Interview, observation, co-creation & demonstration: the air, earth, fire & water of design research techniques.

It is important to learn where you can and cannot make promises. 

Not only does this help you avoid conflict and alienation, it draws you a map of the public and private regions of your soul. 

The last month has been filled with broken promises of many kinds — explicit and implicit, asserted and implied, formal and informal, word and spirit. I can list at least a half-dozen major examples, and probably a dozen more minor ones. 

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I am going to be stingier is accepting promises — and in making them. Not all people are worthy of exchanging promises. I can no longer default to trust. I must learn the art of being cheerful about being let down by dishonorable majority. 

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Wherever you have failed to make your word good, your word is worthless. 

“Form of oath. — ‘If I am now lying I am no longer a decent human being and anyone may tell me so to my face.’ — I recommend this form of oath in place of the judicial oath with its customary invocation of God: it is stronger. Even the pious person has no reason to oppose it: for as soon as the sanction of the oath hitherto in use begins to be applied vainly, the pious person must give ear to his catechism, which prescribes ‘thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!'”

Commitments are predictions we work to make true.

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A futurist who fails to say true things about the future lacks skill. 

A promiser who fails to say true things about the future lacks integrity. 

Reason is always logical, but logic is not always reasonable. 

Whatever is reasonable is always arguable, but not every argument is reasonable; and therefore arguments alone are not sufficient to distinguish reason from unreason. 

Reason transcends argument. Reason knows it is completed only by what always stands beyond the limits of intelligibility. 

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To the degree an argument is untested, that argument remains arguable.

To the degree an argument is unaware of the tests that can invalidate it, that argument is naive.

To the degree an argument is unconcerned about tests that can invalidate it, that argument is complacent. 

To the degree an argument is hostile to tests that can invalidate it, that argument is ideological. 

To the degree an argument does not conceive tests that can invalidate it, that argument is blind. 

To the degree an argument conceives the failure to conceive tests that can invalidate it as nonexistence of such tests, that argument is blind to blindness.

To the degree an argument confuses mere arguability with truth, that argument is unreasonable. 

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Among my unpopular convictions is this one: Religion is essentially reasonable. Ideologies built with logical arguments that reject the cornerstone of reason are not religions; they are fundamentalisms.

Fundamentalism is the dead opposite of religion.

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A universal scientific method moved by awareness of argumentative limits and of reason’s permanent dependence on mind-transcending realities — an active desire to submit one’s arguments to the judgment of what stands invisibly beyond mind — and consequent mistrust of self-evident certainty — is pious. 

I don’t know if this will hold up or not, but this table describes my current interpretation of post-, neo-, anti- or a non-:

This approach might be even more useful for analyzing relationships between positions than for naming them. Here’s a first crack at naming the relationships:

Art is a thing from an everything — an emissary part from an implied whole. It might be a magical thing that seems to belong to an unknown everything, promising there is more to reality than we have known. Or it maybe an expressive thing that belongs to my own unknown everything, promising I am not alone in weirdness. 

I cannot help but believe that liberalism requires a degree of toughness. Why? Because modern liberalism stands on a foundation of pluralism, and pluralism implies the permanent presence of incommensurable beliefs and radical conflict. Knowing how to represent one’s own positions, while maintaining respect and goodwill, where parties disagree on what the disagreement is and methods for resolving disagreements are themselves contested — in other words, the skills of agonism — this is basic liberal competence. 

People who storm about demanding a public sphere so gentle it favors their kind of delicate development and eventual full flourishing are not liberal. 

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In a liberal world, one cannot legitimately be offended by the raising of controversial questions — but perhaps we ought to be offended by refusal to participate in their asking. 

“OK, but who decides that?”: this is the liberal question.

Society should be just? Ok, but who decides what justice is? All people should be given an equal chance to flourish? Ok, who decides what equality is? People should be free within reasonable limits. Ok, but… People’s basic rights  should be respected. Ok, but… Etc.

In the realm of liberalism, where assertions of principle are followed by the liberal “ok, but” questions are rarely answered; they are hammered out with the crucial but possible impossible goal of eventual agreement.

(Having goals is more important than achieving them.)

When conducting design research in a team context we uncover general truths about groups of people, but in the process we uncover profound specific truths about our fellow researchers. 

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To know someone deeply, reflect with that person on the thoughts and behaviors of other people.

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Maybe this provides us one charitable explanation of the appeal of gossip?: of all conversational genres, gossip gives us the most intimate glimpse into one another’s souls.

At Babel the dust and gravel stands erect, each fragment firm on its foundation, proudly piercing its own low heaven. 

I went to a Baptist church for a few weeks. They were nice people. They preach an ultimate reality who is alive with love for them. But they also teach a reality peopled with hateful and wicked neighbors.

If they are right, they are also not right enough. Their insufficiency is not in what they affirm, but in what they oppose: those who they are not. 

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When I was young I was a left-liberal who thought all conservatives were stupid and mean. Then I met some smart, nice conservatives who helped me see how liberals opposed themselves to only the stupidest and meanest conservatives, and how they did this to justify their own flavor of mean stupidity. Years later I found some even smarter, even nicer liberals, and saw how my conservative friends were ignoring the best liberals, in order to elevate themselves above liberalism in general. And then I looked up into heaven and imagined alternating layers of better and better conservatisms and liberalisms, each trying to be more right and less wrong, and maybe at some rarefied altitude starting to crave justice for who they are not.

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Perhaps morality consists not in who we are, but rather in who we aren’t. 

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“And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.'”

Find a quiet place and sit down. Still your mind. Breathe. Inhale and exhale naturally. Concentrate on your bare breath. Do not force your mind or body to do anything. Be in the present. Your mind will wander, and when it does, gently bring it back to the present, to here, to now, to awareness of here and now. Give yourself some much needed relief from the torments of transcendence. This is the dead opposite of religion, and for this reason it is bliss.

Putting it as succinctly as possible, design thinking is a perspective on problems:

Problem finding

• All people-thing problems are design problems.
• Alternative wordier definition: all problems that involve systems of interacting objects and subjects (“soft system” problems) are design problems.
• Design problems are often misdiagnosed as engineering, management and marketing-advertising problems.

Problem shaping

• Design problems are “wicked problems“, which have peculiar and disturbing characteristics:

• The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
• Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
• Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
• Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
• Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation.’
• Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Problem solving

• The best known way to resolve wicked problems is to use the methods and tools of human-centered design with a strong emphasis on prototyping and testing.

Sometimes I admire people as examples of the kind of person I would like to be. This is a kind of admiration of an aspirational future self. 

But I try to also admire people who are utterly unlike me, people I could never emulate without undermine who I am trying to be. I admire them as collaborative partners with whom I might accomplish things I could not accomplish by myself.

I consider this admiration of otherness in potential collaboration superior and rarer than admiration of potential likeness. Both of these, however, are superior to admiration of inaccessibly distant otherness, which in extreme form is worship.