All posts by anomalogue

Know your materials

Philosophy

Any competent engineer will tell you that good engineering depends on understanding materials. If you misunderstand your materials the system will fail.

Materials must be understood with highly nuanced specificity. Two metals that look and feel the same to an untrained eye and hand might behave drastically differently when subjected to friction, heat or strain.

Design has a similar respect for materials. Design, however, also includes categories of “material” that are not physical — ones that engineers typically factor out, namely subjectivities.

Where an engineer sees a car as a system, a designer is trained to see the car plus the driver as the system — a system with both physical and psychological components. Same with a retail space: a system of objects, surfaces, light, sound, merchandise, customers, sales personnel. Or a hammer — a system that includes an arm, a hand, a nail, a board and a metal form. And with the insight of Design Thinking — (the realization that all systems that include and depend on people are actually best approached by methods used to solve design problems) — things that aren’t normally thought of as “design” are viewed through a design lens — like organizational structures, or business processes, or political policies.

How do you recognize a design problem? If a system being developed will succeed only if people cooperate or participate or behave in some particular way, your problem is a design problem. Approaching such problems as a design problems, using people-centered design methods, will increase your odds of success.

But doing the usual, and treating design problems as if they were engineering problems by failing to factor people in at all, or making uninformed generalizations of “how users are” (or “how women are” or “how female general managers are”, etc.) will get you exactly the kinds of results as you’ll get if you specify “metal” for your engine block. You might get high-carbon steel. But you are just as likely to get tin.

Of course, you can reinforce a tin engine block with a different metal and maybe get it to function, but you’ll never get the level of quality as you would if you considered the material from the start.

Likewise, trying to add design after something has been fundamentally developed for nobody in particular will lead to a mediocre solution is unlikely to be embraced by anyone with much enthusiasm.

Or to put in another way: engineering your way through a design problem is bad engineering.

Know your materials!

Apeirony

Judaism, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

Gorging Ouroboros

Anaximander’s maxim:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

*

The Greek word for “whence things have their origin” is the apeiron — primordial chaos. The world without form, void, with blindness upon its face — that over which the spirit moves… the element in which when we are perplexed we drown: this is apeiron.

I am vitally interested in the experience of grappling with apeiron. The apeiron in all its dreadfulness is what we encounter when we actually transcend ourselves. (And it is ourselves we transcend when we transcend — not the natural world, like magic-mongers claim!) Bliss might follow transcendence, but it is strictly what follows — and it happens after transcendence has happened, not during it. If you “follow your bliss” you flee transcendence back into your most finite (most conceptually infinity-containing) self: that who you are, not that who you are not but who simultaneously exceeds and involves you.

Nowhere is “no pain, no gain” it truer than in religious activity.

*

If I have a positive metaphysical conviction it is in the existence of apeiron.

But if the ultimate reality is apeiron, and apeiron is not an essential wholeness but an infinite profusion of particular views of the whole — a flood of incommensurate meanings — we are morally free to find our own commensurations. Not “everything is permitted” but myriad things are…  But as a liberal, I’m most interested in what we humans permit: and I want to permit what permits. According to Richard Rorty, this makes me an ironist.

*

So, metaphysically, I am Taoist. However, I do not think metaphysical beliefs are a suitable foundation for religion. Equating religions and belief systems (ideologies), faiths and factual convictions causes us to make category mistakes that block religious life. My preference for radical pragmatism resembles the religious attitude of a Buddhist. (I agree with Buddhism on what religions do/are.) But ultimately my passionate Judeo-Christian moral commitment to human dignity makes me not only resemble a liberal Christian — it makes me identify as a Judeochristian.

By the way, starting today, I’m removing the hyphen from Judeo-Christian, because Judeochristianity is not a hybrid of two separate things, but a refusal to separate them in the first place.

*

This morning I registered apeirony.com and apeironism.com.

Rorty’s relativism

Philosophy

In my view, the problem with Rorty is that he fails to pay sufficient attention to practices outside of language that serve to strengthen or weaken a person’s — or a whole linguistic community’s — conception of truth. Clearly language is very important, but even the most persuasive and cohesive description that fails to describe what eventually happens or already happened when it uses its internal logic to speculate on past, present or future will lose persuasive force. Without this kind of activity, science would never have progressed beyond scholasticism.

Rorty may not be metaphysically logocentric, but he is pragmatically logocentric. Only some of our truth-instauration practices are linguistic.

The blind impress

Philosophy

I want to rename my tacit triad “the blind impress” after a Philip Larkin poem quoted by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

“Continuing To Live”

Continuing to live — that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries —
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise —
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

– Philip Larkin

 

Dumb insight on love’s requirements

Philosophy

Sadly, this was an insight: Love sometimes requires change, sometimes requires resisting change, sometimes requires urging change. Love sometimes requires willingness to give, sometimes requires willingness to receive, sometimes requires standing back. There is never a general rule, or a handy procedure. It is about you in relation to a specificity that is not you, but that involves you, and the way must be felt, thought, lived and done. It is responsive, responsible, responding response.

I tend to look at love from a single angle at a time, but this fails to do justice to love’s requirements. Love does not require ones heart or soul or mind or strength: and, and, and, and.

 

Soul balk

Philosophy

Soul balk is the condition where you tell yourself to do something and your self simply refuses to do it.

Soul balk is not exhaustion. Exhaustion is where you’ve used yourself up. Soul balk is a self’s refusal to be used for something it cannot recognize as its proper purpose.

Soul balk might be a lack of self-discipline. It might. But it also might be a lack of internalization of other-discipline — other-discipline that is paying insufficient attention to what the self needs to connect with its own resources and live a self-sustaining life.

*

Soul balk is not a state where the self knows its purpose, and sees a mismatch between this purpose and what is required of it. There is no “yes” against which a “no” is visible, and the absence of a positive is felt as a painful dullness that undermines pursuit of anything except moving away from what occupies it, loads it down and dulls it further.

It might be best to see soul balk as a sort of negative faith that conserves and preserves one’s soul for when its purpose is finally encountered.

Universal Design Praxis

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I find the term Design Thinking inadequate.

First, the term Design Thinking belongs to IDEO. As far as I know, they made the term up, they use it for marketing and it remains closely associated with them. It is uncomfortably too many things at once:  a semi-grassroots movement, a (vague) methodology, a bag of tricks, a style, an approach to problem-solving and a trademark.

But second, thinking is only one part of what goes on with Design Thinking. And in fact in Design Thinking thinking is demoted from its usual exalted position. In most situations in most organizations, making and doing activities are preceded by lengthy talking, making of cases, adducing of evidence, modeling, deciding, planning, and other activities of the head. But with Design Thinking, making and doing become more equal partners  with thinking in determining what will be thought and done and made. Hands and feet enter the picture and work alongside the head (and heart) to shape what transpires.

For this reason, I am inclined to characterize this way of working more as a practice than a way of thinking.

Even practice fails to go far enough, though, because a practice can still position a practitioner outside of what is being worked on. With design problems one struggles inside them, rather than working on them or puzzling over them. Anyone who has gone through the wringer of a deep design problem can tell you: design immerses, involves, challenges and changes people at an unnervingly fundamental level. This is why talk around design, design thinking and related movements like UX and service design can get a little breathless and zealous and quasi-religious: because it does stimulate — even forces — unexpected and profound self-transformations. Because of this — because the practice of doing/making/thinking iteratively feeds back into and self-modifies the doing/making/thinking and perceiving process, and the practitioners involved in it, it should be called a design praxis.

And since the active domain of design praxis is all systems involving both subjective free-willed, choice-making entities (a.k.a. people) and objective entities — and such systems are ubiquitous —  it might even be called Universal Design Praxis. According to this perspective, most problems are actually design problems. When we limit design to traditionally define design areas (graphic, product, digital, architectural, interior, fashion, and so on) we misdiagnose problems as engineering, marketing, management, economic, etc. problems — and usually end up factoring out the crucial element of free-will, and wind up treating people as beings to manipulate, control or coerce.

There is a moral/political dimension to design praxis: it works to engage human beings as free and appeals to free choice, and this also contributes to the whole movement’s quasi-religiosity

So here are the core principles of Universal Design Praxis:

  • Any development of systems comprising both objective and subjective (free-willed) components is best approached as a design problem. (This encompasses the vast bulk of human activity.)
  • Design problems are resolved through iterative cycles of first-hand immersion, collaborative reflection, collaborative making, testing, revision, etc. Whatever the specific techniques used, they are used with this thrust in this basic framework: go to reality to learn, to make, to relearn, to remake…
  • Design praxis changes the practitioner as the problem moves toward resolution — the practioner self-transforms into someone capable of seeing a solution that initially was invisible.
  • Design praxis involves reflective collaboration — multiple people working directly with realities (as opposed to speculating or recalling or applying expertise). Abstractions are derived afresh from direct exposure to reality (the reality of people, things, actions, institutions, places — whatever contributes to making a situation what it is).
  • Design praxis assumes, affirms,  appeals to, and amplifies free-will.

 

Goliath vs Pebble

Design

I’m going to get really concrete for a change, and talk about the apparent design philosophies and approaches of Apple Watch vs Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel.

Disclosure: I have a very strong preference for Pebble, I predict they are going to eat Apple’s lunch, and I hope they do eat Apple’s lunch. I hope it happens because I see in these competing products competing ideals of good design producing two very different products. The case study will ripple through the design industry, and if things work out like I hope, it will have a corrective effect.

—-

When designers do what people think they do — and concern themselves primarily with aesthetics or thrilling novel features — instead of doing their job and thinking about the design experientially — that is, in terms of people and how they think and act and feel in order to unconceive and reconceive problems — they make stuff people love to talk about and obsess over, but which under-perform for users, which translates into immediate or eventual under-performing in the market.

Compared to Apple Watch, Pebble Time is inferior sculpture, but infinitely superior design.

And every time I look at either,

Re-thinking / re-feeling politics

Judaism, Philosophy

Something to consider from Bruno Latour: “Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.”

None of us are above politics. However, if too many of us withdraw from politics with an attitude of moral (or intellectual!) superiority will increasingly make politics something we will want to withdraw from. But to reengage we will have to re-think (and consequently re-feel) “politics”, and stop using the term in the disparaging popular sense which connotes deceit, manipulation and abuse of power.

I’ve found Hannah Arendt’s characterization of politics to be helpful: “Action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non [the essential condition], but the conditio per quam [the required condition] — of all political life.”

In other words, politics is the conscious navigation of a pluralist reality, where our own views are one of myriad possible views, where others are in the same state as ourselves: finite and fallible. But if we will gather in the spirit of humility and respect and desire to understand, and adhere to a political faith that the (considerable) suffering of the process is not only obligatory but worth undergoing — we might find ourselves re-thinking what seemed to be no-brainers, and, consequently, re-feeling what seemed to be eternal convictions.

This deeply weird* re-thinking/re-feeling experience is called “metanoia”. But metanoia only comes when we take two political rules very seriously 1) that though reality is intellectually inexhaustible, we continue to try to know it and respect it as much as we are able, and 2) we respect our fellow-humans as someone who, just like us, has something to teach us. Further, we must take these these two rules as, for all practical purposes, the same exact rule, our highest political commandment.

This is what genuine politics requires. It is an exceptionally difficult path — so difficult we are 100% doomed to perpetual failure. But we can always recover from our failures and even learn from them, and it can even bring about yet more metanoia, which turns the failures into healing and growth and all that good stuff we all want to want. And despite our wishes, this process never ends. The minute we think it has ended we degrade into ideologues who think we are right (and we usually are somewhat right, at least in the gnat-like minutiae) but in a far more important sense we are wronger than wrong.

I’d follow all this us with a disqualifying, “anyway, that’s just my opinion”, except that would be disingenuous. I really think this is both right and true, and this is what I will wholeheartedly believe until I’m bowled over by the next metanoia.

(* When I say that I don’t believe in magic, but do believe in miracles, this is the sort of thing I am talking about. My hostility to magic is rooted in the fact that facile magical “explanations” dismantle miracle-inducing perplexities.)

Gorging ouroboros

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Philosophy

Gorging Ouroboros

Every philosophy is a philosophy of some kind of life.

For too many generations philosophers have philosophized about philosophizing to philosophers philosophizing about philosophizing.

This has turned philosophy into something exasperatingly inapplicable to anything important to anyone except a professional academic philosopher.

My belief (or self-interested prejudice) is that being a philosopher who philosophizes a life of human-centered design is a great privilege at this time in our culture.

Human-centered design lives at the intersection of many of our most problematic oppositions: theory-vs-practice, objectivity-vs-subjective, intuitive-vs-methodical, individual-vs-collective, revolution-vs-evolution, symbolic-vs-real, narrative-vs-fact, qualitative-vs-quantitative, holism-vs-atomism, coercion-vs-persuasion, technology-vs-humanities, natural-vs-artificial . . . , etc.

My philosophy feeds on the live problems and anxious perplexities that seize groups of diverse people when they collaborate to improve the lives of other people by changing social situations — physically, practically, symbolically and emotionally — and in this effort become so desperate to succeed that they are willing to stake or sacrifice their own cozy worldviews for the sake of sharing understandings with others.

I am convinced that philosophy can (and will soon) regain its relevance. It just needs a diet of something other than its own self-gorged self.

Overcoming empathy

Design, Design Instrumentalism

A disempathic world view: “We may be accused of lacking empathy, but this supposed deficiency is actually an efficiency, not only because there are convenient statistical workarounds, but because the very object of empathy is entirely useless. People can and should be understood in terms of observable behaviors and attributes. Any invisible “agent” slipped under these observable realities is at best too vague or messy to manage, and in all likelihood superfluous or nonexistent.”

You can’t argumentatively disprove a philosophy of this kind — certainly not in its own terms. With respect to mere argumentation, it is not a matter for disproof; it is a matter for disapproval. But disapproval is not objective. It is subjective, and therefore not admissible as a valid argument to a mind who excludes all but objective criteria. Arguments about arguments will ensue, but objective minds are unable to grasp how this kind of argument is even possible, and therefore it also does not exist. So let’s not.

Luckily, we are not limited to mere argumentation. We are not Medieval Scholastics who must gather around the council table to establish theological truth through logical connections of doctrinal assertions.

We are children of the Enlightenment, and we know that we are not chained to the council table and books and figures and dogmas and arguments. We are able — and obligated! — to stand up and exit the room with all its shadowy abstract depictions Truth — and walk out into the sunlight of reality  to see how our truths perform when we test their fitness in helping us live effectively.

This is where design thinking and social scientific method become gloriously useful. Both take subjectivity as real and testable. This sounds abstract until you realize that the fates of businesses and organizations of all kinds hang on subjectivity.

Human [second] nature

Ethics, Politics

If someday we finally persuade ourselves that free will, souls and individual purposes were inventions, that they are sustained only by our linguistic and pedagogical habits, that they can easily be dis-instituted and explained into non-existence — I hope the insight doesn’t come before an even deeper insight: That the most important elements of humanity are our second-natural ones: what we have made of ourselves in the act of making things for ourselves.

Cultural activity is working to form the second-natural essence of future generations. I want us to have free-will, souls and individual purposes because I like having them, not because I think they have an existence apart from “mere” human ways of being.

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Do not argue with me about what is natural with the expectation that naturalness compels acceptance.

Show me that a thing is good and for whom it is good and which good things must be sacrificed to have it.