All posts by anomalogue

Maturity

Ideas

Hubristic youth believes the world has been made needlessly complex, and that “I” alone, by some miracle (perhaps that same miracle that also placed me in the dead center of my own experience and not elsewhere?) have insight into to the simple heart of the matter…

Clearly this is an unstable state of affairs that is going to end one way or another. Most of the time it will eventually tip over into in its antithesis, a bitter-saccharine docility that accepts deportation to the outer regions of existence to play a far humbler role that’s become good enough for a new, much smaller, less central “me”.

There are other routes beyond of youth. There are better, far more desirable visions of maturity. But to have it, one must take alternate routes, and those routes are not highways (even when those highways are labeled “Alternative”).

Group interviews

Design

If you interview a group, do not make the mistake of thinking you are efficiently interviewing many individuals at once.

If you are interviewing a group you are interviewing a group. So make sure that the group you are interviewing represents a group who will be acting together in real life in whatever situation you are trying to learn about. Otherwise, you will interview the wrong group, even if it is made up of fragments of the right groups.

By the same principle, if you interview individual constituents of a group, do not make the mistake of thinking you will understand the group once you’ve interviewed each and every member. If you want to understand how a group thinks, you must interview the group.

(Obviously, I’m again using Buber’s distinction between social and interhuman.)

Living Alexander

Ideas

Christopher Alexander has been on my mind lately. My company just moved locations, and improved its environment a thousand-fold. Everywhere I look I see examples of densely interconnected living patterns, and it has exactly the effect on me Alexander describes. I feel more alive here.

Yesteday, entering the studio space it occurred to me how different it is to work with patterns when one is a participant in the effect of the pattern. With Alexander’s patterns, the self is always inside and an intrinsic participant in what is happening. This is entirely different from how design patterns are employed in an engineering context. The formal aspects are retained, but the kernel of the problem that moved Alexander is entirely absent. You could say the problem got flipped inside-out, and in the process was transformed from a uniquely existentialist approach to design to a far more mundane system for organizing puzzle-solving heuristics.

Two comments on Heidegger

Ideas

1) I am uncertain I am right about this, but [early] Heidegger appears to view death and demise as separate, but essentially linked in that both refer to the end of life. Whether he means “impossibility of Dasein” to refer primarily to something coinciding with biological death or simply emphasizes it, I think the emphasis is misplaced. Any deep change in Dasein’s orientation to being-in-the-world is a kind of death, and it is here that the religious conceptions of death-and-rebirth have their sense. Anxiety occurs whenever Dasein is faced with a future transformation that it cannot foresee with any degree of specificity, and the anxiety intensifies with the degree of impossibility of foresight. An impending religious rebirth is existentially equivalent to biological extinction.

2) Heidegger (appears to) see Dasein in strictly individualistic terms. I believe Dasein exists collectively, and that even an individual comprises a plurality of Daseins. And I believe what can be said of individual Dasein can be said of supra-individual Dasein. Most importantly collective Dasein can be authentic or inauthentic. Heidegger’s factical situation misled him to believe collectivity is essentially inauthentic, and therefore always “the They”. It might be that any Dasein will eventually discover a limit to the being in which it can participate, and all beyond that point it will encounter They, but I deny this boundary is necessarily that of the individual. Unfortunately, this denial is based entirely in faith, and not in experience. My personal experience confirms Heidegger’s views.

Both of these points have deep practical consequences for how I live in the mundane world, the hopes I hold for it, and my strategies for acting in it.

Art, engineering, design

Design

Without thinking about it, we tend to associate certain types of creative activities with certain media. We assume songs are created artistically, machines are engineered and brochures are designed.

This is not true at all. Not only are many supposed designs actually art — much of what is done in interaction design is a species of engineering. Entire genres of music have been designed (pop) or engineered (serial music). And some of what is thought of as pure engineering is actually art or design. (If German cars were only well-engineered, nobody would care about them.)

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Design is something beyond art and engineering. It is not a combination of the two, or even a higher synthesis.

Design involves a wholly different approach entirely outside of what happens in even the best art and the best engineering. Both art and engineering (and combinations of the two) can be done without reference to any other people than the creator and the creation. Design is always done in reference to third parties who are understood to perceive, conceive, feel and behave differently from the creator. A creator can attempt to design without direct involvement of users, but this means resorting to speculative design processes.

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If you are making a thing solely to please your own sensibility, you are making art.

If you are making a thing solely to function in some defined way, you are engineering.

If you are making a thing and involving the people who will be experiencing that thing and concerning yourself with their sensibilities and their functional needs, you are designing.

 

 

Want creativity for real?

Design

If you want creativity here’s what you really need:

  1. The right approach.
    Business approaches things in a way that’s good for many things, but generally not good for creativity. For one thing, everything’s decided in meetings, through explicit communication by words, numbers and images. Explicit communication will not produce creativity. For another, business loves step-by-step processes. When you say creative process, your average business person will think you’ve got some assembly line string of techniques by which a creation is built up bit by bit. Trying to do things this way guarantees sterility. Creativity requires a lot of pre-verbal (or even permanently non-verbal) intuitive leaps which though testable are not provable, and these leaps cannot be constructed, extracted, extruded or in any way fabricated, but only prepared for, stimulated, coaxed, encouraged — all highly un-macho approaches, which will drive the average exec nuts waiting, and will tempt him reach for the nearest convenient analytical tool to cut through the bullshit and dig out the golden egg.
  2. The right expectations.
    Let’s get this straight up front: Creativity is harrowing. It is non-linear, unpredictable, risky, and in practice often feels like shit. If your organization cannot handle this reality, you’ll have to compete with something other than meaningful differentiation — probably organizational effectiveness. That’s okay. A lot of companies find success that way. And like everyone, you’ll probably talk all about your revolutionary innovations and nobody’ll believe you, and you’ll do just fine. You’ll never be anything like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Virgin, etc., etc., though.
  3. The right team.
    It is taboo to say this, but it is totally true, and you know it. Most people are not creative. Not only are they uncreative, but they’re creativity poison, because they cannot stand the feeling of being exposed to creative processes and do everything in their power to make that feeling go away (because of all the unpleasant characteristics, listed in the point above). Putting the wrong people on a creative team will make creativity impossible. I don’t know why executives who pride themselves on their cold-eyed realism and their ability to make hard calls and all that go all mushy sentimental on this point, but it would profit them to get realer, meaner and tougher on this point and staff the kitchen with people who can take the heat. But no. Everyone’s packed right in, and people are running around sweating and bitching about getting singed on the burner, and that the raw eggs and the baking soda don’t taste like cake. It’s damn hard to get anything cooked.
  4. The right inputs.
    Many designers secretly or openly detest research. And they should. Because all most research does is tie a designer’s hands by telling them all the cool stuff they want to do won’t fly. It closes down possibilities. But if you were to give designers something that opens up possibilities by inspiring them to conceive totally new approaches they’d eat it right up, because that is what designers live for. The type of research finding that opens up possibilities is an insight. Few marketing/insights departments know how to provide insight, even though they believe that providing customer “insights” is their core competency. When they say “insights” what they mean is facts — information about customers — their stats, behaviors, needs, wants, attitudes, and what have you. Insights are not essentially factual, and they are often not even expressible in language at all. The best source of insights is actually exposure to concrete people, environments and situations, and the best expression of those insights are often not words, graphs, or even cool diagrams, or anything else you might expect to find in a report, but rather ideas on what might work for those people in those environments and situations. But when this happens there’s always some process prig lying in wait ready to tell them they’re “getting ahead of themselves” and that their ideas are premature. They’re wrong. These premature ideas are the expression of having an insight. Don’t get attached to the ideas, but do keep them, because they are raw insight ore that can be melted down, refined and articulated — or simply “gotten”.
  5. The right conditions.
    Creativity is not only ugly and temperamental, it is also needy and fragile. It needs protection, but protection of a kind that seems counter-intuitive. To protect creativity, you have to restrain yourself from protecting the participants from the painful effects. If a creative team is not struggling in the dark, suffering from intense anxiety, infighting, bickering, hating it, with no end in sight until the end is suddenly in sight, they’re not doing anything that will blow anyone’s mind. Let them suffer. But don’t add more pain. Don’t interrupt them with the chickenshit that you think is urgently important. Think of the creative team’s hell as a pressurized tank. Your interruption will puncture it and let out all the pressure and deflate what’s trying to happen. As if this weren’t already too much, there’s one more indulgence you should lavish on your ugly-ass creative process: provide decent space with room to draw, sit, stand, fight, walk comfortably, all with minimal outside stimuli. A rule of thumb: keep creative suffering pure of mundane contaminants.
  6. The right tests.
    The usual tests of validity of ideas in business cannot do justice to creative ideas: 1) demanding analytical justification for why something will work, and 2) submitting it to the semi-informed opinions of people sitting around in a conference room. This procedure is 95% certain to kill off ideas that would work and support crappy ideas that should never have seen the light of day. The only legitimate way to test a creative idea is to prototype it and put it in front of real live human beings. After a prototype test is done and the idea survives it or its suckiness is exposed… then arguments for and against that idea and how it tested can be made.
  7. The right support
    Creative ideas need support before, in the form of these all these items in this list. But also, you need people to make the ideas happen. To execute. Such people are called “executives”. If you throw responsibility on creatives to make execution happen, ideas will always be proved impractical, because execution is a talent of its own. That’s because creative vision and genius for execution are two entirely different talents that do not always coincide in the same personality. One of the great things about business is that we get to combine our talents in ways that cancel out our weaknesses and allow us to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible. A smarter division of labor based on more realistic psychology, that permits creatives to conceive visionary ideas and executives to execute and actualize them would produce far more brilliant results.

Splattering

Ideas

Epistemology interrogates answers; ontology interrogates questions.

Thoroughness of thought is epistemological; depth of thought is ontological.

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Thoroughness can be microscopic or telescopic: resolving into finer granularity of assertion or expanded topical breadth.

Depth asks of assertions “in what sense is it real?”

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Each accomplishment of thoroughness raises new questions. This requires listening for questions, which is different from looking for answers.

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When something hits a limit in depth, its expands in breadth. It splatters, pools up, soaks in, seeps out.

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We sometimes say “going into depth” when we mean becoming more and more thorough on the same plane of questioning.

#

Ideas

In 6th grade science class my teacher, Mr. Mason, demonstrated the space-filling property of liquids by slowly pouring a drum of water into an eight ounce tumbler. The water overflowed the cup, and he kept pouring. As the puddle spread across the floor, to our desks and around our feet, Mr. Mason imparted the insight: “See? This water wants to fill up this container, our room.”

Of course, Mr. Mason was, like we were, much more fascinated by the vandalistic act of dumping large quantities of water on a fine hardwood floor, but it did leave an impression.

But Mr. Mason was just warming up. The scientific revelations that came later in the year were far more mind-bendingly spectacular. In one memorable lecture, he explained to us the purpose of the mysteriously useless pound and asterisk buttons on touch-tone phones. In 1980 the only buttons that did anything were the numbers, and we always wondered what the other two were doing there. When Mr. Mason told us he knew what they were for, he had our attention. In the not-distant future, they would be used by the government to stun people. Agents would call criminals up, hit the pound key to freeze them in their seats, and capture them without having to shoot them.

A holy diary

Judaism

It would be really interesting if a religion kept a chronicle of its own development from its own current perspective, never modifying past entries, but constantly reflecting upon and reinterpreting the older perspective in terms of the latest one.

(Imagine a collective version of a child writing a continuous diary, starting from infancy, each session reading the story so far, then continuing it.)

The chronicle might start of as a purely mythical self-interpretation of a mythical existence. Then it might progress to a more institutionalized state and formally self-interpret its formalization, and so on all the way to its development into an pluralistic interpersonal religion, and offer pluralistic self-interpretations of its own pluralistic existence and its harmoniously divergent views on its past and future.

The only drawback to the experiment would be if some reckless Prometheus-type were to hand the work to wild readers from a more primitive stage of development. Would they even grasp it as a chronicle? They might see it as a catalogue of true factual assertions. They might misinterpret truths they’re unprepared to grasp, like children attempting but failing to make sense of the adult world.

A They

Judaism

I cannot help but think that Heidegger’s understanding of social being would have been radically different if he had participated in a society that understood fellow human beings as gateways to divine being, instead of in a Protestant Christian milieu (which holds that others are, at best, superfluous in one’s own personal relationship with God) and had developed to a point where National Socialism could dominate it.

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If you happen to believe other human beings are intrinsically part of one’s relationship to God you’ll consider the conditions for cultivating and preserving relationships sacred. You might occasionally go too far and idolize those conditions, but as long as the relationships are preserved it is possible to reawaken the spirit for the sake of which they are upheld.

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My experience of social being is exactly like Heidegger’s.

However, I interpret the experience differently. I’d call it a “deficient mode” of inhabiting a culture. Heidegger’s existentiell relationship with his culture distorted his understanding of everyday Dasein — and consequently of Dasein.

Canny vs uncanny

Etymology

Uncanny – 1590s, “mischievous;” 1773 in the sense of “associated with the supernatural,” originally Scottish and northern English, from un– (1) “not” + canny.

Canny – 1630s, Scottish and northern England formation from can (v.) in its sense of “know how to;” lit. “knowing,” hence, “careful.” Often used superciliously of Scots by their southern neighbors, implying “thrift and an eye to the main chance.”

(From the Online Etymology Dictionary.)

The Oxford dictionary defines canny as “having or showing shrewdness and good judgment, especially in money or business matters” and Scottish & Northern English “pleasant; nice: ‘she’s a canny lass.'”

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I nominate uncanny/canny for the office of Most Fundamental Ontological Category. The canny represents the principle of savvy niceness; the uncanny, occult weirdness.

Heidegger’s Te

Ideas

From Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction:

“A few days before his death, Heidegger penned a motto for his collected edition: “Ways, not works”. He explained this motto in some notes for a preface:

The collected edition should indicate various ways: it is underway in the field of paths of the self-transforming asking of the many-sided question of Being … The point is to awaken the confrontation about the question concerning the topic of thinking … and not to communicate the opinion of the author, and not to characterize the standpoint of the writer, and not to fit it into the series of other historically determinable philosophical standpoints. Of course, such a thing is always possible, especially in the information age, but for preparing the questioning access to the topic of thinking, it is completely useless.”

I also found out from Polt’s book that Heidegger worked on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, which makes perfect sense, especially when you consider what Martin Buber had to say about Taoism.

Returning to Being and Time

Ideas

I’ve made it through Division 1 of Being and Time. This is my first rereading of this book since 2006. It strange to return to this book because these ideas — especially the ethical themes — connect to memories from the time, almost like music or distinctive scents. Except with philosophy, what is recalled is a perspective — which is precisely what in memory is absent, supplanted by our present perspective, which re-orders past events into the perpetually arrogant “only now do I really understand” of the present mind. What rereading philosophy recalls is the meaning of a time along with its images and facts — and allows a self to return and to justify itself to the self it has become.

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Philosophy has been called the queen of the sciences. It is also the queen of the arts.