Category Archives: Design

Ward Farnsworth

Design, Ideas

I learned of Ward Farnsworth reading his book on Socratic method. I knew nothing about him, but his delivery was so striking I found myself asking “Wow! — who is this person?” So I started digging around. It turns out he has written extensively on style, rhetoric and argumentation. And philosophy. And law. And chess. And soon, Latin.

What I admire most about his writing is how every word overflows with respect for the free judgment of his audience. This respect is conveyed not only in the content, but through his use of language. It is palpable in how he addresses you as a reader, and you feel it before you comprehend it: the choice to accept or reject is your own.

I believe this is not only talent or know-how, but the fruits of a life shaped by persuading juries, judges and negotiation partners.

Ward Farnsworth is a genius of liberal virtues.

I want these liberal virtues for myself. They cannot be faked. I have work to do.

I learned of Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” from Peter Sloterdijk:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Instauratio ex nihilo

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

When I first learned the word “instauration” from Latour’s magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, I was thunderstruck. Latour described precisely how it is to find the kinds of truth we discover-create in design research.

But now, I am thunderstruck all over again, recognizing that the creation and revelation essential to Beriah is sublime instauratio ex nihilo.

Desperate philosophizing

Biography, Design, Existentialism, Trefoil

Nietzsche is not the What of his thought. He is the How of his thinking, and his How opens up a blinding flood of Why.

For What-bound epistemological souls thinking is pure What. For them only How if it is “how do you know whether what you claim is true? How do you infer it, argue it, prove it to be true?”

But if you allow a Why with a How to show us new What… they converge into Who. “Who is this, and now — Who am I?”

What originally forced me into religious modes of thought was a total inability to answer people’s questions about What Nietzsche thought. I couldn’t answer, as asked, perfectly reasonable questions. But I had a How ready if a need for Nietzschean thinking arose. That How knew how to respond to the need for understanding or intelligent action.

Sadly, 90% of my knowing is still like this. I know how to respond to all kinds of design problems. Explaining what I will do ahead of time draws on a completely different kind of knowledge that is only tangentially related.

It is easier for everyone — both them and me — if people just learn by participating.

I have a slide I show clients.

I usually say something like, “If someone tried to explain Monopoly to you by reading you the rulebook, you would feel complete overwhelmed and you wouldn’t want to play. But if you just jump in and try to get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun, and soon the rules start making sense.”

Tragically, the more important design gets — the more expensive the project and the more executive scrutiny it gets — the more no one lets you do it until you explain ahead of time exactly how it will be done.

They all think this is being thorough and thinking things through. They think it is being thoughtful.

Fact is, this very process of verbally modeling it and explaining it out with words falsifies and complicates what happens in design. It prevents design from doing anything ordinary executive cranial labor can’t do. The whole reduction of reality to what can be said explicitly (and briefly) and measured is what makes executive turn whatever they touch into sterile, empty, corporate soullessness.

This is the misery of my life. This misery drove me to Nietzsche.

My experience with Nietzsche is what allowed me to understand McLuhan.

The crippling despair I experienced in the wee years of the new millennium — just before my encounter with Nietzsche — was entirely tied up with the need to explicitly communicate things I only knew deeply through intuition — and the terrible consequences I suffered if I was unable to explicitly communicate.

Because what happens every time is the same: I get forced to work in ways that alienate my intuition from the work, which makes the work impossible, and deeply depressing to execute.

But here is one consolation: If you can at least account for that pain — if you can point at it and talk about what is happening very clearly — 61.803398875% of the pain just… evaporates.

Perplexities are hellish enough. But if the very fact of a perplexity also perplexes you, now you are exponentially perplexed, and the angst is exponentially painful.

I never would have spent a minute thinking about any of these things, had I not been forced to.

I thought out these ideas out of sheer existential necessity. They were never interests of mine. (Or at least they didn’t start off as interests.) They’re also not things I gravitated to because I was good at them, or thought I could make a living from writing teaching, blogging, podcasting or youtubing about it.

I thought about them because I would die of despair if I didn’t figure them out.

This is why I scorn trifling souls who frolic about in philosophical content, who consume other people’s idea and see nothing but delightful play in philosophy, and who deny the role of pain in creativity-revelation.

My pain, fear and angst has been my best muse, and so I always find myself blessing my fate, even as I curse it.

I am going to make something very pretty from all this hell.

Confessions of a material misogynist

Biography, Design, Kabbalah, Letterpress

As a kid, I was a bad painter.

While painting, whenever a brush stroke offered me something interesting or beautiful to me, I would be slightly offended, because I hadn’t envisioned and ordered it myself, and then I’d go in and try to make it my own, snuff out whatever had been coming to life with my explicating brush. In Gen-X playground parlance, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”

And that, precisely, was what made my paintings bad and boring and dead to the eye. Good painting is precisely collaboration with the paint’s own ideas. It is a dance of activity and receptivity and reciprocity.

Each medium has its own optimal center of gravity, which is the heart of its own craft — what draws an artist to work in that medium, rather than in another.

So, I was much better suited to pen and ink. I listened better to what ink images suggested to me — maybe because those images emerged from materials more obedient to my hand’s will. These suggestions came from something that felt under my control. Paint defied control, and I was too materially misogynist to accept that kind of resistance. I wanted a nice submissive material, not a raging mood-swinging lunatic with a headful of intuitions of who-knows-what ambushing (ambrushing) me with her visions.

(Damn. Maybe I should try painting again!)

But all this is preface to another idea.

The same thing can happen with ideas — especially symbolic ideas with visual origins.

It is entirely possible to “have” thoughts with their own agency — ideas who can collaborate with you, or who might refuse to collaborate — or who can haunt, mock or reject you. Visually inspired ideas can sit, silently watching, waiting for you to wake up.

There is still the bad painter’s impulse in me. Something intellectually misogynistic in me wants to control my more autonomous ideas with explication — to hold them until they are clearly, explicitly understood — to not stop short at poetic opacity.

But is poetry really opaque? Maybe poetry is unclear because instead of transmitting ideas, or reflecting them, they emit living light of their their own. Poetic speech is autonomous speech.

I feel that this strange dialectic Sefirot I drew is trying to tell me all this.

She started out with someone else, but with me, she started intimating new truths.

I think I will print this new Sefirot.

The plate arrives today.

Some quotes I’ve quoted before:

Bob Dylan:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
But there are no truths outside
The gates of Eden

Nietzsche:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.

Latour, a good Mary-adoring Catholic boy:

We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing?

Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

Nietzsche, again:

Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices — you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!

A last sad reflection on the professional work I am trying to do.

I too love to play with materials, and they are some very strange materials.

The materials I love are perplexities — that soul-wracking migraine liminality, hovering like a heat mirage on the outer edges of intelligibility.

Organizational conflict, chaos, anomie, dysfunction generate collective perplexity. So this is where I go.

My job — though nobody knows it, or even knows how to know it — is to air-drop into perplexed organizations, figure out the lay of the land, waters, forests, and navigate my way out by finding new ways to understand — all the while mapping what I find.

Meanwhile, I am dodging both hostile and friendly fire. I am shouted at: “Show us where you are going! You are supposed to be an expert, so where is your map? What is your route? Show your turn by turn directions!”

Some clients figure it out, and become travel companions.

Some refuse to come along until you’ve shown them what can only be shown when the work has been done.

Some frag you in some muddy ditch somewhere on the edge of a frozen forest. “You are drawing a map as you navigate in places you don’t even know. Not only do you not have the answers, or a solution — you don’t even have questions. You don’t even know the problem!”

ack ack ack ack

One last quote, perhaps my most overquoted quote of all, Wittgenstein’s definition of a philosophical problem:

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

You cannot say this, so I do say it to anyone with ears that hear.

My life sucks, and it is glorious.

Letterpress design wisdom

Design, Letterpress

I’m adding this to my backlog of useful design wisdom to letterpress.

“Conflict divides the world into four halves.”

The current backlog also includes:

  • “Nothing happens without a plan. Nothing happens according to plan.”
  • “What has a name is real.”
  • “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

I may also want to do a Useful / Usable / Desirable venn diagram.

I’ve already printed two pieces in the series.

And

Whyness, Whatness and Howness

Design, Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams, Trefoil

Intellection gives us supraformal absolute truth (of Beriah) toward/from the Absolute (of Atzilut) to which objectivity-forming subjects (Yetzirah) and objective truths (Assiyah) can be more or less faithful.

Of course, subjects can also be more or less faithful to material reality, and this determines their scope and degree of practical effectiveness.

The modern era has maximized the scope and degree of practical effectiveness in material reality. Its scope is maximized to total universality, and its degree of effectiveness is maximized to total control. It has traded off all considerations of intellection, to such a degree that few are aware of intellection as a possibility of knowing.

Even fewer actualize their intellective mode of knowing.

Fewer still coordinate intellective and rational knowing.

Fewest of all coordinate intellective, rational and practical knowing.

Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Intuiting-what knows what of is, knows what of can, knows what of ought.

Intuiting-how does how of can, does how of ought, does how of is.

Intuiting-why cares why of ought, cares why of is, cares why of can.

Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

Intuiting-what grounds fact, method and ideal, and without it, there is perplexity.

Intuiting-how grounds ability, grace and technique, and without it, there is faltering.

Intuiting-why grounds value, taste and purpose, and without it, there is indifference.

Every vital culture must converge Whyness, Whatness and Howness in its collective being. If it fails to do so, each member of its culture will suffer confused perplexity, ineffective faltering or depressed indifference. Or the culture will fragment into factions who maximize one or two and sacrifice the third.

Design at its best is a method for converging Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Unlike many professions it is not a collection of techniques (What-How) methodically deployed to achieve defined goals. Design discovers its goals as it works, and its most important goals are given to intellection as the Why of the work.

Christopher Costes is right: Design is the heir of magic.

Perplexity lifeguard

Biography, Design, Philosophy

Overcoming painful perplexities is one of the most rewarding parts of my work as a strategic designer.

Perplexity is incapacity to understand a difficulty, so thorough that the difficulty cannot even be expressed negatively as a problem or question. As I’ve said millions of times over the last thirty years, perplexities induce intense mysterious anxiety in people. It is not “discomfort” with “ambiguity”. It is excruciating and disturbing, and it makes people behave atrociously.

If we are to believe Wittgenstein, perplexities are essentially philosophical problems: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”

But the majority of people are unphilosophical. They lack all awareness of the existence of the phenomenon of perplexity and the language to recognize and diagnose it — much less methods, skills and mindset required to overcome perplexity.

And people are not merely unphilosophical. They are aggressively unphilosophical. Philosophical thought annoys people. It is socially acceptable to disrespect it and anyone who does it. Even open-minded “good listeners” stop listening and tune out if they detect philosophy in a line of thought. And if you press it further, the resistance presses back even harder. The trajectory is very much hemlockward.

Here is the problem: one of the horrors of my job is the everpresent risk of being trapped in a collective perplexity with collaborators who are unwilling to confront and grapple with it for what it is. In such situations, one is a participant in an emergent collective being who transcends each individual person. Each person is immersed in the pain that has gripped the group, but is entirely powerless to overcome it alone.

Overcoming the perplexity requires a concerted and coordinated effort.

But many perplexed people behave like drowning swimmers. Instead of cooperating with the lifeguard’s attempt to rescue them, they instead try to climb over the lifeguard’s body to get oxygen. This is why most of lifeguard training is learning break-holds. Often a lifeguard must subdue a drowning person in order to rescue them. If the drowning person gets control of the lifeguard, everyone drowns.

Perplexed people who lack awareness of perplexity instinctively flail and grope for whatever control over the situation they can get, but whatever control they exert only defers and amplifies the confusion and anxiety. Instead of finding a better way to conceptualize the difficulty so it can be framed as a problem, people desperately try to ignore or bypass the perplexity or bludgeon it with mismatched techniques and expertise — and everyone drowns together.

Being is scalar.

Collective being is just as real as individual being.

Collective beings can be perplexed.

Collective beings can also be depressed, anxious, delusional and psychotic.

Entire classes and societies can go mad. Nietzsche said it: “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Leadership differs from management in that management treats only systematized parts of organizational life. Leadership participates in the collective being of an organization, addressing its personhood from within — as a part.

I would dearly love to work at an organization that would acknowledge and value my philosophical work. My best work is unappreciated, unsupported, unacknowledged and uncompensated at best. If I speak about what I do and how I think about it, the best I can expect is tolerance, but the usual response is vapid or jocular dismissal and disrespect. “There he goes again.”

Nothing, however, is more respectable and more valuable. I know this even if nobody else does.

This whole age is convulsed in perplexity. People will fight wars before confronting and resolving a perplexity.

Against red oil

Design, Politics

I caffeine-ranted at Susan this morning.

I complained about how much the work-world goes on about the importance of passion, while ignoring the personal nature of passion. It behaves as if it is a moral duty of every employee to care on command, and that it is the duty of every leader to get employees to care, or, failing that, to put on a convincing performance of caring, or failing that, to weed out those who are unwilling or unable to care or pretend to care.

And education reinforces this cultural delusion by insistently assuming that every child has exactly the same potential to be the same exceptional student, equally great at everything and passionate about whatever someone needs them to passionate about. Every child has the same potential as every other to be the same conveniently effective and efficient human resource, quantifiable as a man-hour in a man-week within a man-year. If only the world were more just, managers would have a more uniform supply of talent to utilize. Human work could be more like electricity or plumbing instead of delivered in the painfully inconvenient form of a human being.

The “social justice” of K-12 edu-activists and managerial convenience are the twin convergent goals of education, in direct service to the corporate world, which is insatiable for a supply of human resources of maximum amorphic convenience. Oil is “black gold” — human resources are red oil.

I like to think of service design as reasserting personal specificity.

The premise of service design (as I practice it) is that each person lives to provide specific kinds of services. These services give that person a sense of purpose in life, and rather than consuming their energy and making them feel depleted, used and exhausted, the work taps into inner energies. Other services, however, feel onerous or meaningless, and they prefer to receive these services from others.

In other words, people are more like organs with specialized abilities and needs than as generic plastic materials which can be formed into whatever shape is required. A corporation (etymologically, this means “body”) is an organ-ization, a system of organs arranged to exchange services and co-operate as a living being.

The core mission of service design is to understand the ideal service exchange of each personal “organ” and to organize them into something organic and effective within a service-exchanging ecosystem.

Education should complement this mission by helping each student understand their own organic ideal — the service exchange embedded in their being.

Resolving perplexity is the work

Biography, Design

Resolving perplexities is the most important work designers do.

Resolving perplexities is not a precondition to doing the work. Resolving perplexities is the work. Again, it is the most important work.

Attempting to ignore perplexities never makes them go away. It makes the work impossible and hellish — and the perplexities compound exponentially as they go unresolved.

Anyone who cannot tolerate perplexities is unfit for strategic design work.

Dollars-for-drugery

Design

A healthy organization is not primarily fueled by money. The same is true of a healthy economy. To the degree an economy runs exclusively on money, it is an unhappy, unwholesome economy.

This is not meant to suggest that money is not important. Money helps provide artificial motivation when organic and intrinsic motivations are insufficient to make action happen. Organic and intrinsic motivations include things like inspiration, curiosity, enjoyment of skillful action, camaraderie, reciprocity in mutual generosity, desire to help, sense of duty, habit, momentum, friendly competition, joy of progress, satisfaction of reaching goals, etc. It is the motivations of play.

Think of money like promises in a marriage. Promises are absolutely necessary to keep a marriage alive, but if a marriage is nothing but forcing oneself to fulfill promises — to do things one would very much prefer not to do — after a point, that marriage is in trouble.

But when most or all of the motivation in an organization comes from money, the organization can be said to run on artificial motivation. Too much of this, and an organization will begin to feel artificial, in the pejorative sense of “unnatural”. That icky, lifeless, meaningless, unlovable feeling we call “corporate” is the result of an organization relying on money to generate service. A corporation can hire professional meaning-makers — “creatives” — to apply a veneer of meaning, play or style to the outer surface of such an organization, but such attempts are skin deep and fool nobody.

A dollars-for-drudgery organization will feel dry, boring and neutral at best. At worst it will feel false, soulless, coercive, manipulative and threatening to anyone with an intact spirit.

The essential purpose of service design is to understand how to organize people with needs to give specific kinds of value and needs to receive specific kinds of value so that they can exchange value with one another in mutually beneficial ways. This kind of organization allows organizations to reduce their dependence on motivation by money to keep things running. Service design aspires to social orders animated by rich, dense, diverse value exchanges of function, meaning and belonging, substantiated by carefully formed material and nonmaterial artifacts.

The goal is to create living organizations that thrive through natural, organic intrinsic motivations, as opposed so socially engineered mechanisms that run on money and which are controlled by afar through monitoring and driven by greed for rewards and fear of punishments.

In this money-driven economy it is easy to use designers to find new ingenious ways to improve the social engineering of institutions. The modern designer’s skillset can certainly be harnessed to creating management systems of control and monitoring. But designers rarely enter the field of design to amass money, otherwise they would pursue something more lucrative, like management or engineering. And the value exchange in such an application of their skill will not work out for a designer who is a designer from the heart.

Knowing the absence of knowing

Biography, Design, Judaism, Philosophy

I get excited when I meet service designers who entered the discipline from practical need.

Such service designers encountered some problem or set of problems they recognized as beyond the reach of their own methodology.

This is much harder than it sounds: The adage “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is profoundly true. To see beyond the expert’s disciplinary scotomas requires a poet’s originary eye.

These people recognized that they not only lacked the tools and methods to solve a kind of problem they faced, they lacked concepts and language for defining and communicating them. Despite this  conceptual chaos known as perplexity they searched out ideas, vocabulary, methods, tools and logics until they found them in service design.

There are many fine service designers out there who were drawn to service design in undergraduate school. They were presented with an array of career options and for various reasons — interest, ability and opportunity — chose service design.

But having that before-and-after experience of a real-life practical perplexity resolved into a defined, solvable problem leaves a permanent trace in a practitioner — an appreciation that is lacking in people who learned to see both the solution and the problem before they ever struggled without either.

The same is true of human-centered design in general. HCD was not always here to learn and use. It only became self-evident and inevitable only after it was, through arduous work, instaurated as a discipline. HCD was a hard-won accomplishment. People who have been trained in HCD methodologies sometimes speak knowingly about the many methods they have learned and could learn, but this knowingness betrays an obliviousness to the blind chaos and nothingness from which these methods emerged. They cannot imagine looking at a design problem and seeing only an engineering, marketing and technical writing problem. They can’t see how Don Norman did anything terribly impressive, and so perhaps his reputation should be reassessed and downgraded.

It is the same difference as people who lived through the fog and fear of historical events, whose outcomes were the furthest thing from assured, and those who learned the history with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and are blind to the blindness that permeates every unfolding present and believe the unknown only hides in darkness.

The study of history is difficult because we are so possessed by the present. It is freeing ourselves from the omniscience of now and reclaiming the unknowing of the past that is hard. It becomes much harder when our “historical fiction” revises history to force it into conformity with contemporary prejudices, instead of alien and much more interesting prejudices of the past — which are the very essence of history. Popular entertainment product like American Girls and Bridgerton exclude history from their contemporary costume dramas, and this is why young consumers of this “relatable” content are radical presentists. Every totalitarianism tries to establish its own year zero, and to lock away in oblivion the prehistory that produced it.

It is those simple world-transforming insights that are hardest to conceive, but then after, hardest to unconceive. Once we see them we cannot unsee them. We cannot even conceive life before their conception. They shape even our memories and our grasp of prehistory.

Food tastes different to people who have experienced hunger.

I hope Kabbalists recognize me as someone who came to the tradition from the most urgent need.

I was made to memorize this Emily Dickinson poem in ninth grade:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

Letterpress “theory-practice” print

Biography, Design, Letterpress, Star

Helen and I spent yesterday parallel printing at the Stukenborg Press with art saint Bryan Baker.

I printed a third, more realistic version of the “Tend the Root” print, requested by Susan and several others who missed the realism of my first screenprinted version, and preferred it to the abstracted asterisk version. I still prefer the asterisk, for visual and symbolic reasons.

More significantly, Bryan has, after months of gentle nudging, managed to persuade me to return to manually setting lead type, which has made my letterpress obsession considerably worse.

(Last time I did this was in 1992, when I handset my wedding invitation, framed with a wood-engraved decorative border of pomegranates and dogwood blossoms. Susan and I pulled a literal all-nighter in the printing studio hand-producing the invitations. Before that, I handset the ingredients of Doritos. Legend has it my Grandpa Dave worked as a typesetter in some kind of association with Frederic Goudy. I’m also apparently somehow descended from someone connected with the founding of Charles Scribner’s Sons. I blame my ancestors for the visceral craziness I feel around books and letterpress. I also blame my design professor Richard Rose for waking this weird impulses lurking in my blood.)

I set one of my favorite aphorisms, frequently misattributed to Yogi Berra:

In theory, there is no difference
between theory and practice,
but in practice there is.

This is one of the wisest and most radically conservative and designerly utterances I have ever heard, and I love it. It demanded to be smushed into the pulpiest of papers.

Design and form

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Everso, Philosophy

We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.

If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.

If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.

To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.

Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.

When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.

Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.

The future of Service Management

Design
Posted to my company slack. I’m posting it here so I can be on record in case someday I want to say “I told you so”:

I’ve said this a bunch of times but I’m demented and repetitious and do I’ll repeat my reckless prediction, while y’all roll your eyes:

I think Service will go the same general direction, and adopt the same rough division of labor that Product has…

  • Service Managers or Journey Managers will be the analogue to Product Managers. They’re the 24/7/365 worried-about-every-aspect-of-every-detail people, interfacing with executives, designers, researchers, marketers, customers, front-liners, and everyone. They’re the CEO-track psychos who live, breathe, sleep whatever service they own.

  • Business Operations people will take on a more hands-on engineering type role. They’ll start driving more of the service blueprinting and implementation, with service designer’s support, mainly from the experiential behavioral motivation side. I’m guessing more and more operations folks will be fully absorbed into service management. It would be cool if COOs became CSOs, with operations execs under them.

  • Service Design will be pushed back into a sort of service-sensitive polycentric experience design — just as UX designers have lost some of the control over product vision they at least aspired to in the early days of proto-UX. Service designers need to understand JM/SM and operations, but that’s part of their horizontal T. The depth and expertise of the T’s vertical is polycentric experience design.I’m confident enough this is the future shape of our industry that I’ll bet up to $100 on it. Preferably less.

I’ve had this prediction dismissed enough already, that I’m pretty keen to say it at least once before it becomes common knowledge, and everyone thought it all along.
As William James didn’t say:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

I might even be too late. If do you think this is a stupid prediction, please, please go on record now, so I can prove the obviousness of this prediction was only retroactively so.

Practical fantasy

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Back in the early 2000s, my brother and I developed a “practical fantasy” vision of bicycles.

Scott ran a bike shop. Over the years, conversing with many customers, he began to notice that everyone who cares about bicycles carries in their soul some ideal image of themselves within the world, and they project that ideal image onto their bicycle, onto themselves as rider, and onto some ideal riding scenario.

A gearhead is one such archetype. He owns the lightest, most advanced technology. He imagines the awed envy of fellow cyclists when they see how his bicycle is specced out and how light it is… Wannabe racers imagine themselves bursting ahead of their rivals… Wannabe couriers snake through dense traffic taking insane risks, scoffing at the certainty of gruesome injury and likely death… There are tweedy retro fetishists, transporting themselves from home to cafe to studio to bookshop. (Who me?) … Rugged all-terrain riders, carrying their survival gear into the wilderness… Ultralight nomads Eurail from country to country with their foldable, carrying only what fits in the knapsack… We defined a small set, but the full list is extensive.

Scott wanted to decode those practical fantasy archetypes, so he could equip the subset of cyclists he liked and served to fully actualize their fantasy.

Central to this practical fantasy vision was a goal: Transform the fantasist into an actual rider. Liberate the bicycle from its garage imprisonment, and liberate the cyclist from their skull imprisonment.

When I recall this vision, it is just one application of a general theory of design.

The same dynamic applies in every situation where a user of some designed instrument extends their own ideal being into the world through that instrument — enworlding and self-actualizing themselves — making themselves at home in a world they partially shape to their own ideal.

Reminder: Philosophies are one such instrument.