All posts by anomalogue

Sources of innovation

Design

Ideas for innovation come from many sources.

  • New technological possibilities  can be used to create and evolve new products.
  • New industry developments can create new strategic pressures and opportunities that make new products competitive.
  • New insights into people and the details of their lives can show how new products might fit into and transform their worlds.
  • New combinations of skills in inter-disciplinary teams provided the right conditions and supports can co-invent new ideas impossible for isolated individuals.
  • New innovation tools, techniques and approaches can produce and evolve new products.
  • New forms of analysis can lead to new understandings of situations that reveal new opportunities to innovate.
  • And — at the risk of sounding old-fashioned — inspiration can strike a person at any time, in any place, for any reason or no reason at all.

This is not even close to a complete list. Most people prefer one or another source and sometimes would have their organization cultivate only one or a few sources instead of as many as possible. But why? Perhaps because most organizations already have many ideas and are looking for ways to narrow the list.

But really, what is needed is a way to evaluate ideas and select the best ones. And the majority of organizations rely on one method, which could be called “table-thinking” — people sitting behind desks and tables, presenting, debating and deciding things about distant situations they at best partially understand and largely misunderstand.

Foot, eye, hand, heart and head

Philosophy

I’m working on a simple framework for aguiding the instauration of individual and collective common sense.

Foot: Where have you (and others) stood within the situation, and where are you standing now?

Eye: What are you (and others) trying to observe?

Hand: How are you (and others) acting on the situation?

Heart: Why do you (and others) feel the situation ought to be changed (or not changed)?

Head: How are you (and others) conceptualizing the situation?

The interaction and interrelation of all these elements is indispensable to understanding. Every element of common sense must participate — foot, eye, hand, heart and head — or we end up with an ungodly soup: dissociated chunks of non-common private sense floating in a broth of common nonsense.

Continue reading Foot, eye, hand, heart and head →

Chord: social versus interhuman

Chord

Below is a chord of passages on social versus interhuman interactions, which I believe illuminate a key difference between introverts and extraverts.

Extraverts seem to prefer social interactions, where each person plays a role as a participant in some cultural order. Introverts seem to prefer interpersonal dialogue exposing the unique particularity of the individual (which in some ways undermines cultural roles).

This preference becomes conspicuous at lunchtime. Introverts will seek a situation where intimate conversation is possible, so they’ll sneak off with two or three introvert co-conspirators, carefully avoiding extraverts, who are likely to unthinkingly change the situation to suit their own tastes, by grabbing as many people as possible on the way out of the building, and creating a situation where people will perform for one another around the table. For an extravert that is what good times are, but for an introvert it ruins the possibility of anything truly fascinating happening.

  • Buber: The Social and the Interhuman — It is usual to ascribe what takes place between men to the social realm, thereby blurring a basically important line of division between two essentially different areas of human life. … we have to do here with a separate category of our existence, even a separate dimension, to use a mathematical term, and one with which we are so familiar that its peculiarity has hitherto almost escaped us. Yet insight into its peculiarity is extremely important not only for our thinking, but also for our living. … We may speak of social phenomena wherever the life of a number of men, lived with one another, bound up together, brings in its train shared experiences and reactions. But to be thus bound up together means only that each individual existence is enclosed and contained in a group existence. It does not mean that between one member and another of the group there exists any kind of personal relation. … it must be said that the leading elements in groups, especially in the later course of human history, have rather been inclined to suppress the personal relation in favour of the purely collective element. Where this latter element reigns alone or is predominant, men feel themselves to be carried by the collectivity, which lifts them out of loneliness and fear of the world and lostness. When this happens — and for modern man it is an essential happening — the life between person and person seems to retreat more and more before the advance of the collective. The collective aims at holding in check the inclination to personal life. It is as though those who are bound together in groups should in the main be concerned only with the work of the group and should turn to the personal partners, who are tolerated by the group, only in secondary meetings.
  • Nietzsche: Dialogue. — In a dialogue, there is only one single refraction of thought: this is produced by the partner in conversation, the mirror in which we want to see our thoughts reflected as beautifully as possible. But how is it with two, or three, or more partners? There the conversation necessarily loses something of its individualizing refinement; the various considerations clash, cancel each other out; the phrase that pleases the one, does not accord with the character of the other. Therefore, a man interacting with several people is forced to fall back upon himself, to present the facts as they are, but rob the subject matter of that scintillating air of humanity that makes a conversation one of the most agreeable things in the world. Just listen to the tone in which men interacting with whole groups of men tend to speak; it is as if the ground bass of all speech were: “That is who I am; that is what I say; now you think what you will about it!”
  • Nietzsche: The first distinction to draw regarding artworks. — Everything that is thought, written, painted, composed, even built and sculpted, belongs either to monologue art or to art before witnesses. The second category must also include the seemingly monologue art involving faith in God, the entire lyricism of prayer; for solitude does not yet exist to the pious — this invention was first made by us, the godless. I know no deeper distinction in an artist’s entire optics than this: whether he views his budding artwork (‘himself’) from the eye of the witness, or whether he ‘has forgotten the world’, which is the essential feature of all monologue art — it is based on forgetting; it is the music of forgetting.
  • Nietzsche: The cynic speaks. — At the theatre, one is honest only as a mass; as an individual one lies, lies to oneself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes to the theatre; one relinquishes the right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s taste, even to one’s courage as one has it and exercises it within one’s own four walls against god and man. No one brings the finest senses of his art to the theatre; nor does the artist who works for the theatre: there, one is people, public, herd, woman, pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbour, fellow man; there, even the most personal conscience is vanquished by the levelling magic of the “greatest number”; there, stupidity breeds lasciviousness and is contagious; there, the “neighbour” reigns; there, one becomes a neighbour’.

 

Faithlessnesses and faiths

Judaism, Philosophy

I’ve speculated that the extremes of exoterism (fundamentalism) and esoterism (mysticism) have little do do with the faiths they are thought to exemplify.

They are faiths of their own — the former a faith in a divinity who dwells beyond (who demands particular observances), the latter a faith in a divinity who dwells within (who bestows universal insights).

Neither fundamentalist nor mystic can be told anything new, and in this they are strikingly similar. Both have already arrived at the truth. I suggest that this is the entire point of them: they are perennially convenient evasions of religious struggle. They are certainly faiths, but not religious ones. And “spiritual” dissociation from religion (with the insinuation that religion is essentially exoteric), only shows the extent to which transcendence is misunderstood, and confused with what ought to be called “inscendence”, an intensification of self within itself.

Perhaps it is a symptom of my essentially Judeo-Christian nature or second-nature that I believe so strongly that 1. religion is essentially struggle with the truth of transcendence — of relating oneself to the reality that exceeds and involves each particular person and demands that one participate in universality as custodians of a particular and unique everything among innumerable everythings — 2. that the primary locus of this struggle is not within the individual, nor between the individual and supernatural beings, but rather between individuals in the medium called the world, and 3. that the primary action of religion is transformative learning: metanoia — unlearning and relearning for the sake of relationship with beings beyond the mind’s bounds.

According to this view, avoidance of being schooled by one’s irritating neighbor is symptomatic of an avoidance of religion itself, and a removal of oneself from the realities religion seeks to inhabit with increasing intimacy, extent and awareness. The loss of religion is not wrongness but loss of the desire for ever greater rightness.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
— Milton

The medium of action

ANT, Philosophy, Politics

Had Hannah Arendt lived to read Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump: she would never have written this:

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

This last sentence is perfectly, elegantly wrong, and overcoming this belief is at the very heart of Design Thinking.

The design of truth

Design, Philosophy

What kind of truth do you know? That depends on what kind of reality you inhabit and what kind of life you are trying to lead.

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A truth relates a knower to some part of reality and allows that knower to participate in that reality in some capacity to some degree.

Two truths can conflict in the same way that two good user interface design approaches can be incompatible with one another. And this is barely metaphorical: truth is a person’s interface with a local bit of reality.

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A choice of truth can be between truth and falseness: Does it represent accurately, or does it distort or obscure? But a choice of truth can also be between effective and ineffective: Can the truth be used to do what needs doing, or does it lead to paralysis or mistakes? And finally, choice can be between valuable and valueless: Does this truth lead to something good and beautiful, or something depressing and repellent?

Truth is a mixture — and sometimes a designed system — of factuality, actuality and importance.

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We can design truth, and we are allowed to, but what we design can succeed or fail at what it aims to be and do and mean. Is this relativism? Absolutely — but it is neither purely subjective, nor arbitrary.

(This is what my book The Ten-Thousand Everythings is about.)

Chord: eyes and ears

Chord

A chord of Nietzsche quotes:

“He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.”

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“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.”

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“He is a thinker: that means he knows how to make things simpler than they are.”

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“He who wants to mediate between two resolute thinkers shows that he is mediocre: he has no eye for what is unique; seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes.”

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“Of all the arts that grow up on a particular cultural soil under particular social and political conditions, music makes its appearance last, in the autumn and deliquescence of the culture to which it belongs: at a time when the first signs and harbingers of a new spring are as a rule already perceptible; sometimes, indeed, music resounds into a new and astonished world like the language of an age that has vanished and arrives too late. … It lies in the nature of music that the fruits of its great cultural vintages grow unpalatable more quickly and are more speedily ruined than the fruits of the plastic arts, let alone those that have ripened on the tree of knowledge: for of all the products of the human artistic sense ideas are the most enduring and durable.”

 

Practical xenophilia

Philosophy

It’s not enough to feel xenophilic, nor is it sufficient to make efforts to think xenophilically (to engage in speculative empathy).

Xenophilia requires action. These actions are a radical implementation of the scientific method, applied to all things: immerse in a reality you wish to understand, observe, listen carefully, submit to being taught, participate in it, test your understandings…

Over the last three decades much work has been done to develop and implement practical xenophelia and this work has gone by many names: User-Centered Design, User Experience, Design Thinking, Service Design, to name a few.

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From now on for me UX does not stand for User Experience: it stands for Ubiquitous Xenophilia.

 

Making a book

Philosophy

Removed from a letter to some friends:

The book I’m working on is about designing well-crafted, habitable delusions, and it is itself a well-crafted, habitable delusion.

Viewed from my angle, philosophy is a species of design. We are allowed to design truth.

Who’s going to stop us? Objectivity? God? Pretty much the only authority who can drop the hammer is the intellectual conscience of the individual reader, but this is where those qualifications “well-crafted” and “habitable” enter the picture.

I’m not saying reality is not meaningless as Rust says, but I am saying that if you put a good UI on reality, you can design a better experience “using” it. And that UI is what we call truth. Philosophy is the UI we interact with to make sense of and interact with the OS that is our daily lives, running on the overwhelmingly hopelessly complex platform called reality.

A philosophy can and should be run through the framework of Useful / Usable / Desirable: A badly-design interface might be useless (it will be buggy, conflict with daily experience, and will prevent us from interacting with reality and accomplishing what we need to accomplish). In other words, it can be FALSE. But it can also be unusable — just too complicated to actually use well. So we are confused or forced to muddle, or we just decide not to think because our philosophy makes thinking such an awful chore. Or undesirable.

Remind me later to connect all this with Leo Strauss and the neocons.

The creativity of agnonism

Philosophy

The predominance of war or appeasement undermines the creative accomplishments of diplomacy.

The predominance of corporate capitalism or communism undermines the creative accomplishments of politics — and the market.

The predominance of collectivism or individualism undermines the creative accomplishments of friendship.

The predominance of conviction or skepticism undermines the creative accomplishments of philosophy.

The predominance of lust or alienation undermines the creative accomplishments of love.

The predominance of intolerance or tolerance undermines the creative accomplishments of religion.

And so on.

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Releasing ourselves from the painful tension of internal conflict by neutralizing one force to liberate another — it gives us energy and all the answers — but the foundation it provides is less fundamental than it is base.

 

 

Art in the age of work

Philosophy

I just stumbled upon a very relevant passage from The Wanderer and His Shadow:

Art in the age of work. — We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. — This is the most general circumstance through which the relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of the industrious and able against it, it is directed to the conscienceless and lazy, who, however, are in accordance with their nature unfavourably inclined precisely towards grand art and feel the claims it makes to be presumptuous. It may therefore be that grand art is facing its end from lack of air and the room to breathe it: unless, that is, grand art tries, through a kind of coarsening and disguising, to become at home in (or at least to endure) that other air which is in reality the natural element only of petty art, of the art of recreation and distraction. And this is now happening everywhere; artists of grand art too now promise recreation and distraction, they too direct their attentions to the tired and weary, they too entreat of them the evening hours of their working day — just as do the artists of entertainment, who are content to have achieved a victory over the serious brow and the sunken eye. What artifices, then, do their greater comrades employ? They have in their dispensary the mightiest means of excitation capable of terrifying even the half-dead; they have narcotics, intoxicants, convulsives, paroxysms of tears: with these they overpower the tired and weary, arouse them to a fatigued overliveliness and make them beside themselves with rapture and terror. On account of the perilousness of these means it employs, ought one to denounce grand art in the forms in which it now exists — opera, tragedy and music — as the most deceitful of sinners? Not at all: for it would a hundred times prefer to dwell in the pure element of the quietness of morning and address itself to the expectant, wakeful, energetic soul. Let us be grateful to it that it has consented to live as it does rather than flee away: but let us also admit to ourselves that an age which shall one day bring back true festivals of joy and freedom will have no use for our art.

Why design research is the greatest

Philosophy

Why do I love design research? Two reasons:

  1. Design research often destroys existing knowledge and expertise,  creating new philosophical problems (as Wittgenstein elegantly defined it: “I don’t know my way about”). This is what I do.
  2. Design research produces social solidarity. When a team observes the same realities, reflects together, produces hypotheses and prototypes together and tests them together, and develops a “common sense” — the members of the team become friends in a uniquely substantial way. It is the exact opposite of loneliness.

Why should companies love design research? Two reasons:

  1. Problems that defy existing knowledge and expertise are the ones with the most innovation potential. Radically new problems produce the most radical, freshest-feeling innovations. Design research exposes these new expertise-resistant problems.
  2. The team alignment resulting from design research creates more cohesive, efficient and inspired teams.

 

The intolerable span

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

If something is lacking in an organization, the deficit rarely persists from simple unavailability of whatever is missing. More often the deficit is actively maintained, either from a direct allergy or an indirect displacement.

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People and organizations selectively include and exclude people, ideas, practices — this is how they preserve themselves as the being they are.

When something is introduced that cannot be simply subsumed or appended to what already is there — if a new entity requires deep change of political structure, of conceptual framing, of habits — the organization will repel that thing as a threat to its existence.

This is why organizational change is so hard. Organizations want to persist — to survive and grow and thrive in its own way, just like every individual biological organism wants to survive and grow and thrive.

And this is also how it is with individual souls. A soul knows in a wordlessly certain way that deep change is death. A soul can detect even the faintest trace of deep change in an idea.

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A soul can find many ways to excuse itself. We lead very busy lives. The more important I am, the busier I am, and the more brusque I am permitted to be. The important man is allowed more and more to fend off anything new. This is why the weak get smarter and the powerful become more… conservative.

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Of course, deep change is also ground-clearing for rebirth, but it is impossible to believe in such things: only faith suffices.

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If you think you know something that another person needs to know, please understand: there is probably a good reason this person does not yet know.

If you think you have a talent or skill some other organization needs but does not have, please understand: there is probably a good reason this organization does not have this capability.

And if you have discovered a disruptive insight, do not be fooled into believing that people will be grateful for it. Do not be fooled into thinking that it is mere aversion to risk that makes people resist. Do not be fooled by any functionalist explanation: the aversion is instinctive fear of death: dread.

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A bit from the book I am writing, The Ten-Thousand Everythings:

We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.

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Do you know it when you are confronting the dread of a truly new thing?

Do you know your way across the intolerable span?

Can you want to cross it?

3rd-place-mercury

 

Passenger

Philosophy

A person who is self-interested and unconcerned with what anyone thinks about it, will sometimes have a change of heart and become intensely other-interested.

Such a person believes he has experienced a conversion and has arrived at genuine concern for the other, when in fact he has taken only a baby-step.

A painful journey lies ahead.

The first leg of the journey is realizing that his change of heart and sacrifice of “self-interests” is mere preparation for a far greater sacrifice.

The second leg is wrestling with whether he is truly prepared to pay such a price. He had no idea what — and even less, who — was at stake.

In the third leg, he must calculate whether he even can afford to complete his journey once he has paid what turns out to be the fare. As he looks up from his tallying, he sees for the first time the reproachful glances of the other passengers who have paid their way.

In the fourth leg, he digs deep and pays up. Now he begins to move.

 

Another origin myth

Fables, myths & parables

What seemed to be the solid earth was surveyed, and it was discovered to be an island, and not a very large one. It was in fact a very tiny island. It bobbed and swayed and creaked. The thin planks under his feet had never been rock. And the planks were flimsy and began to dissolve. Soon his only support was the foamy film of the ocean’s surface. He flailed and grabbed at the sky and found clouds strangely substantial in his grip. He pulled and kicked and rose upward. But it wasn’t the clouds pulling him upward, it was the day itself. He was swimming into the sky in the clarity of azure. As the sun set, he continued to rise. Gold and purple, green and translucent twilight carried his body outward. But as stars appeared in the firmament and snowflakes sparkled on his skin, he felt the memory of weight and a welcome tug on his body; a descent and the touch of ground under his feet. The earth was there again, founded on an uninterrupted plain, solid, and permanent. And the people standing there beside him on the rock had never left, their feet were planted in this ground, and they had never been wrong.

Rethinking totalities

Hermeneutics

The problem with totalities is not that they are total — it is that totalities are so often reductive or aggressive.

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The worst totalities are excessively inclusionary and exclusionary at the same time: kill and eat it, or get far, far away from it. Fight or flight, and nothing in-between.

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Perhaps if we were to entertain totalities as subtotals, or treat horizons as something that can fall in a range between accidental and insubstantial artifact of standpoint and an impregnable wall we must faithfully tend and defend, we could enjoy some relative stability of identity with minimal aggression. Perhaps it is a matter of material — a permeable membrane or a transparent shell — or shape — a spiral or a circle with a mouth.

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But actually — more and more I resist conceptualizing understanding in terms of horizons. Horizons are seen, and entities are seen against horizons and put in perspective through a vision. This whole family of analogues promotes an ocular notion of knowledge.

Some knowledge is of things known at a distance, but much of knowledge is kinesthetic and/or participatory. As much as eye-awareness dominates hearing-awareness, both positively obliterate touch-awareness, scent- and taste-awareness, and these obliterated awarenesses are primary faculties in philosophy.

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Common sense was originally not “what everybody believes in common” but rather that sense of reality that arises from interpreting and synthesizing all sense data. The conflation of these two very different meanings into a single word is a symptom of deep philosophical naivety.

More symptomatic distortions: “materialism”, “idealism”, “realism”, “pragmatism”, “paradigm shift”, “experience”…

The mundane world has an uncanny appetite for words it cannot digest, a need to grip in its stumpy little fingers what is ungraspable. It can’t understand it, and it won’t understand it — yet, it cannot leave it alone. It’s like a young boy overwhelmed by his first crush…

He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to “show off” in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration. He kept up this grotesque foolishness for some time; but by-and-by, while he was in the midst of some dangerous gymnastic performances, he glanced aside and saw that the little girl was wending her way toward the house. Tom came up to the fence and leaned on it, grieving, and hoping she would tarry yet awhile longer. She halted a moment on the steps and then moved toward the door. Tom heaved a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. . . . He returned, now, and hung about the fence till nightfall, “showing off,” as before; but the girl never exhibited herself again, though Tom comforted himself a little with the hope that she had been near some window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions. Finally he strode home reluctantly, with his poor head full of visions.

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer