Emergencies are risky and costly and should not be declared frivolously.
When legitimate emergencies do happen, the heroes are not the hotheads who shriek first or loudest — the heroes are the ones who keep a cool head and maintain the ability to think clearly.
For all I know the innovation consultants are right that anybody can innovate.
But I will insist on adding one stipulation: anyone who really wants to can innovate.
“Really wants to” means wanting everything that goes with innovation — non-linearity, doubt, anxiety, ambiguity and profound disorientation.
Wanting all the conditions of innovation might be something not that many people can want, despite wanting to have the output.
Overcoming mistrust is very expensive.
I tell my clients that research designed to overcome skepticism can cost three to five times as much as research designed simply to inform.
A month of coins purchased what? An explanation for an inexplicable abhorrence left in the wake of defied expectation. A base motive is better than no motive.
*
Compare me to something and tell me what I am like.”
The first said to him, “You are like a just messenger.”
The second said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.”
The third said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.
*
“…Thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.
An image made this pale man pale.”
Over breakfast, an evaporating dream is fortified with a confabulated plot which displaces the dream’s truth, but makes the dream memorable.
*
Dreams are unintentional, undisciplined, unformed.
Sleeping, the mind is permitted to repose in native chaos and to proceed by accident — but chaos is as immemorable as a speech in a foreign language.
*
We remember words, images, forms. We remember by words, by images, by forms. If we do not form reality as it occurs, and derive forms from reality as it occurs — collaborate with reality to instaurate truth — reality escapes and vanishes and we must imagine truth like fiction authors, or lose ourselves to amnesia.
*
A life lived without intent, without discipline, and without articulation is in some ways is truer to life than one lived in the artifice of faith, routine and language. Reality is permitted to remain real: unprocessed experience.
But human nature abhors a vacuum. A self demands a history, an I, a future. It is of past-present-future that a self is made and it is by this that a self endures.
If one does not impose self on reality in the moment, it becomes necessary to do so later after the fact, after reality has receded into oblivion on a stream of babble — after reality has evaporated like a dream and is no longer present to represent itself.
Past is fictionalized. And since the future forms itself from past, future is also fictionalized. And consequentially, self is fictionalized.
*
Seeking self as an activity separated from trying to understand this world and the beings who inhabit it, is guaranteed to prolong the quest forever, and to deprive the search not only of any possible resolution, but of all sense.
People who think they must “find themselves” before they can move on to other questions, are guaranteeing that they will find neither, because the self is found by finding the world.
Toward alterity: eros, not altruism.
Permeable totalities, not infinity.
Finitude humble enough to fail at apotheosis, once again, forever.
“What can be counted is an instance of a category,” thought Midas.
And he reflected on gold, “Is it gold I really love? Or is it the quantity of gold that I have counted that makes my face glow with pleasure?
And he turned to look at his wife and asked, “Is this crazy woman inside my Queen the one I adore? Or do I love this one (1) I can count on to be my good wife, my good queen, the effective mother of my daughters?
“And how do I love her? Let me count the ways! And does not each way have a name and criteria by which it can be classified as that which it essentially is? Let me count the number of instances of each of the ways I love her!” exclaimed Midas.
“And is it my car I love? Or do I love driving? I love acceleration, speed, torque. My love for my car equals its best-of-breed specifications.”
“I used to love insatiably and helplessly, because I did not know how to eat. My mistake was I loving most what I could least digest: the inert permanence of gold.
“One cannot own what is not made one’s own flesh, and my mind’s flesh is idea. My mind makes things mine by knowing them. Counter, counting and counted are One.”
Midas touched his friends and family and made a social network with whom he could stay in touch with a stream of quick updates. Midas touched actions, and the actions became behaviors and the behaviors became patterns, performance and measurable value. Midas touched the school and all the students were scored, ranked, morally evaluated, and routed to appropriate facilities. Midas touched the appliances in his home to tap their informational juices so they could flow into his world of hard fact.
The world was his at last — all at his transfiguring fingertips.
And behind Midas’s glinting eyes, Plato smiled in his archetypal paradise where the mind is a place of its own, knowing heaven, hell, earth, man, woman, values, categories, instances, criteria, data.
The next time I hear someone call the U.S. healthcare system a joke, I will enjoy savoring the idea that perhaps this joke is being told at our great expense by a mythical comedian.
See if you think this joke is a funny one…
First, few people know that, until recently, the Caduceus of Hermes (what 90+% of Americans would call “the medical symbol”) had nothing to do with medicine. Since ancient times, the Western symbol of medicine has been the Rod of Asclepius — the staff carried by Asclepius, Greek god of medicine — which is a rod with a single serpent entwined around it resembling a U.S. dollar symbol.
The Caduceus only became “the medical symbol” in the early 20th century when it was confounded with the Rod of Asclepius by a U.S. Army Medical Corps officer.
Then note that Hermes is (among other things) the god of commerce. If you are cynical, you might also enjoy contemplating the fact that Hermes is also the god of thieves.
So, our medical symbol is actually the symbol of commerce. Our symbol of commerce is actually a symbol of medicine. We seem able to untangle neither these tangling symbols nor the tangled-up realities they represent, that of dollars and doctors…
Incidentally, Hermes is also a trickster god.
Good one, Hermes.
I am approaching a point where I will no longer be reasonable about unreasonableness.
The conditions for working with me: Adherence to the law of reason.
You do not have to believe me about anything in particular, but you do have to observe the Fivefold Laws of Reason.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats
*
In “The Second Coming” Yeats poses one of the great ethical riddles: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Who are the best and the worst? What defines them as best or worst? How does the question of best and worst connect with questions of belief and will?
What does it looks like when the best rediscovers its convictions?
My own attempts to resolve these questions have more and more revolved around reason. In fact, these attempts have traced a tightening spiraling question: what does it mean to be reasonable?
Below is a first attempt at an answer.
*
Reason is not elemental. It is essentially composite and essentially complete.
With reason, the closest approximation to reason is the furthest thing from reason: a facet removed from reason is not reasonable; but reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.
*
Reason is fivefold:
Reason is empirical. Reason begins and ends with concrete experience.
Reason is logical. Reason follows the rules of thought, for the sake of civility.
Reason is realist. Reason exists toward a world beyond the realm of knowledge.
Reason is experimental. Reason’s knowledge arises from interaction with reality.
Reason is supple. Reason is ready for surprise, because surprise is the mark of the real.
*
An isolated facet of reason is not reasonable.
Empiricism divorced from reason is impressionistic.
Logic divorced from reason is empty.
Realism divorced from reason is helpless.
Experiment divorced from reason is impulsive.
Suppleness divorced from reason is submissive.
*
Reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.
Reason without empiricism is delusive.
Reason without logic is arbitrary.
Reason without realism is solipsistic.
Reason without experiment is scholastic.
Reason without suppleness is stagnant.
Religions are born as freely-given gifts. They mature in gratitude toward the giver. They die as stolen gifts, snatched from the giver’s hand and stolen as a possession: a belief.
*
The giver is a mystery known only by way of receiving from who-knows-where. In the absence of this receiving the giver becomes nonsense.
Once belief is perfected and eternalized — permanently comprehended fact — religion is stillborn-again.
Dis-born, dis-conceived, erased from past and future, annihilated: fundamentalist.
To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.
*
“Reason? Why?”
Because it is reasonable.
“But that’s circular.”
It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.
*
Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.
*
Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.
Reading, I just came across a new, excellent word: anadyomenous. It is the characteristic of “coming up or emerging (especially of Aphrodite from the sea).”
A google search turned up exactly one example of the word in use, in the very book I am reading.
Why do I love design research?
First, I love new ideas. Performing design research early in a project generates fresher ideas. Yes, the ideas are better informed, but more importantly, they are better inspired. When we know something we are selectively filtering what seems irrelevant. But what is deemed relevant to any industry gets overcropped by experts and it loses its vitality.
Yet, it is to this expert-blessed depleted ground we go when we want to generate new ideas.
The real opportunities to innovate are hidden in plain sight as irrelevant stuff nobody thinks is important enough to talk about.
Just as importantly, new ideas are impossible to argue in the conventional way, relying on success of precedents. Newness always loses that kind of argument. But prototype arms (good) new ideas with evidence of viability and gives them a fighting chance.
Second, I love reason. We often think of intuition as a purely benevolent force. Think of all the names it goes by: inspiration, imagination, insight, idea. All great things begin with an intuition — and a heroic will to champion it and actualize it. But this neglects to notice that the most horrible things have resulted from malformed intuitions and tyrannical wills acting in the name of heroism — and these vastly outnumber the successes that have given intuition its good name.
And really, isn’t the essence of tyranny to have an intuition — an imagined thing, an alien inspiration, a spurious insight — imposed as a reality you must accept whether you believe it or not?
Reason is what allows intuitions to be accessed, assented to, internalized and shared. Reason is the ethic that feels an obligation to show, demonstrate, persuade and share ideas to anyone expected to treat them as real.
Reason is not just logic. Any horrible idea can be argued logically, and the logical structure is rarely what makes a horrible idea horrible.
Reason is not just adherence to what seems correct. All intuitions seem correct. What make ideas horrible is that they take their own self-evident correctness at face value and sees this as sufficient to require all others to treat the idea as fact, whether it is self-evident to them or not.
Reason means to establish truth socially through experiment. Where people will not submit to experiment — (because there’s an emergency, or there’s no time, or there’s no money, or there’s no point, etc., etc. etc.) — unreason is at work. Unreason is another name for tyrannical intuition.
Third, I love transcendent truth. That is, I love the kinds of truth that cannot even be imagined until the moment they appear. You cannot go out looking for any particular transcendent truth, because, by its very essence you cannot know what to look for. All you can do is create conditions where it can appear and to expect specifically the unexpected. When things feel constricted, played out, used up or settled, and you cannot imagine how anything new could possibly happen in your industry, your field or your organization — you are failing to factor in the innately surprising nature of transcendent truth. Again, what we know secondhand cannot produce transcendent truth: only de-filtered reality with some of its chaos permitted to shine through.
Fourth, I love dialogue. Dialogue is a very specific kind of conversation: one that allows groups (usually small ones of two or three) to gather in the name of reason, in contact with a reality, and in the urgent struggle to find-create-instaurate something new together, to experience transcendent truth, not only of the situation and its possibilities, but also of one another.
Last, and very much least, design research produces better products. I really like great products. There’s a lot of them, though. We are drowning in great products. What is rare — if we are honest with ourselves — is great work. So, the principle cultural value of good products is that they increase the urgency to make even better products, and the urgency can grow so enormous and so unavoidable that organizations will sometimes resort to doing design research to create them.
I’ve done work with research, and I’ve done work without it, and the difference is total. But you have to want that difference. Powerful people and complacent people rarely want it. But the world needs it.
Intersubjectivity is conducted through the medium of things.
*
I and You runs a circuit through It.
Are things otherwise?: I is short-circuiting, again.
An indicator of a closed circuit: intense heat.
*
Circuit – ORIGIN late Middle English: via Old French from Latin circuitus, from circuire, variant of circumire ‘go around,’ from circum ‘around’ + ire ‘go.’
(It is interesting to think of the circuit as primarily the movement, not the substance that enables the movement.)
*
Laurie Anderson’s “Closed Circuit”
Reality is radically heterogeneous: it is made out of materials, people, ideas, imagination, interactions, feelings, roles, habits, perspectives… whatever interacts to make a situation what it is — that is real.
Design works with heterogeneous materials in heterogeneous situations. Whatever reality is there, no matter what it is, it is considered part of a system to be modified.
Design accepts the entirety of reality as its medium and material.
We have to be who we are to be a participant in any relationship.
When it comes to relationships selflessness is as destructive as selfishness.
It is entirely a matter of knowing how to situate first-person-singular — I — within first-person-plural — We — and to allow a second person singular — You — to do the same.
This goes for relationship between people, but also for relationships between people and things.
To be selfless in creation — to set yourself aside to do what is called for — is to make trash. It is crucial to invest yourself in the things you make.
To be selfish in creation — to fail craft by not listen to the material — is to offend nature, including human nature, and gives artifice a bad name.
*
When we do design research we are not collecting bits of data that will speak for itself later if we suppress our subjectivity. Not only is this approach naive, it is unnatural, alienating and highly conducive to creating the projection it seeks to prevent.
To be good researchers we have to be there, in situ, listening, letting the present reality speak for itself while it is present, letting it teach us while it is there with us able to tutor us. We have to struggling to understand and to become fluent and articulate by seeing how the reality articulates itself. And we have to be changed by what we learn, from baffled outsider to fluent participant. It is our fluency that will guide our introduction of new elements into the situation, not the data we record, chop up into individual sentences, then categorize into labeled heaps.
What does the learning look like? Like a student struggling to understand, trying out different ways to grasp the material, making mistakes, accepting correction, trying again. Frustration, then light bulbs go off. Ideas erupt spontaneously. This is also what science looks like, not like white-coated gods standing above reality like objective eyes-in-the-sky.
To learn is a humble activity.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
To design — to “de-” apart + “-sign” t0 seal or mark…
— to set a thing apart and and assign it a significance…
— to define the boundaries of some reality, to extract it from the surrounding chaos and to let its reality stand in the foreground against a background, and to let it be for itself and for us…
— to separate parts within a whole, give them joints, in such a way that a sequential encounter of part-by-part allows the whole to emerge spontaneously like the meaning of a sentence emerges word-by-word without need of grammatical analysis — that is, to articulate in every sense of the word…
— to invite things to participate in human life, to embrace their inhumanity by allowing them to speak in the conversation of craft, to learn the full truth of their existence so they collaborate with us to embody a significance…
— to designify, assign designificance, apart and special.
It is good to design, and this is a good time to be a designer.
)O+
There’s a lot of painful lessons about love in this passage from Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. I used to want my daughters to read it, but really this is for the boys. The last conversation between Cosimo and Viola is excruciating.