In college I split the things I cared about into two categories:
Being a young rationalist, I sided against my loves, for things of which I approved.
This lasted into my mid-30s. Starting on my 34th birthday, under the influence of Nietzsche I switched allegiances to what I loved.
Now I am back again, though in a less severely dichotomous form.
I still love Nietzsche, but my allegiance is with John Dewey.
This is a redrawing of a diagram I played with in 2009. It is meant to show the relationship of making and understanding and how it weaves between thinking top-down in wholes, and then bottom-up in terms of parts. It was originally inspired by learning (from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism) that the hermeneutical circle was based on a model from rhetoric theory.
Design systematizes both inter-subjective and objective components, where engineering systematizes non-subjective components.
(This is the latest version of an iterating thought.)
The free market is at least partially redeemed by the emergence and development of brand positioning. Brand positioning is strategic pluralism.
What is the pragmatic “cash value” of a person’s moral vision? I propose this: Where is that person motivated or resistant to experiment, at what cost and at what risk?
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Where: What possibilities of reality does the experimenter wish to investigate and bring to light? These possibilities can range from definite hypotheses or questions to indefinite intuitions of potential.
Cost: How much does the experimenter propose to invest or save, and who pays for doing the experiment and who pays for not doing it?
Risk: What level of unpredictability is the experimenter ready to tolerate?
“Having no use” for something has less to do with that thing’s uselessness than the quality of one’s own understanding and hopes. To the extent one understands, everything may be relevant, and to the degree one hopes everything may be problematic.
As we realize that everything, every thing and everyone is potentially relevant and problematic we lose the capacity for violence — and for this reason understanding and hope should be tempered by humility. We are all living things, after all, and we must eat, defend ourselves, and fight for what matters to us. To deny this fact completely is hubris, but to surrender to this fact is base.
To aspire to humanity is to live suspended.
This ought to be useful: Special thanks to my good friend, caffeine.
From the classic animated short Ah, L’Amour.
One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ ” I love it for two reasons. First, it shows how philosophy is not an archaic style of theoretical speculation that has been supplanted by science. Philosophy is a perpetual discovery of new scientific turf. Philosophy pioneers what science settles and builds up.
But the other thing I love about the quote is it shows where philosophy can fit into the practical activities of everyday life. If you can’t intellectually move about in a problem space, you can’t work consciously and methodically. But what is innovation than looking for these areas? To extend my pioneering metaphor, in any exploration of innovative possibilities, philosophers ought to be brought along as guides to help navigate and map the territory.
What could be more passe than to define Design Thinking now — now that it has been over-hyped, described in a million ways, implemented very glamorously and expensively, found to not live up to the hype and finally publicly declared dead?
Nonetheless, Design Thinking ought to be defined, as crisply as possible, because it is a real thing with a precise meaning, and knowing its precise meaning is required to approach it in the right way and get those promised results. Without this precision, Design Thinking is really little more than an appearance of systematic creative activity, a style of carrying on, and unwarranted hopes.
So here’s my definition. Design Thinking is an approach to solving problems that involve hybrid systems composed of both objective and subjective elements. By objective elements I mean entities that exist “out there”, as physical objects, virtual objects, environments, services, and anything else a person can encounter in the world. And by subjective elements I mean ideas, thoughts, emotions, decisions, perceptions — all those things a person experiences “in here”.
In its inclusion of subjective elements in its problem definitions, design distinguishes itself from engineering, which treats only systems composed of objective elements.
The 20th Century was obsessed with the creative possibilities of cleansing problems of subjective elements. And in many areas, especially in the physical sciences and the technologies based on the physical sciences, this was the key to progress. However, this systematic elimination of subjectivity was misunderstood by many to be one of the key principles of scientific method. A scientific approach to anything involving human beings meant treating human beings strictly as objective entities (behaving objects) and removing the messier and more arbitrary elements of human experience — subjectivity.
In fact, the scientific method does not necessitate the objectification of problems except in instances where the phenomenon to be understood is itself purely objective. What scientific method requires is clarification of the problem, inclusion of all relevant factors in exploring the problem. So to understand a social problem scientifically, it is necessary to include not only the objective factors at play but also the subjective ones. This, of course is what the social sciences do in a variety of different ways.
So, another way to grasp what Design Thinking is is to make an analogy between engineering and the physical sciences. To some extent, you can engineer by instinct referring explicitly to theories from physics or drawing on science to test the adequacy of your engineering solution. Or you can harness scientific knowledge, use your instincts to come up with crazy possible approaches to try out, and then test them to make sure they actually work. The exact same thing goes for design, except where engineering uses the physical sciences, design thinking uses the knowledge and methods of the social sciences.
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Some analogies:
Design thinking is to the social sciences what engineering is to the physical sciences.
Design thinking is to agency “creative” as engineering is to tinkering.
To understand another person try understanding how he understands other people. Who are other people to him?
We are not only who others think we are; perhaps even more we are who we think others are.
To the degree an individual participates in the life of a group, the behavior tends to be formatted according to conventions of speech, concept and procedure. One uses the vocabulary, ideas and behaviors easily understood and accepted by the majority of group members, in order to gain influence within the pace and formatting of group work. To stray outside of the commonalities of the group is to risk frustrating or alienating some members of the group and consequently losing their support, or to slow the pace of the activity and interfere with meeting goals, or to fragment the group into conflicting factions, or to require too much effort or time to understand and risk being interrupted, ignored or otherwise silenced.
With some individuals things can be different — if the individuals do not insist on enforcement of group conventions.
Once again, this connects with Buber’s distinction between “the social” and “the interhuman”.
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Deep innovation and novel syntheses require new procedures for conceiving and evaluating thoughts, new language to express new thoughts (and to distinguish the new thoughts from older, more familiar ones), a willingness to wrestle with frustrations, unclarity and dead-ends — in other words, it runs counter to everything that makes groups function effectively. This is why innovations tend to be hatched by individuals and why “group-think” has such bad connotations. However, groups outfitted with new conventions — perhaps in workshop settings or in semi-permanent collectives governed by new codes, processes or cultural values — might produce results impossible in other conditions. (A way to see it is that a workshop or a department or team can be socially programmed to produce different results.) But the novel results achieved are still different in kind from the more flexible conditions of individual or small group work.
“Why” is not logical; every “why” is a logic.
Until a person’s why-logic is understood that person’s beliefs, behaviors and feelings will seem illogical.
The grasping of a why-logic and the consequent grokking of a world via that why-logic is insight, in the most precise sense of the word.
It is an unfortunate habit of speech that has us say “insight into” another person. We should say we have “insight out from” a person.
I saw a quote last week that said something like “Nothing happens according to plan — but nothing happens without a plan.” I can’t remember the source.
Watching an occurrence is one kind of observation. Seeing a pattern is another. However, it is rare to find either observation in anything approaching pure form. When we observe an occurrence, often what we are most witnessing is the repetition of a pattern — and little else. And when we see a pattern, we imagine an event or two that lends sense to what repeats — but more vaguely than we suspect.
To watch an occurrence without the guidance of a pattern is disorienting. We don’t know what to make of it. But, conversely, to hear description of patterns of occurrences of which we lack real-life experience and cannot imagine is also disorienting, and we don’t know what to make of that either.
In the former case we are lost in the concrete and in the latter case we are lost in the abstract.
But something peculiarly meta happens when we get lost in the abstract: Being lost in the abstract it is also being lost in the concrete. An occurrence of explanation (of some unfamiliar thing) is happening before us in a conversation or on the pages of a book, and we do not know what is going on, and so we do not know what to make of it. (If you are having trouble recollecting a situation where this has happened to you, and it is preventing you from understanding what the hell I am talking about here, right now — well, now you have your example.) In these situations it is possible to master the mode of explanation (as a language game) without gaining familiarity with the reality to which the explanation refers…
Perhaps the vast share of our knowledge is of this second-degree concrete/abstract variety.
I saw a quote recently that said something like “Nothing goes according to plan, but nothing happens without a plan.” I can’t find it, now.
No marginal status of any kind automatically bestows deeper knowledge. Only an urgent need to understand, followed by active pursuit of understanding yields such knowledge.
What is different about my opinions? Why the difference? How does the difference arise and manifest? How do I bridge the difference with others? How do others suppress my difference, and how do I resist or overcome this? How do I know when I am suppressing the difference of another? How does this dynamic work in general? What are the ethical implications? Why would any person who does not have to ever want to embrace an ethic of respect of the marginal? Can I count on my own loyalty to this ethic if I it carries me to a position of dominance? Should I remain loyal to it…?
Any person who stops trying to understand others and otherness through reflective practice, not as a solitary meditation is going to dwindle in insight, and as the blessed anxiety subsides comforting clarity floods the knowing subject with the blessings of faith: confidence, determination and uncanny charisma.
I lack capacity to how I am not right, therefore I am right.
I have good reason to disregard what my enemies say to me.
Everyone agrees with me on this — everyone who matters.
Know how to form grounded innovative hypotheses.
Know how to craft the cheapest, fastest and most informative experiments.
Know how to find and use perplexities.
Know how to think through and design out new logics from new perspectives.
Know how to observe, learn and respond across a range of developmental stages: from the broadest and fuzziest to the minutest and most precise.
Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.
Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.
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When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.
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Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.
I acknowledge only voluntary political identities, and I condemn all involuntary identifications.
Every individual American has the right to make political alliances according to his or her own ideals, and it is on this alone the individual should be judged.
If the political body you’ve chosen to join and identify with imposes political identities on other groups defined by race, sex, class, orientation, or any other non-voluntary classification, for any reason no matter what the justification (including imputed capacities or incapacities, genes, essences, spirits, lineages, legacies, texts, behavioral probabilities, etc.) politically you are not my friend. I don’t care which direction your racism or sexism or chauvinism or xenophobia points, or why you point it in that direction. The problem is not the target — it is the targeting.
I’m prepared to be politically isolated and to suffer the consequences for refusing to treat enemies who resemble me in irrelevant ways as natural allies. I have only artificial allies: people who collaborate with their own natures to overcome mere nature to become super-natural, and who affirm other’s attempts to do the same.
In his instant-classic The Lean Startup, Eric Ries restores some crucial components of the Scientific Method to innovation processes, long-neglected by “scientific” management. Among his most important restorations is the the experimental practices that are the heart of scientific discovery. This is enormously important: without experiment, the creative dimension of science is lost and “scientific rigor” of quantification becomes an expensive, time-consuming and intrinsically conservative hindrance to doing anything unprecedented.
However, I do not believe that Ries has restored the entirety of the Scientific Method, and for the sake of setting up an unimpeded engineering-dominated process, has omitted or de-emphasized key non-engineering components that improve outcomes and shorten timelines. Here is a partial list of omissions:
I’m going to read as much as I can about Scientific Method and develop this thought further and support it with some research. But I’ve been sitting on this idea too long, and I wanted to at least sketch it out.