. In business we must adopt the lingua franca philosophy of business as the dominant one, and everything else must be translated. Native-thinkers of business philosophy will always be more fluent than business-as-a-second-philosophy thinkers.
Whine, whine, whine.