Category Archives: Design

Responding to the ineffable

Design, Religion

Both design and religion are responses to the ineffable. In each, we try to preserve something given by reality, something intuited but not grasped, something that cannot be captured in words. In both, intervention and control by words threatens the quality of our response. Words want to replace what they should convey and preserve.

The more completely language intervenes in perception, the more language logically formats all understanding and the more language directs and controls all action, the less inspired the response will be.

This is what makes so much of what organized religion and organized design produces so flat and dry and stale and boring. Even the words such organizations say are the product of words. Nothing is said or done or given from the heart or hands without being packaged and shrink-wrapped by the brain-mouth.

Again and again we must go to reality, go to the ground and allow ourselves to intuit and respond to what is there, to who is there, to what we are shown and taught. We must change in response, change into someone who responds naturally to what is given. Only if we make this change can our speech can assist us.

Rapport itself a kind of knowledge, not a means to capture data to analyze later. Rapport is an intuitive attunement to some particular personful reality. Rapport does not end when a conversation ends, it continues on in our responses, only some of which is speech, much of which must now be poetic. If you can hold on to the rapport, if you can cultivate a tradition of rapport, if you renew the rapport by returning often to the ground, y’all can be in touch with someone transcending you and your organization.

Both design and religion are alike in this respect.

New and improved vulgarity!

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Trefoil

I reject two very common, often unexamined, and highly consequential psychological assumptions.

Vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious mind consists largely of objective beliefs of which we are unaware, that exist beneath the surface of awareness, because unconscious psychic processes push them under. I think repressed objective beliefs do exist, but that most of “the unconscious” consists of activities of the intuition which are essentially unknowable as objects, in the same way seeing is essentially invisible to sight. The rational mind, however, inhabits a world of comprehension, and to rationality, whatever evades comprehension cannot have the status of existence. It must belong to the phantasmic inner world of sentiment — a nonexistent subjective pseudo-object.

Vulgar assumption 2: Intuition is essentially an unconscious rational process. Two consequences of this belief are equally wrong: 2a) that anything we think or do can become intuitive through practice. 2b) that anything we intuit can through analysis will reveal an implicit rationality.

In both of these assumptions I see evidence of a rationality that claims to speak on behalf of the self, but instead speaks only for itself in purely rational terms. In some cases, rationality tyrannizes over the whole self and attempts control all its behaviors. In most cases, though, rationality is made the powerless figurehead of the self, and is allowed to say whatever it wants, but has no significant influence over real feelings or behaviors. In both cases, the intellect is alienated from self.

I would like to replace these two vulgar assumptions with two different vulgar assumptions. And by “vulgar” I mean they can be unthinkingly adopted by ordinary people and become ideas so mainstream nobody even thinks to question them. As I’ve said before, the sign of a well-designed philosophy is (like all good design) invisibility. And invisible philosophy is naive realism, or, to say it in a prettier way, a faith.

A practical philosophy designer’s ultimate goal is new forms of naive realism that, when adopted, allow people to live better lives together.

When a philosophy is designed well, people easily understand what is said (it is usable), they spontaneously see applications (useful) and they feel value in the new understanding (desirable). But that is just the first encounter, when the philosophy is still an object of understanding. The true test of the philosophy’s design is after it is adopted, and the philosophy becomes the subject of understanding — that is, it is used to understand subject matter beyond itself. Now the philosophy is understood from, and it functions less like an object we experience at than an interface through which we experience other objects of understanding. And like all designed things we can change modes of attention, and experience it as a beautiful object, or a beautifying subject.

Almost every beautiful thing I see, I see clearly because of a very beautiful pair of glasses I wear, which were crafted in Germany by trained jewelers. But sometimes I remove my glasses and look at them and marvel at their form. And I love my bicycle for similar reasons. I climb into my bike (if you’ve ever ridden a Rivendell, you’ll know why I say “into” instead of “on to”) and I am now merged into this bicycle and into the landscape I ride through. But often I climb off and look at this bicycle from a distance and am overwhelmed by its appearance. Same with all my favorite objects. And of all the beautiful objects, the best are books. They have innumerable layers of subject-object gorgeousness. The book is a physical and typographic object. But it is a “crystal goblet” for its content. But its content is also a crystal goblet for various realms of reality. Despite practicing design for decades prior to reading Beatrice Ward, I could never understand it or practice it the same way again after learning to see it through her eyes. Same with Liz Sanders and Christopher Alexander. The reading was wonderful. The permanent change to myself and the world as I inhabit it (my enworldment) as a designer was immeasurably better.

I am sitting in a middle of a room lined with the most beautiful books, dozens of which have subjectively reshaped me. I am the immortality of myriad beautiful souls.

What was I talking about? Oh – vulgar assumptions. My goal in life is to improve our vulgar assumptions. A philosophy that is not adopted and vulgarized is falling short of its purpose.

My improved vulgar assumptions go like this.

Improved vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious is unconscious only to our rational mind. Subjectivity is not a realm that exists side by side with objectivity. On the contrary, objectivity is a subset of subjectivity — that small corner of subjectivity that can be defined, comprehended and explicitly spoken about. The rest can only be known about indirectly, and can never be known any other way. So, for example, if our unconscious keeps producing racist notions it isn’t because we have racist beliefs that we keep repressing; it is because we have racist subjectivity that perpetually generates racist observations and racist thoughts. Trying to manipulate the content of such a subjectivity will just make the racist more divided against herself, more emotionally hysterical and more desperate for drastic remedies for her dividedness. The resolution of the problem is through asking different questions, not from inventing different answers to old ones and bullying ourselves and others into pretending to believe what we say.

Improved vulgar assumption 2: Rationality is one kind of intuitive process, one that is mostly composed of explicit objects and operations. But many intuitions and other intuitive processes exist that are not reducible to rational terms. And this means 2a) that we should not assume intuitive design only makes use of established habits, or that any design will become intuitive once it is practiced and made habitual. And it means 2b) that we should not assume implicit rationality in any intuition or intuitive response. The why behind an intuition might not have any explicit “because”, and this only makes it more real and important.

One last thing. Even beyond the usefulness, usability and desirability of a designed philosophy, there is something even more important. Does it answer to reality beyond itself? This is the truth many younger designers are trying to bring to the design discipline. Our responsibility as designers extends beyond the needs of immediate receivers, deliverers and supporters of services and products. Our designs impact the entire world, and we are answerable for all impacts to anyone, not only to those we consider. Most designers I meet are materialists, who think only in terms of ecology, economy or psychology, but this is only the parts of transcendent reality a materialist rationality can comprehend. There is more out there (and in here) that we must answer to, and this determines whether our designs bear halos of light or void.

Misusing esoteric symbols

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

I have a long habit of turning esoteric symbol systems into all-purpose concept models.

Two of the most dramatic examples: the trigrams (and hexagrams) of the I Ching and the Sefirot of Kabbalah.

When I interrogate myself on what I genuinely believe, I find that I I believe that this (mis)use of esoteric symbol systems that is the ground of their validity. It is primarily their value in practical use — helping us make sense of our own subjective experience, inspiring, motivating and animating our responses (or non-responses) and guiding our actions — that suggests that they are “true” beyond this sense-making use.

But I am a Pragmatist, and I’m not sure that I believe that truth is meaningful beyond this kind of practical use.

To repeat, the value of these models is threefold. They can help us live more lucidly, meaningfully and skillfully.* And I think it is important that the models engage us intuitively, that is, in a way that transcends what is explicitly sayable. This is the power of concept models, both in design and in religion. These models reach beneath language and help our intuitions organize themselves into living faiths, instead of forcing intuitions to push paper in the bureaucracy of talk — essentially enslaving them to doctrine.

All art and design derive their power from transcending the centralized control of language, which filters out all but the commonest experiences.

Note: * This, of course, is a paraphrasing of Liz Sanders’s Useful, Usable, Desirable framework, which is itself a concept model of supreme importance. It is, in fact, a mundane expression the Great Triad: Earth, Man, Heaven.

Earth is What-lucidity, that is objective mastery. Man is How-skill, that is practical effectiveness. Heaven is Why-meaning, a capacity to experiencing value, positive or negative.

The downside of modernity, especially its scientific aspects, is that it emphasized What/Is/Usable/Earth and How//Can/Useful/Man to the exclusion (or more, the compartmentalization) of Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven. We got amazing at explaining and manipulating the physical world. We developed myriad techniques for doing whatever we want. We accomplished this by bracketing all questions of meaning. When scientists ask “why?”, they are not asking for a meaningful why, they are asking for a causal account, “how?”

In late modernity Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven part of life has been sawed off from everything else entirely, and quarantined in museums, theaters and religious spaces. During the day, we are scientific, practical and dutiful, doing things without any Why at all, pretending very unconvincingly to be “passionate” about our drudgery. At night, after we’ve used ourselves up doing meaningless tasks all day, we try to regain some meaning through entertainments and spiritual stuff, and it fails to replenish us.

And this is why we can do anything we set our minds and hands to, but we find it harder and harder to want any particular thing. We have a crisis of caring. We are nihilists because our ways of understanding fail to take seriously the problems of value and meaning. We are forced to emotionally hype ourselves up to care about anything outside our most mundane needs. We project our own petty childhood feelings onto the world stage, finding stand-ins for our shitty moms, dads, friends, teachers — maybe movies or stories that touched us as kids — and wherever these projections fail, we force them into some shape we can feel about, or we just drift off into confused apathy, or cosmic generalizations that license indifference and dress it up as wise detachment. This is why, once our kids are taught the correct way to think about the world, they fall into hysterical despair and display every symptom of distress. We know damn well we damaged them, but we shout over our intuitions and call them prejudiced and phobic.

Fact is, we have no idea how to make sense of the world and continue participating in it — and at the same time, care about it. That can change, but we are resistant most of all to what will save us. We’re too clever for any human way of being. The theories of physics and our good standing with our fellow nihilists is far more important to us than living lives we can love.

Toward a Theory of General Multistability

Design, Holarchy, Murmurations, Philosophy

This article builds on two previous articles, “The Click” and “The Philosophical Click”. It also builds on my murmuration articles — my “murmurata”.

Any click is the rapid change of stability in an order, from one stable state to another. It is almost as if stability under stress builds up static energy that discharges itself in an instant of recrystallized stability.

There are many kinds of multistable orders, each with its own kind of click.

The gestaltists observed perceptual multistabilities. The phenomenologists and hermeneutic philosophers (I believe) observed conceptual multistabilities, which form not only our understandings but our spontaneous interpretations of whatever we encounter. The postphenomenologists focused on equipment-mediated multistabilities. Depth psychologists observed psychological multistabilities, and called them complexes. I do not know if ethnomethodologists speak of multistabilities, but they should. (Socially, we act within the rules of an ethos to make sense to others and to understand the actions of others — and we navigate the hazards of multistability to attempt to avoid misunderstanding or being misunderstood. We can take (perceive, conceive) any given action “the wrong way”, a way other than intended.) Then there is the world of cybernetics and systems theory. Adaptive systems have responsive multistabilization abilities. They are, what Koestler called holons, whole-parts existing and subsisting within a holarchy.

All these multistabilities are crucially important to designers. Designers work with (and often against) multistabilities. We try to stabilize systems of participation, where a person spontaneously takes the system as given (as intended) and responds in a way that supports that system. The response is often — and ideally — not explicitly thought about. Often people barely notice their interpretations and responses. They respond with natural instinct or second-natural habit.

Our various options for participating in social systems can be viewed as practical multistability. We can work support systems as they exist currently by cooperating and contributing to their stability. Or we can undermine systems by destabilizing them, perhaps in order to dissolve them and reconstitute them in a new stable order.

Radical pluralists cultivate awareness of all the kinds and possibilities of multistability. Whatever seems to us a given truth is always a function of what we can take (-ceive), and what we can take — further constrained by what we will take — is a matter of the myriad stabilities surrounding us and within us.

My better judgment

Design

One nugget of wisdom I try to pass along to younger designers:

Your job is to inform judgment, not to impose it.

Paradoxically, judgment becomes less arrogant as it matures, improves and becomes genuinely superior.

I learned this lesson the hardest way. I’ll be paying down my debt for the rest of my life.

Anaximander:

Beings must pay penance
and be judged for their injustices,
in accordance with the ordinance of time.

 

Rambling on about self-formation

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Extended Self

When children engage in repetitive play, it generates habits of personhood. It is important to be patient and allow them to be repetitive, however tedious it might feel after the zillionth repetition. I find it helpful to meditate on what kind of adulthood might grow from whatever habits form in various kinds of repetitive play.

The analogue for adults is ritual. Rituals can be intentional, such as religious observances, or secular (or semi-secular) routines like exercise or other practical self-maintenance activities. Or they can be accidental, like habitually consuming certain kinds of media, playing games or performing routinized work tasks.

Prayers are verbal-mental rituals. They bring us back to a way of understanding the world along with the emotional attitudes that naturally attend that understanding. Obsessive-compulsive thoughts are a kind of involuntary prayer. Reading challenging books and having challenging conversations can also be prayer.

We also have social rituals that shape our collective existence. Ethnomethods are the meaning-making social habits we use to be understood and to understand others in any given social setting. Nearly all ethnomethods function unconsciously and recede into the background of social life, unless they are not followed, at which point things become awkward or tense. Ethnomethods are a little like well-designed tools, which disappear in use. (Design researchers who know the history of their craft know that much of what we do is rooted less in anthropology than in ethnomethodology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. Lucy Suchman pioneered thinking of physical artifacts as social actors woven into the ethnomethodic social workings of their use contexts. It is sometimes very helpful to think of design flaws as a kind of ethomethodic breach objects commit. Maybe it would be better to reverse what I said. Well-designed tools disappear into the background like ethnomethods, because, in fact, they are materialized ethnomethods,)

Ethnomethods are also verbal and mental. To participate in social sense, we adopt a certain collective vocabulary and logic, and this becomes the conventional wisdom of the group.

I’m flaky enough to believe ethnomethods (enacted by humans and nonhuman) enable distributed cognitive processes that are a conscious being of a group. This seems less far-fetched, once we observe and take seriously how each person’s own mind exhibits intellectual polycentrism among factions and alliances (complexes) within one’s own mind, but that somehow this polycentrism creates a nebulous center who is each person’s I. What shouldn’t this same intra-self consciousness-generating social dynamic be possible between people and generate consciousness that transcends any one of us? I think it is not only possible, I experience it as actual.* (If you like this line of thought, see the extra-extra-flaky note below.)

These verbal and mental ethnomethods are enacted in official communications of organizations; in these cases, they function like group prayer. The mental ethnomethods are repeated in popular news and entertainment media, and then we repeat them in our own conversation. This same vocabulary and logic is, more often than not, adopted by individuals, made habitual through repeated use and internalized as truth.

Like all ethnomenthods, if a person does not participate in verbal and mental ethnomethods, and insists on using idiosyncratic or disharmonious vocabulary or logics, they will create confusion, awkwardness and strain. Severe breaches of verbal and mental ethnomethods have been treated with hemlock.

Our deeply-engained ethnomethods and personal babits are self-generating activities. Whatever we repeat shapes our first-person being — let’s call it first-personality — which in turn shapes our third-person being — our third-personality, or persona — and how we perceive it.

  • Extra-extra-flaky note: For me, super-personal consciousness (also known as egregores) are not a matter of speculation, but is, in fact, a given feature of reality, as manifestly real as gravity.

And I’ll disclose right now — I’m feeling reckless, so why not? — that as service designers, we are intentional shapers of social arrangements within organizations. We attempt to create stable, mutually-beneficial interactions among people through modifications of physical artifacts (touchpoints), processes, policies and social roles.

This means that, whether we know it or like it, we in the egregore summoning business.

I got ever-so-slightly recognized (and I mean almost not at all) in some service design circles for pointing out that the essential medium of service design is organizations. An organization as a discrete social entity. As a disciple of Bruno Latour, I define “social” very broadly, and include within its scope not only humans but everything that supports a social order. Anything social is a human-nonhuman hybrid.

The medium we work with is social — organizations. But what do we actually aim to produce when we design in an organizational medium?

Monocentric designers (UXers, visual, interaction, communication, product designers) often say that, whatever medium they work in, the goal is to produce experiences — individual experiences.

Polycentric designers produce collective experiences, in which each of us partakes as participants, each with their own individual experience.

Right now, service design is heading into a new formalistic phase. It is probably necessary. But we must not lose the inward and qualitative whole as we focus on quantifiable parts.

Win-win engineering

Design

Organizations live or die by human behaviors.

If the leaders of a company behave in a way that inspire, encourage coerce or otherwise motivate behaviors within the organization that efficiently and effectively motivate partners and customers to behave in ways that support the organization’s goals, that organization will flourish.

If leaders motivate the wrong behaviors or fail to motivate the right behaviors, and if behaviors within the organization fail to support or undermine an organization’s goals, or if they do so inefficiently or ineffectively, and if, consequently partners and customers stop engaging with the organization, that organization will fail.

Service design begins and ends with behaviors. It begins with what people are currently doing, and it inquires into why people behave the way they do. It ends with systems of behavior that cause an organization to flourish. And it looks for ways to make people want to behave in organization-supporting ways, and to willingly and spontaneously support it because that organization supports what they want.

The best service design inspires genuine loyalty.

I’ve called service design “win-win engineering”.

The service drive and inward economy

Design

I have been working on an article for several days about a very simple idea. It keeps diverging and losing its essential simplicity.

It is about one of the core ideas of service design, value exchanges. This core idea is the locus of my hopes for the future.

My hope is based on a premise. Some people have embedded in their souls an impulse to serve in some very specific way. Their lives are animated by this very particular service drive.

If we give people opportunities to serve in their own way, they inject limitless energy into their organizations and social environment.

If they are prevented from doing so — often due to interference from other services they are forced to provide — they lose their motivation. They can even sometimes start sucking energy out of their organizations.

Two examples.

  1. Educators, or at least the best educators, live to teach. If they are supported by their leaders and allowed to focus on teaching they bring inspired energy into the classroom, and their students learn. If, on the contrary, administrators demand endless processes and documentation from teachers, to prove that teaching has been executed correctly as specified and that learning has occurred, teachers no longer focus on teaching, and all the processes and documentation harm the outcomes they are supposed to measure.
  2. Nurses, or at least the best nurses, live to care for their patients. When they are allowed to focus on care, the best nurses work tirelessly to ensure their patients have everything they need for their comfort and recovery of health. But when nurses are required to attend to the business and administrative side of healthcare, it demoralizes and distracts them. They become disgruntled and burn out.

Perhaps not all people have a service drive. Perhaps some have service drives that are more general or more specific. That’s a quant problem.

Qualitatively, I know it exists, because I have it myself, most of my friends have it and a great many people I have met in the field while conducting design research have it.

I believe the myriad service drives are as powerful an economic resource as money, machines or material resources. These “outward economy” resources are necessary, and they always will be. But they are not sufficient — far from it. The service drive, the resources of the “inward economy” must flow in, in order to ensoul our institutions. Positive outward motivations like money, perks, competition and prestige (or negative ones like fear or shame) can only supplement the inward ones. They cannot replace them. When we neglect or squander the resources of inward economy, and rely too much on outer resources and control mechanisms to compensate — we get that repellant quality we call “corporate”. It might be old-school cubicles-and-chinos corporate, or it might be the new phony bring-your-whole-self, west-coast-quirky corporate, but it is all manifestly soulless and impossible to love. This, I believe, is why so many people are unhappy in the workplace and unhappy in general. I believe it is one root cause of the collective depression the western world seems to be suffering.

But we lack language and justifications to stop it, and reverse it. It doesn’t fully occur to us that we can or should. We look everywhere for the source of our despair than the cause of it, which we take to be an innate and inalterable feature of reality and work. If work were something we did for the intrinsic value of doing it, we wouldn’t need to be paid to do it, would we?

My admittedly pollyannaish mission as a service designer is to fix our deeply broken value exchanges, so we can inject new sources of energy into our organizations, economy and society. We can shape and cultivate organizations that are animated as much by the inward service drives of the organization’s members as by its outward goals. In such organizations, we can can extend our roots deeper into our psychic soil, down to where we can find new sources of inspiration and motivation, and draw them up from the depths to the surface, to bring new nourishment to this meaning-depleted world. If our organizations enable our innate service drives to find real use, they become something we care about — something worth serving and sacrificing for.*

Note: And organizations do require sacrifice. Obviously, not everything we do is intrinsically meaningful. Most things are not. Even the most inspired and rewarding career will be three-quarters chores. But when meaningless chores serve our true service, they are given purpose, and that purpose infuses them with new importance. They are no longer onerous and soul-draining tasks; they become worth doing for the sake of service.

May your wanting… wait, no — letterpress

Biography, Design, Letterpress

Rabbi Jeff Roth taught my wife a blessing: “May your wanting be wiser.”

This is something very much worth letterpress printing.

I do not see how I can go on without a printing press.

Some other things I want to print:

  • The Pragmatic Maxim: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception — and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. — Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • The full Shema prayer in Hebrew and English. Basically, I want to print the full text of a mezuzah, but printed and with translation.
  • Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two slips of paper: 1) “I am a speck of dust.” 2) “The world was created for me.”
  • Shabbat prayers chapbook
  • Pesach Seder chapbooks (this is ambitious. I will design these specifically to “wear it well” — bearing the patina of wine and food stains with grace, like a yixing teapot, an oriental carpet, a well-used lugged steel bicycle, one of Christopher Alexander’s clay garden path tiles, or an old family Bible. We need more things in our lives who gain, not lose, value through wear!)
  • “For the Last Wolverine” by James Dickey. (I already typeset it.)
  • The Emerald Tablet. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • Phi (the Golden Ratio) to the 10,000th decimal place. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • My weird little snakes and trees poem, which I’ve been rewriting since the early 2000s, and I believe accurately anticipated the absurd metanaivety of now, a time when fancy folks using fancy jargon naively accept at face value their theory-infused perceptions of other folk’s naive perceptions, without a twinge of irony. A gorging ouroboros, starving as it stuffs itself on itself.

Or maybe I should just write and print my Enworldment book one chapbook at a time.

My very next project, though, is re-printing the Sefirot on a variety of papers (some hand-made) that are wandering their way across the country to my door. And hopefully, a third plate will also arrive from the die-maker soon, and unlike the first two, will be unblemished. I’m doing all these with the magical glow-gold ink I used on the 2025 pi posters.

I really need a printing press.

Pi poster 2025

Biography, Design

In 2022 I made a poster for Pi Day. It was pi to the first 10,000th place, color laser printed on a 10.5 x 17″ sheet of some kind of fancy paper and each digit was color coded.

This year I did a follow-up project. Even in 2022, I originally wanted letterpress print the poster. I sent out for estimates, but it was too expensive. But now, I have access to a letterpress studio, and have begun relearning the craft.

And so I spent the first two weekends of February 2025 with master letterpress printer and print studio owner Bryan Baker and my old friend Brian McGee cranking out the Pi Day 2025 poster on letterpress. It is the same size as before (so it matches the first edition), but is now printed for real, with proper Gutenberg technology, with each digit inkily mashed down into the paper.

Behold!

Continue reading Pi poster 2025 →

Praxis? — or apology?

Design, Philosophy

Instinctively I’ve always designed a particular way. I have always looked for a clear and simple inspiration to animate my design work and to invest whatever artifact I design with life. My philosophy only articulates my intuitive practice. My philosophy is probably useful only for others who already work in an intuitive way similar to how I work and who need concepts, reasons and language to explain and justify it. My philosophy won’t enable anyone to design any differently than they normally design.

(I realized I’ve lapsed into believing that my philosophy guides or shapes my practice. It doesn’t. Philosophy is primarily my defense against interference.)

“Critical barbarity”

Design, Politics

I (re)finished two Latour essays this morning, “A Cautious Prometheus” and “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”.

A passage in the latter stood out to me, where he describes something he calls “critical barbarity”. This is most certainly a phenomenon, I’ve seen too much of in the last decade, when critique gathered steam and inflated a great many people with hot air. Today people who haven’t cracked a philosophy or sociology book in a decade or more run around dismissing all kinds of things as “constructions” (for instance money, race, sex), while invoking indisputable fact (for instance, history, physics, critical theory) to justify the necessity of all kinds of ideological intrusions.

The selective skepticism and credulousness can seem like hypocrisy, but I believe it is truly innocent. And not only innocent; for all its talk of critical self-awareness, it is naive.

Latour describes how this naivety is maintained:

…the cruel treatment objects undergo in the hands of what I’d like to call critical barbarity is rather easy to undo. If the critical barbarian appears so powerful, it is because the two mechanisms I have just sketched are never put together in one single diagram. Antifetishists debunk objects they don’t believe in by showing the productive and projective forces of people; then, without ever making the connection, they use objects they do believe in to resort to the causalist or mechanist explanation and debunk conscious capacities of people whose behavior they don’t approve of. The whole rather poor trick that allows critique to go on, although we would never confine our own valuables to their sordid pawnshop, is that there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position. This is why you can be at once and without even sensing any contradiction (1) an antifetishist for everything you don’t believe in — for the most part religion, popular culture, art, politics, and so on; (2) an unrepentant positivist for all the sciences you believe in — sociology, economics, conspiracy theory, genetics, evolutionary psychology, semiotics, just pick your preferred field of study; and (3) a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish — and of course it might be criticism itself, but also painting, bird-watching, Shakespeare, baboons, proteins, and so on.

If you think I am exaggerating in my somewhat dismal portrayal of the critical landscape, it is because we have had in e?ect almost no occasion so far to detect the total mismatch of the three contradictory repertoires — antifetishism, positivism, realism — because we carefully manage to apply them on different topics. We explain the objects we don’t approve of by treating them as fetishes; we account for behaviors we don’t like by discipline whose makeup we don’t examine; and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those things that are for us worthwhile matters of concern.

But of course such a cavalier attitude with such contradictory repertoires is not possible for those of us, in science studies, who have to deal with states of a?airs that fit neither in the list of plausible fetishes—because everyone, including us, does believe very strongly in them—nor in the list of undisputable facts because we are witnessing their birth, their slow construction, their fascinating emergence as matters of concern. The metaphor of the Copernican revolution, so tied to the destiny of critique, has always been for us, science students, simply moot. This is why, with more than a good dose of field chauvinism, I consider this tiny field so important; it is the little rock in the shoe that might render the routine patrol of the critical barbarians more and more painful.

At the end of the essay Latour proposes a new critical attitude, which to me looks an awful lot like the attitude held by designers at their mature best:

The solution lies, it seems to me, in this promising word “gathering” that Heidegger had introduced to account for the “thingness of the thing.” …What is presented here is entirely different attitude than the critical one, not a flight into the conditions of possibility of a given matter of fact, not the addition of something more human that the inhumane matters of fact would have missed, but, rather, a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence. Objects are simply a gathering that has failed — a fact that has not been assembled according to due process. The stubbornness of matters of fact in the usual scenography of the rock-kicking objector — “It is there whether you like it or not” — is much like the stubbornness of political demonstrators: “the U.S., love it or leave it,” that is, a very poor substitute for any sort of vibrant, articulate, sturdy, decent, long-term existence. A gathering, that is, a thing, an issue, inside a Thing, an arena, can be very sturdy, too, on the condition that the number of its participants, its ingredients, nonhumans as well as humans, not be limited in advance.

The point here is that each person involved in a matter of concern will bring their own things they believe in more or less, practices and courses of action they prefer more or less, have their own epistemological standards determining what to them seems more or less true and relevant. To determine in advance what will be gathered or not only undermines the sturdiness of what results from the process of bringing social reality into existence.

Cultivating alignment is half the work of solving problems. When we behave as if those who are not already aligned with our way of understanding and acting are interfering with solving the problems we face it exposes a deeper problem: we do not understanding what a political problem is. A political problem is first and foremost an alignment problem! No wonder we can’t solve it — we literally do not know what we are doing.

It is natural for technocrats to confuse technical problems with political ones, but it appears this is no longer going to work. Technocrats will have to forget their expertise bias and relearn politics before we will make any more collective progress.

Reformist revolution?

Design, Philosophy, Politics

In the last week something inspiring has come into clear view for me.

It all started when Susan complained to me that she has a dozen urgent projects to do, which all interconnect and play a part in a single overwhelming goal she wants to reach. All the projects need to unfold simultaneously. I suggested she think in terms suggested by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country:

…Dissent, and the group of writers around it, felt able to dispense with membership in a movement. They were content simply to throw themselves into a lot of campaigns. By “campaign, ” I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called “the passion of the infinite.” They are exemplified by Christianity and by Marxism, the sort of movements which enable novelists like Dostoevsky to do what Howe admiringly called “feeling thought.”

Membership in a movement requires the ability to see particular campaigns for particular goals as parts of something much bigger, and as having little meaning in themselves. Campaigns for such goals as the unionization of migrant farm workers, or the overthrow (by votes or by force) of a corrupt government, or socialized medicine, or legal recognition of gay marriage can be conducted without much attention to literature, art, philosophy, or history. But movements levy contributions from each of these areas of culture. They are needed to provide a larger context within which politics is no longer just politics, but rather the matrix out of which will emerge something like Paul’s “new being in Christ” or Mao’s “new socialist man.” Movement politics, the sort which held “bourgeois reformism” in contempt, was the kind of politics which Howe came to know all too well in the Thirties, and was doubtful about when it was reinvented in the Sixties. This kind of politics assumes that things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born.

As I re-read this passage, it brought to mind a beautiful essay from Bruno Latour, called “A Cautious Prometheus”. It begins by describing five characteristics of design, and draws parallels between the evolution of design and Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) re-understanding of scientific truth.

…what is so interesting to me in that in the spread of design, this concept has undergone the same amazing transformations as my own field. STS, that was until a few years back but a small subfield of social science, has now received the formidable support of a much larger movement. What was a slightly far-fetched and a clearly scandalous claim, namely that there are no objects but only things and disputed assemblages, is now fast becoming common sense.

The five characteristics of design he listed can be summarized as:

  1. Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than a foundational acts of creation.
  2. Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft, and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
  3. Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism, and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
  4. Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
  5. Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.

You should read the essay yourself, but I am summarizing these five characteristics of design to provide context for this inspiring passage:

Of course, all five of these dimensions of design as well as the development of STS could be taken as a clear sign of postmodernism, as a quiet and lazy abandonment of the tasks of Promethean modernism. Some diehard modernists do think that way, but I don’t believe this is the case. As I pointed out earlier, the spread of the word “design” doesn’t come at a time when there is less to do; it comes at a time when there is more to do. Infinitely more, since it is the whole fabric of life that is now concerned thanks to the ecological crisis. What no revolution has ever contemplated, namely the remaking of our collective life on earth, is to be carried through with exactly the opposite of revolutionary and modernizing attitudes. This is what renders the spirit of the time so interesting. President Mao was right after all: the revolution has to always be revolutionized. What he did not anticipate is that the new “revolutionary” energy would be taken from the set of attitudes that are hard to come by in revolutionary movements: modesty, care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details, careful conservations, redesign, artificiality, and ever shifting transitory fashions. We have to be radically careful, or carefully radical… What an odd time we are living through.

At the risk of undermining Rorty’s advocacy of campaigns (aka social design projects), I’d like to suggest that energetic embrace of designerly reform could be revolutionary.

If a critical mass of people got it in their heads that progress is not measured by proximity to perfection, but rather by how many improvements we can make to the world around us, and took up the tools of design we could improve the world considerably, find meaning in doing so, and because design seeks alignment and collaboration, do so more democratically and inclusively. This way of working generates alignment and solidarity, something sorely lacking today. …and something even more lacking: inspiration.

Reform versus revolution

Design, Politics

I’ve heard Marxists quip that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” implying that anyone who wishes to preserve capitalism lacks the imagination to want something better. But is limitation of imagination the only reason a person might have a conservative desire to defend capitalism?

I see at least two alternative explanations.

First, pro-capitalist conservatives might actually have better imaginations — at least different imaginations — better able to imagine what might go wrong if we make radical changes to the world.

Second, it could be due to an acute awareness of imagination’s limits. We can imagine utopic or dystopic outcomes of change, but in my experience, the future often unfolds in ways nobody imagined. Our imagination always omits crucial considerations that lead to unintended, unimagined consequences.

This is why I prefer reform. If we make slow, incremental changes, we are better able to foresee the consequences and to respond to the inevitable surprises . The greater the scale and speed of change, the less predictable it is and the harder it is to correct if things go off the rails.

A third important reason conservatives are skeptical of revolutions, economic and otherwise, is that conservatives believe societies develop organically, by complex, distributed, localized processes — far too complex for any expert or any group of experts to comprehend, however imaginative, insightful, knowledgable and intelligent they might be.

Experts can effectively influence and shape these organic processes. But the belief that they can create them from scratch is a sign of naive hubris. Friedrich Hayek called this “the fatal conceit.”

Obviously, I share all three of these mistrustful attitudes toward imagining radical futures.

Does this make me a conservative? It is relative. Compared to a revolutionary (whether a left radical or right reactionary), yes, I am conservative. But compared to people who think things are perfectly fine as they are, and therefore not requiring significant reform, then I look like a progressive, albeit a cautious one who respects conservatives. But I’m not so conservative that sensibly-paced, sensibly-scaled socialist solutions to social problems automatically horrify me.

But whatever else I am, I’m certainly anti-revolutionary.

Letterpress sefirot

Biography, Design, Judaism, Letterpress

An old friend of mine introduced me to a master letterpress printer who lives in the Atlanta metro area. The printer connected me with one of the nation’s best die makers. I immediately ordered a plate for my first project, which will be a letterpress sefirot.

I am doing this project because nobody else has. I have been unable to find a beautiful letterpress printed sefirot, so in order to have one I will have to print it myself. This is something that should exist. I’m excited to have a supply to give away to friends.

The final printed artifact will look like this:

Actant systems

ANT, Design, Etymology

Design develops actant systems. Polycentric design disciplines (including service design) are optimized to integrate multiple interacting human actants into the actant systems they develop. In contrast, monocentric design disciplines were optimized for a single human actant.

One exciting aspect of seeing design this way is purely etymological. Human actants in a design system are designated defined roles in the system. They are, as such designees. In design we designate roles both to people and to engineered sub-systems as actants within our systems. Cool!