Category Archives: Design

Lead… then gold!

Design, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

When a person loses their soul, the very soul who could intuit the loss is absent. All that is left is unreality feeling the unreality of unreality.

I’ve quite a bit on ethnomethods — those mostly intuitive behavioral conventions that permit us to participate in some particular social setting. To belong to a culture is to know how to produce and how to interpret a repertoire of meaningful behaviors. We learn how to understand other people’s behaviors and to make ourselves understood by them; then we adopt them as habits; then we internalize them and they become second-natural, and eventually we forget them entirely and they recede into nature.

Many ethnomethods are never explicated. We learn them mimetically — by direct intuitive mirroring. We just pick them up.

Very few people can deliver a lucid lecture on the ethnomethods they use. Nor can they be relied upon to talk about them, mainly because it would not occur to an interviewee to bring them up, since they operate outside of linguistic direction. Understanding ethnomethods — a sociological approach known as ethnomethodology — requires direct observation and experiment.

But also, and I am sure I am nowhere near the first to say this: language is ethnomethodic. Cultures adopt a shared active vocabulary. And they speak in certain ways about their shared world. This relationship between words, communicative behaviors, referenced realities and speech acts produce mental ethnomethods. Through ethnomethods, people adopt cognitive behavioral habits, and become “inwardly” likeminded through their outward conformity to the intricately inter-related heterogeneous outward norms.

Why do I bring this up? Several reasons:

  • Ethnomethods are the meaningful substructure of organizations, and organizations are the material service designers shape. When we do this shaping, ethomethods are a huge, elusive and difficult part of that shaping.
  • Scholars who have studied how designers work and teach new practitioners (like Nigel Cross and Donald Schon) have observed that design practice differs in distinctive ways from other professions. When these practices are taken up by communities and become a disciplinary field, and are intentionally transmitted through education, training and apprenticeship they become an ethnomethodic tradition. Cross invented an adjective for indicating belonging in the repertoire of behavioral, linguistic and cognitive ethnomethods: “designerly”.
  • Design practice has, since the pioneering design research work of Lucy Suchman, adopted ethnomethodic practice — but ironically has adopted and transmitted it purely ethnomethodically! Very few designers have any explicit knowledge of where our methods came from. Ethnomethodology is embedded in many of our methods, and when we use those methods we function ethomethodologically. If the ethnomethodological tools happen to cycle out of our work, the ethomethodological ethnomethods disappear with them. And designers, who are nine-nine parts technician, and maybe one part intellectual, are ill-equipped to notice.
  • Service design, as a field, has its own evolving set of ethnomethods. Of course, like all fields we have our methods (tools) and our methodologies (systematic use of tools), and when people ask us about how we work, these are what we talk about. But beneath all this is a layer of ethnomethods that guide how we do our work and even how we think about it. I suspect many service designers see themselves as more intellectual than other designers. It is partly because we are required to explain ourselves, our value and our methods to so many different stakeholders. And it does require a degree of articulateness beyond that required of other designers. But this is not intellectual articulateness, but, rather, a technical articulateness.
  • And, perversely, for this very reason, I think service design has lost almost all its designerly ethomethods. It started with “meeting business halfway” and learning the language of business in order to communicate the value of service design in meeting business goals. Then it became mastery of that language and fluency in speaking it, which means learning to think in it. Then it became immersion and active participation in business practices. Then it became learning new methods and approaches to managing journeys and products within journeys. Designers began meeting business halfway from the previous halfway point. And then halfway from that… then that… then that, until eventually, Zeno-paradoxically, our service design stopped being designerly at all.

And this brings me to the thesis I have been working and reworking, which I just summarized to one of the few service design intellectuals I know:

I’m coming to you with a growing suspicion about the field of service design that I think cannot be discussed by most practicing service designers.

I believe that the tacit philosophy that underlies and unconsciously shapes and animates service design practice has never been fully adequate to the problems service design is meant to address. The whole field has always stood on a shaky intellectual foundation, and this has weakened our disciplinary praxis.

But in the last several years, I think even that foundation has eroded away, until that now service design has devolved to total submission to that tacit philosophy that shapes and animates business management — a vulgar subspecies of what Heidegger called technik.

The intellectual foundation upon which service design was erected needs to be dug out and re-laid, so service design can bring design to the business world.

As it stands, service design offers nothing to business that is not new-and-improved business management consulting. And it is this non-designerly sameness that sets dull eyes aglow with recognition when service design gurus speak their language. Service design now sees eye-to-eye with business because it is no longer design, but utterly safe, unchallenging, non-disruptive business as usual. It is no more revolutionary than corporate progressivist activism, and just as phony.

Service design has gone native in the world of business. It has, in the process lost its soul and cannot even sense it.

A methodological note:

I’ve joked that brimstone is my fossil fuel, and that rage is my muse.

I’ve waxed bad-poetic about my daggerscalpel. Something bothers me dreadfully and gets me all murderously angry. I grab my dagger and lunge at it with full intent to kill. But as the weapon tip plunges toward the heart of the matter, it changes midair into a surgical instrument of healing. And now I know something that releases me from resentment.

Most recently I’ve spoken humorously about my philosopher’s stone as a bludgeon — I smash it into some leaden stupidity and watch it transmute into golden insight.

And so on.

Let me see if I can transmute all this ragey negativity into something beautiful.

Design is a very different way to enworld our world. It is not meant to replace other enworldments, but does retune them so we can all collaborate in harmonious difference to solve shared problems.

Design wants to solve these shared problems in some distinctive ways.

It wants to bring things into existence that people value, and which makes life in general more valuable. That is, it wants to offer things that people freely choose and want to have in their lives.

It wants these things to be beneficial to all involved. In the case of a service, the service should not only be beneficial to those who receive the service but also those who deliver that service on the front lines, or who support the service behind the scenes. The service offers opportunities to serve and to be served in ways that are meaningful and rewarding and make people thank their lucky stars that this service exists.

It wants this rewarding involvement to be true of its own services. Anyone who gets staffed to a service design project should immediately feel a palpable change for the better. Anyone who works as a service designer at a service design agency should feel this as well. They should feel that they are bringing a gift to their client. If they do not feel this in their hearts, the designer and the agency need to look into the design of their own service and get right with their craft.

It wants to do what all design does: make things that are useful, usable and desirable. Useful is the easy part. It is about what the design does for whoever uses it. Usable means we can use it intuitively, without massive cognitive effort. It means working with simple gestalts and purely intuitive interactions. And desirable means reinforcing a person’s values and overall sense of value. It means inviting relationship.

It wants to shape a reality that can be enworlded but shared in a variety of ways by a variety of participants. Each participant approaches the artifact in a different way, experiences it differently and responds to it, interacts with it, and changes it from their own point of participation. The single reality is actualized by the distributed agency of participants, each of whom experiences the reality in their own way. In Christopher Alexander’s words, a service is a semilattice experienced by a plurality of participants, not a tree-structure experienced in one way.

Design wants to create a world where a diverse range of people who might inhabit the same world very differently all feel at home and grateful to be here together.

This is why I design.

Undead but undying

Design, Kabbalah

Oh!…

I just finished reading Robert Alter’s foreword to Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and the concluding paragraph delivered a powerful jolt of insight.

Scholem’s ability to understand the power of this root contradiction [between irruptions of profuse mythic life into antimythical monotheism] and at the same time to hold it in a steady critical perspective explains much of the continuing cogency of his vision of history. The archaic past, as well as the manifold later accretions of tradition, aurochs and angels alike, remains part of our collective heritage, and because it both reflects what once engaged humanity and addresses deep human needs that refuse to disappear, it cannot be jettisoned. In this regard, Scholem’s searching investigation of the twisting paths of Jewish mysticism makes profoundly instructive reading as we approach the millennium. But he also sees sharply that the mystics, impelled by discernible historical circumstances, very often sought to escape the ordeal of history by withdrawing into a realm of ecstasy and, at worst, delusion. Thus he observes of the Merkabah mystics after the fourth century who endured an era of persecution by the Church, “from the world of history the mystic turns to the prehistoric period of creation, from whose vision he seeks consolation, or towards the post-history of redemption.” With minor adjustments, this generalization holds for each of the major trends that Scholem surveys — the pietists of medieval Germany, the Spanish Kabbalists, the Safed school of Isaac Luria, the Sabbatians, and the Hasidim. The historian and his implied audience, of course, do not have the luxury of seceding from history and cannot indulge in the Sabbatian delusion that history can be forced to an end. Scholem’s magisterial study is hardly intended to promote a nostalgia for mysticism or any illusion that we can embrace it as it was, but he makes us see the essential role it has played in the Jewish story, and indeed in the human story, and he leads us to ponder what other symbolic languages there might be to express our stubborn sense of connection with eternal things.

The insight was an illumination of some remarks made by David Biale concerning Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”.

In 1958, Gershom Scholem published a series of ten aphoristic statements entitled “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala.” Although later republished in the third volume of his collected German essays, Judaica, these aphorisms have received little or no attention in the English-reading world, despite their considerable interest both for Scholem’s own thought and as philosophical reflections on some fundamental issues in the Kabbalah. The word unhistorical in the title immediately suggests Scholem’s intention to take off the hat of historian and philologian that he wore in most of his writings and to look at his material from a different perspective. Since Scholem’s primary achievements lay in the history and philology of the Kabbalah, his more philosophical and theological reflections have often been treated as occasional pieces, peripheral to his main contribution. I have argued elsewhere that an understanding of Scholem as a historian requires an examination of these writings and attention to his place in modern Jewish thought. …

One of the main characteristics of these aphorisms is just such an interplay between historical theses and modern philosophical language. Scholem boldly suggests parallels between modern schools of thought and the Kabbalah: dialectical materialism and the Lurianic Kabbalah, phenomenology and Moses Cordovero, Franz Kafka and the eighteenth-century Frankist Jonas Wehle. At the end of aphorism 4, he notes: “The conception of the Kabbalists as mystical materialists with a dialectical tendency would certainly be thoroughly unhistorical, yet anything but meaningless.” At first blush, to impose modern categories on a historical subject would certainly seem unhistorical. Yet Scholem assumes that the philosophical issues treated by both the Kabbalah and modern philosophy are universal, even as they are addressed historically in different terms by different movements. The seemingly “unhistorical” procedure of these aphorisms is therefore philosophically meaningful: modern philosophy and the Kabbalah illuminate and explicate the same problems and can therefore shed light on each other. But it is also historically meaningful because it allows the modern sensibility to grasp a system of thought that appears initially alien and remote.

…This telescoping of historical ideas by viewing them through modern prisms is not, however, a subject only for “unhistorical” aphorisms. It lies at the heart of one of the classic problems of all historical work: What changes do ideas necessarily undergo as they are refracted through the eyes of a historian whose categories of thought are historically different? The very ability of the historian to reconstruct the past lies in his finding a common ground or common language between himself and his sources: if the past is utterly alien, it cannot be reconstructed. Hence, the historian must engage in a delicate balancing act between past and present, maintaining the bridge between them without collapsing one into the other. The fact that Scholem gives explicit consideration to this issue in these aphorisms does not mean that he ignored it in his historical work. On the contrary, one can find repeated instances where he consciously used modern categories to illuminate and explicate problems in the Kabbalah. Indeed, one of the keys to Scholem’s success as a historian of the Kabbalah was in turning an ostensibly alien system of ideas into one with a contemporary resonance and urgency. Yet unlike Martin Buber, who also found striking parallels between modern thought and the Kabbalah, Scholem was largely able to maintain the distinction between them.

…

For Scholem’s own purposes, the aphoristic style clearly held particular attraction. Although these aphorisms are “on” or “about” (über) Kabbalah, they are, in their own way, Kabbalistic in both style and content. In order to convey the parallels between the intellectual problems of the modern historian and those of the Kabbalists, Scholem adopts Kabbalistic formulations that he, of course, avoided in his more historical essays. The aphorism conveys a sense of mystery and impenetrability: opaqueness is almost part of its definition. The sense of secrets hidden behind the explicit text in an aphorism is thus reminiscent of the Kabbalah, for which truth is by nature secret (sod). Aphorisms mirror the Kabbalistic concept of esoteric truths.

That which is hidden cannot be expressed without altering its meaning, and therefore the aphorism, which suggests more than it expresses, is a better vehicle for these reflections than direct exposition. Hence, Scholem’s choice of aphorisms is itself proof of the relationship between the historian of the Kabbalah and his subject matter. Indeed, the very number of aphorisms — ten — hints at a Kabbalistic “subtext,” for that is the number of sefirot (divine emanations). And just like the sefirot themselves, these aphorisms are at once discrete and seemingly unlinked to one another, yet at the same time unified by a common theme that is treated in each from a different angle. That theme, to which we have already alluded, is the fundamental tension or even paradox of communicating a truth that is, by definition, secret or hidden.

What is the definition of a “secret” (Geheimnis)? On the one hand, it may be something that is known but deliberately hidden, or, it may be that which is essentially inaccessible (hidden by nature rather than by design). It is this latter sense of a secret that Scholem has in mind here. Kabbalistic truth is inaccessible because God is transcendent. Historical truth is inaccessible because the past cannot be known in the same way we know the perceptual world. Both Kabbalist and historian face the same problem of how to convey a truth that is hidden.

The subtle influence of the Kabbalah on Scholem as a historian becomes particularly apparent in deciphering the language of the aphorisms. Scholem writes in German but often thinks in the technical language of the Kabbalah (either Hebrew or Zoharic Aramaic). Thus, a correct understanding of the text requires sensitivity to the Kabbalistic language lurking behind it. For instance, in discussing the epistemology of the Kabbalah, he uses the term Erkenntnis (knowledge). Yet it becomes clear in the context that he has in mind the Kabbalah’s understanding of knowledge in the form of the sefirah (divine emanation) called hokhmah (wisdom). One is thus faced with the problem of grasping both the philosophical vocabulary and its Kabbalistic background in reading the text. …

It is almost as if Scholem’s historic hermeneutics — the entering, exiting, contrasting, comparing of differing yet connected enworldments — was itself a kind of Kabbalistic praxis. And not only “almost as if” — he was clearly was doing historiological work as a kabbalist.

And indeed any hermeneutic praxis — whether Talmudic study, historiological scholarship, or (who knows?) maybe design! — can inject a kabbalistic interiority, a vivifying soul, into a traditional exoteric practice. A covert Kabbalist can preserve the practices and the language of the exoteric tradition, but circulate something else, something palpably, vividly, but nonobjectively alive — into what is otherwise mechanical, or dead or which is dead but still functioning soullessly — undead. Because “it takes a long time, but gods die, too.” All living being, all living traditions, all living organizations — are mortal.

Traditions who last over millennia learn to reensoul themselves once they “die inside” while preserving their traditional continuity. Anyone who interprets such reensoulment as an indictment of what came before might wholeheartedly idolize what comes after, but they know not what they worship, and they know not what they do when they obsessive-compulsively recrucify their eternal scapegoat.

It is Shabbat, but please hold your stones.

What is a profession, if not an exoteric tradition formed around some domain of activity?

New disciplines are inspired to life by need. They start wild. They grope their way to form and eventually, gradually, they congeal into professions.

Then the profession institutionalizes.

People go to school and are taught it.

A generation of students enter the profession without ever experiencing the problems raw or grappling with them without a toolbox filled with prefabricated techniques and little instruction manuals on how to use them.

The wild background thins, dissipates, and eventually vanishes altogether. And the better a practitioner is educated for the field — the more filled up with expertise, the more highly trained in technique, the better versed in methodology one is, the less present those initial chaotic conditions that inspired the profession in the first place are known or even perceived.

The expert carries his well-equipped toolbox of expertise, and everything looks like his kind of nail.

But with the loss of the wild background, comes loss of inspiration.

The priest class becomes the most ignorant of all of the subject of worship.

And now comes, leaden, dead, technical nihilism, animated by momentum, grinding duty and impersonal social mechanisms.

The discipline is now leadenly led (managed, administered, enforced) by uninspired, dead-souled, dispirited, dispiriting experts, and anyone who follows such leaders falls into the same careerist rut.

These are the times when professions lose their way and are ripe for reensoulment. Their traditional exoteric body lies dead — or, worse, slouches along in a zombie death march of loveless duty — but that disanimated or dysanimated corpse can be reawakened and revived by exactly the kind of inward, esoteric yet tradition-preserving revolution described and actualized by Scholem.

An enworldment that forms across comparison among enworldments is not just one more enworldment. It is a vaseface among vases and faces, a duckrabbit among ducks and rabbits. It is inexhaustible readings in a world of this doctrine and that. It is the history of histories, in a world of history.

Glimpsing the invisible nihilitude dividing finitude from finitude discloses infinitude. Now we receive, conduct, return.

Kabbalah, kashrut, teshuvah.

Service trio

Design, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

Service design focuses on human participation in service systems. In order to do the job well, a service designer must work with others focused on business viability and technical feasibility and find that golden overlap at the heart of the Venn diagram.

To put it in terms of IDEO’s feasible / viable / desirable model, service design has primary responsibility for desirability.

To use another famous IDEO model, service design is “T-shaped” with broad familiarity with feasibility and viability (horizontal crossbar of the T) and specialized depth in understanding people and what motivates them to participate in a service, and what might prevent them from doing so, (the vertical column of the T).

For years now, I have been observing that every design discipline has its engineering counterpart.

Design systems by definition are composed of both human and non-human components.

The engineers occupy themselves with purely objective sub-systems, while designers concern themselves with humans who might participate in the system and support it to some degree, or to abandon or undermine it. If engineers do their job, the thing being made functions as intended, and designers do their job, the functioning thing is something people want to purchase, try, adopt, keep using, increase their use of, spread the word about, etc., and the thing gets used in real-life.

And sneaking around the edges are business people who figured out how this thing, once functioning and in use, helps their organization flourish, mainly by making or saving money.

So there you have it: desirable, feasible, viable.

The problem with services, though, is that few organizations understand them.

Most business-as-usual organizations remain essentially atomistic in orientation, and assume that a satisfactory assemblage of satisfactory parts automatically amounts to a satisfactory whole.

So they fixate on managing the individual pieces and parts. Product managers fixate on their product. Marketing fixates on its messages. Customer service fixates on helping customers looking for help. Everybody’s in silos, and nobody is working on how the parts hang together, much less thinking about ways the parts could form into something whose whole is greater than the sum of stuck-together ad hoc parts.

For at least a decade and a half, service design has lacked its engineering counterpart. And maybe because of this, or maybe causing it — or probably both — service design as it is currently practiced attracts a type of person who finds it relatively easy to flow into that vacuum, and to try to perform the roles of not only designers, but also engineers and business consultants.

They’re not really “service engineers” but then again, neither is anybody else, so nobody has anything to compare them unfavorably against. Few of them know enough business management to be sophisticated “service managers”. Maybe Service-Dominant Logic experts could do this role if any of them ever wandered off campus to do useful work, but they don’t. So service designers do that, too.

These two awkwardly massive jobs inevitably overwhelm the experience design part of the job, which is also considerably more complex than most other forms of experience design (such as visual design or UX).

Where most design disciplines focus mainly on one person, and are monocentric (user-centered, customer-centered, employee centered, etc.) service design is pluricentric, understanding complex interactions among a plurality of people, each of whom sees the service differently, like in the famous fable, “the blind men and the elephant”.

This plurality of experiences and roles cashes out in different behaviors, which are distributed throughout the system and collectively determine its collective behavior. This kind of distributed agency makes service design systems polycentric.

Service designers must understand the pluricentric experiences and polycentric behaviors of design systems together and arrange them in ways that are mutually beneficial to each participant. (I’ve called service designers “win-win engineers”).

So what we call “service design” is actually three overwhelming jobs.

Each job is not only too much work for one person to do, but also too much expertise for anyone to know, too many skills for any one person to master.

But worst of all, each of these activities demands a different, incompatible mentality. And of these mentalities, design is the hardest to maintain, the least recognized and therefore the first to be chucked out once things get stressful.

Service design tries to cover non-design activities with the design umbrella, but then strands design out in the rain.

Service designers end up least of all… designers.

As it stands service design looks, sounds, acts and smells more like management consulting than design, and the people attracted to the profession seem more interested in constructing logical systems than understanding human beings and their loves, fears and hopes, and crafting things that might matter to them.

Service design will only mature as a profession when it differentiates roles, and like product management forms a close-knit trio of a manager-strategist who focuses on viability (analogous to product manager), an engineer who focuses on feasibility and a service designer who focuses on desirability.

Gone native

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Hermeticism, Philosophy, Trefoil

What does it mean to “go native”?

According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”

She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:

Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.

Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.

Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.

Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.

Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.

This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.

I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.

My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.

It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.

For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.

Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.

We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.

We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.

We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.

And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.

We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.

Service design has gone native. We are corporate.

Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.

And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.

When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.

It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.

It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.

But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.

Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.

Idea execution

Autobiography, Design, Fables, myths & parables

I have spent my entire design career laboring to bring ideas to life.

When I use the expression “bring ideas to life” I do not mean this metaphorically.

When “bring ideas to life” is said metaphorically, which is exactly how most designers say it, it means the opposite of what I mean. It means bringing ideas to their execution.

Any organization that thinks as a means to execution will have no use for me or my kind.

Please excuse the apocalyptic excess, but here’s you a vision: The crown of the glass tower is studded with chieftains, busy officiating over executions. The tip of the crown pierces a heaven level with the sea. An artery runs through the tower, connecting the crown’s seven heads to the heart of the structure; this artery pulses with sticky pitch. The sap goes up, lifted high, consumed; it returns to the ground sapped, depleted. Ten-thousand rowers are arrayed in galleys below, rows and columns of cubic cells, stacked to the basement. They buy none of what comes down from on high, but none of it is sold for purchase, so on they row, on and on, to the end of their shelf life.

Broken value exchanges

Design

The only thing that keeps me interested in the excruciating field of service design is that its essential function is to summon collective being through ideal arrangement and mediation of value exchanges.

Service design directly addresses the worst pain our society faces right now: few people can find opportunities for their service calling. Every person is called to some particular kind of service, and each person needs to be needed in that particular way. To have our service calling rejected, and to be “utilized” for some other function alienates us from our sociocultural fabric.

Our cultural value exchanges are utterly broken, and this is one of several causes of our nihilism pandemic.

This is not a tree

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.

I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.

Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.

Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.

The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.

So many things are not a tree.

A city is not a tree.

A service is not a tree.

An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.

Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.

History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.

A culture is not a tree.

A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.

The Tree of Life is not a tree.

Services are hyperobjects

ANT, Design, Philosophy

Years ago, a cynical friend remarked to me that when organizations hire companies to come in and implement enterprise software, what they are really buying is redesign of their operations. That is true, but let’s not lose balance: without enterprise software, redesigned operations will sink back into chaos.

In the future, service design will iteratively develop one hypercomplex deliverable.

A service is a hyperobject. A service is a multidimensional lattice laced so densely along so many vectors that the designer’s primitive tomography of “visual communications” cannot capture its being, or even do justice to its kind of being.

You could stack printer plots of experience maps and service blueprints and ecosystem maps higher than the stratosphere, but the more complete the documentation, the more unmanageable the towering edifice of knowledge grows, until it collapses into incomprehensible paper rubble.

Early last week Susan asked me if I could sense what is next in design. I told her no. For the first time in my career I had no signal. By the end of the week, I had a strong signal.

Any form of pluricentric design (including service design) crafts hyperobjects (objects of more than three dimensions).

Only now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, can we approach hyperobjects as what they really are and design them accordingly! Human minds are (possibly with rare exceptions) confined to thinking in three dimensions within unidirectional time. With four, we are outside human intuition, and must work very differently.

So – not only are services not trees, but they are also not semi-lattices! Nor are they anything as tame as three dimensional semilattices. They have at least four dimensions I can count:

  1. Touchpoints along channels – line
  2. Omnichannel motion across channels – plane
  3. Delivery operations – volume
  4. Actor – tesseract (since all three dimensions are duplicated by each actor, yet share the same hyperobject)

And woven through this 4D space (the word hyperloom comes to mind) are innumerable threads gordian knotted into a dense hypermesh:

  • Value exchanges among actors
  • Qualitative and quantitative data about actors
  • Measurements of various events within the service
  • Nonhuman service actors (ironically ANT’s flat ontology might only make sense in information hyperspace! Entities like data stores might end up making most sense inside of the actor dimension… hmmmm)
  • Team/-member responsibilities for shared opportunities, shared outcomes, implementations, etc.

I’m going on record. You heard it here first.

Services are hyperobjects.

Because services are hyperobjects, they cannot be adequately rendered by any amount of planar expression.

Until we learn to model, document, develop and manage services as hyperobjects — something only now possible thanks to AI — service design is an exercise in futility, doomed to partial success at best.

Material fate

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Participatory know-how precedes and embodies theoretical know-what.

Existential know-that and moral know-why precedes both, providing material and motivation of embodiment.

Know-what is not the paradigmatic knowing, and to take it that way demonstrates impoverished knowing.

Our being streams out through our senses and limbs, through our tools, into our materials, crafting the enworldment through whom reality is given in this momentary way.

In a speech to Parliament in 1943, concerning the design of the rebuilding of the space where MPs themselves met and confronted one another in debate and deliberation, Winston Churchill famously said:

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

This is one of the wisest things any sensitive consumer of design has ever said about design.

Had Churchill done any of this shaping work himself his insights into shaping — or to put it more neoplatonically, formation — he might have extended and deepened his insight even further:

As we form our materials, our materials form us.

In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer observed how in dialogue, we become participants in a conversation who transcends us; the conversation has itself through its participants.

Craft is material dialogue.

In craft, our being merges with our tools, our materials, and the forms emerging through the craft. The craft reveals-creates itself through us and our materials and our tools and the forms.

Craft instaurates (reveals-creates) craftsman and craftwork.

From Charles Stein I learned the word “artifex”, the alchemist participating in alchemical transmutation, and this affords a prettier formulation — pretty enough, perhaps, for an alchemical text:

Craft instaurates together artifex and artifact.

To be alive to craft is to be alive to world.

In craft, the dense and surprising reality of the world and the dense and surprising reality of one’s own self attune and atone to one another.

We once again belong to the world by taking part, and participating in its being.

For a designer, choice of materials is choice of the self one will become.

In service design, our material is organizations.

Some organizations are people serving other people, circulating value, sharing life.

Some organizations are corporations with nothing but dry dollars in their veins.

Heaven help the designer who attempts to craft such a material, for that designer will fuse with it. When the designer’s crafting hand touches the corporation, the corporation touches back. The corporation touches the designer with its own transmuting corporate touch, and a designer is now human resource, incorporated, corporate. The world is now given in quantities, words, abstractions, techniques, agendas, opportunities, dollars.

Hermetic design is just a truer name for human-centered design, and human-centered design is just a truer name for design.

A Service Is Not a Tree (rewrite)

Design

Many design students are assigned Christoper Alexander’s classic “A City is Not a Tree”, a 1965 essay about how urban designers unintentionally produce cities that lack the richness of cities that develop organically.

He offers a structural diagnosis. The planned-out cities that feel artificial are organized around function. Each part of the city has a clearly-defined purpose and is optimized to perform its function well. Alexander’s complaint, though, is not a functional one. It is how these cities feel. They feel artificial, he explains, because, in the effort to optimize functions the system is abstracted into a clean hierarchy — a tree — where each element of the city has one set of functions to perform, which each sub-component supports. This kind of order is efficient, easily thought out, understood and managed, but devoid of life and hard to love. Alexander calls these “artificial cities.”

The structure of “natural cities” so beloved by Alexander (and so many other connoisseurs of urban life) is a semi-lattice. In a semi-lattice each element serves multiple overlapping functions. Alexander gives an example:

In Berkeley at the corner of Hearst and Euclid, there is a drugstore, and outside the drugstore a traffic light. In the entrance to the drugstore there is a newsrack where the day’s papers are displayed. When the light is red, people who are waiting to cross the street stand idly by the light; and since they have nothing to do, they look at the papers displayed on the newsrack which they can see from where they stand. Some of them just read the headlines, others actually buy a paper while they wait.

This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interactive; the newsrack, the newspapers on it, the money going from people’s pockets to the dime slot, the people who stop at the light and read papers, the traffic light, the electric impulses which make the lights change, and the sidewalk which the people stand on form a system – they all work together.

The important thing about this complex overlapping of purposes, though, is that it is conducive to social life. He makes what I would call a “pluricentric” observation: Each person who experiences a part of the city sees it according to a slightly different schema — their own personal tree structure, their own mental model. A patch of city with semi-lattice structure can accommodate a range of such structures. But if a designer has imposed a tree structure, there is only one way to see it. Every person conforms to the designer’s own perspective, and we do not sense the presence of many personalities, who inhabit our shared world in a variety of ways, we just that one monologic that ordered this place.

Rereading it today, it is striking how much a service, also, is not a tree — and the extent to which we service designers also try to force services into tree-structures, for the same reasons as urban planners, and with the same kind of result.

In an effort to make work manageable, we adopt structures like Teresa Torres’s Opportunity-Solution Trees, meant to help us clarify problems, focus on solving those problems, and then track how well our solution solves the problem and addresses the opportunity. At the scale of a single product or touchpoint, this approach is effective, which is why it has been so widely adopted.

But at the scale of services, this causes a kind of team siloing, and encourages each touchpoint to address different discrete sets of opportunities, just like what happens in Alexander’s artificial cities. And the result is services that work well, and perhaps even without gaps or glaring inconsistencies, but which lack life. Instead of the kind of service that creates emotional connection, the organization remains generic, impersonal, anonymous — corporate.

In a world of broken services, an artificial-feeling service that is not infuriating is probably sufficient. It will not repel customers. But it also won’t keep them. It will not create positive emotional memories or inspire loyalty in the long-term.

What do we do instead? How do we provide services that feel organically coherent and alive?

One obvious way, of course, is to give frontline employees the support they need to relate  to customers as human beings. Unhappy, stressed-out, overburdened, micro-managed, micro-measured and thoroughly dehumanized employees cannot provide human interactions that create strong relational bonds. They create an impression of an impersonal or deteriorating or tyrannically controlled organization. But allowing employees to flourish as human beings is expensive. Most companies are under pressure to prune staff to the bones, and wring maximum productivity out of each remaining human resource. For many organizations a humane treatment option is largely off the table.

Another way is to reweave multiple touchpoints — which, for the sake of efficiency, speed and accountability have been combed straight into siloed teams — back into a rich interconnected fabric that shares opportunities across touchpoint teams. Teams focused on implementing their discrete part of a service, must perform their design work in a broader context, collaborating across teams to orchestrate complex solution systems that address opportunities over time across multiple touchpoints.

This will require developing new methods and infrastructure for bringing together the right people across teams to collaborate and share accountability for their contributions to service experiences. The first step toward this goal is kicking the “divide and conquer” mentality. Never forget the origin of this often mis-used expression. It was advice to conquerers wishing to defeat, subdue and control a population by undermining their solidarity and preventing them from responding in a coordinated and effective way. A divided, siloed organization aids and abets its competitors, not itself or its customers.

The alternative to divide and conquer isn’t a softer, blurrier “more human” version of the same strategy, nor is it more collaborative workshops. It is setting different and more ambitious goals, that address not only customer pain or functional needs, but aims at relationship, emotional connection and specialness. And it involves asking different questions. Instead of asking “who owns this part?” we need to ask “what are we trying to do?” with an expectation that the answer convene people across teams and solutions. And last, these cross-team collaborations should be small and frequent, part of the rhythm of every workweek.

Services that feel alive will be dense with these kinds of overlapping opportunities to serve and complex semilattices of collaborators, and at every scale. The opportunity to serve is not achieved through mere touchpoint connect-the-dots. It’s in weaving and reweaving these connections among dots and people, into rich lattices of service.

Trilingual

Autobiography, Design

Back in the day, I had a business with my dear friend Vanessa.

Vanessa and I are both profoundly and intensely Gen X, and sometimes (~90%) we communicated with one another in the native language of our generation. If our client happened to be Gen X, and was sufficiently unshitty, sometimes we would speak to them that way, too.

Our little business was as bilingual as Canada. We were prepared to express every one of our key ideas bilingually. We spoke in Business Casual to uptight people, and in Pottymouth to cool people. If you made us nervous, we’d give you an FAQ on the importance of design research. If we trusted you, you got an FUQ that enumerated the horrible things that befall omniscient dumbasses who leave Frequently Unasked Questions unasked. If you asked us what we did and you seemed like an asshole we said usability and innovation. “You know, ” we’d say, with sphincters well-clenched, “Making the right thing, or making the thing right. Ha. Ha. Ha.” But if we liked the cut of your jib, we explained that we’re always either “fixing some seriously fucked up shit” or “fixing to seriously fuck some shit up.”

I mention this now because I just wrote a post in a third language, which is my first language, Flakiness. That language is infinitely less socially acceptable than either Business Casual or Pottymouth. This is a crying shame because Flakiness is the only language that does any justice at all to design. Flakiness is the language I use when I am speaking to myself about things that matter most to me.

If my last little post on hermetic design left you cold, confused or irritable, maybe try this Pottymouth post on bullshit and chickenshit, which says more or less exactly the same thing.

Hermetic design

Design, Hermeticism

To gather physical and logical materials together in concerted cooperative function is a triumph of experimental technique. It is convergence of earth and man.

To inspire people, to touch and move them, to form, ensoul and animate selfhood from the tiniest spark of intuition to the grandest community is a miracle of culture. It is convergence of heaven and man.

To do both — to draw heaven and earth together so they touch, interpenetrate and dwell in us, through us, among us and around us — this is the highest aspiration of alchemy. It is the enworlding craft of design.

Successful design

Design, Philosophy

What a world-spanning miracle a successful design is.

A successful design has successful engineering. Myriad components (physical and logical) are assembled into an elaborate system that functions together in concert as a unit.

But a successful design has more than just successful engineering. Design focuses on human responses to engineered things. Where an engineered system works objectively, building objects out of objects, design concerns itself with subjects in relation to objects. Subjective beings experience, respond to and interact with engineered objects, and, in their participation, complete the design. Design instaurates hybrid systems of subjective participants and objective parts.

But human beings are not solitary. Human beings are profoundly social. For one thing humans swim in shared linguistic meaning. Our heads are full of words. Words enter through our ears, words spill out through our mouths, words swirl about in thoughts, inner dialogue, imagination, poetic inbursts, looping self-talk, babbling. But our environments are overflowing with signs, signals, symbols, meanings, most of which were molded by and for human minds, hearts and hands. Most of what we see around us is only heard and read, but the best of it reaches through the words and touches or strikes our hearts. Our hearts. First person plural. We share our loves, concerns, cares and cultivate, protect, honor, repair them together. When we lose these things we let the world around us deteriorate and decay. We might even want to help it along. A successful design gives us a shared object, inspires shared concern, draws us together, condenses us around common love, gives us shared being with whom, in whom we identify. Without common objects of love, identity devolves into mere typology, classification systems, schema, categories, criteria, reified imaginary constructions.

But best of all, successful design requires us to leave the insular certainty of our own expertise and mastery. Design demands that we let go of what we know and how we know it, so we can expand our understanding to accommodate how truth and reality is given to others. We must, again and again, pry apart the grasping fingers of our all-knowing minds, force open our own comprehensive omniscience, and expose our tender palms to what is not yet graspable. To “open the hand of thought” is not a gentle release. It is a terrifying sacrifice, entailing the loss of everything our hand death-grips as its own possession.

Only in this opened state does our hand momentarily apprehend the incomprehensible vast richness of being, and it does so by allowing itself to be held in its openness. Vanishingly few can allow this at all, and almost none of us can do it for long — but this unfolding of comprehension is the one thing needful for inspired, inspiring design work.

And this is why the world is overflowing with unwanted garbage, forged in the closed fists and hard skulls of technical masters of design — experts in convincing heard-headed executives to build useful things, spray-painted with desirability, calculated to achieve measurable business goals. These design experts might complete many successful projects, but they do no successful design, and so, despite their best intentions, whatever they construct drains yet more love and care from the world.

Hermetic design

Design, Hermeticism, Kabbalah

Scholem: “While Christianity and Islam, which had at their disposal more extensive means of repression and the apparatus of the State, have frequently and drastically suppressed the more extreme forms of mystical movements, few analogous events are to be found in the history of Judaism.”

Judaism was too weak and unimportant to effectively persecute its mystics! And that is why Kabbalah flourished and matured enough to become integrated back into its classical religious form.

This reminds me of something my friend Stokes said to me once: the reason design was able to develop its own genuine social scientific practices — and avoid suppression of scientistic management practices (imaginary scientific rigor, and its attendant misnorms, which, paradoxically, make scientific method impossible!) — was only because design was considered unimportant and unworthy of management attention. Design could do science only because it flew under the scientific management radar.

Indeed, the more important a design project is — the more scrutiny it receives from the top floor of the glass tower — the more tippy-top-down control is imposed upon it, the less doing design is possible. It is still called “design”. It looks designy. There are cool hipster costumes, profuse post-it notes, kraft paper, masking tape, markers and general arts n’ crafts creativity signifiers. There are calculatedly messy sketches and pretty polished graphics.

But the freedom, soul and joy has been driven out by fear, control and ambition.

The more I move back-and-forth between hermetic mysticism and design, the more a book on hermetic design wants to be written.

Mysticism and design are joined at the heart.

Alive to craft

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Religion

Most of our making is construction. We build systems of meaningful units, glued together with logic and causality.

We do precious little craft.

In fact, we do not even know what craft means.

We are dead to craft.

Because we are dead to craft, the material world is dead to us.

We are cursed with a midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to word. On contact with our skin, words to turn to more words — words about words — entire universes of words — packing inward, denser and denser, within our word stuffed suits.

We cannot touch the world. We cannot feel anything against our skin, except the texture of text. Words have woven themselves around us, webs, cobwebs, soul mummies, whited cocoons.

We can speak fluently about galaxy clusters, theories of relativity, subatomic particles, but we have to sit down with a computer to figure out what love is. We understand how things happen in supercolliders, distant laboratories, radio telescopes, but our own kitchen table, and the things sitting on and around it? It is all inscrutable epiphenomena.

Walter Benjamin quoting Stanley Eddington, made this same point:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

Bruno Latour, crypomarian ethnographer of Sciencestan, said this:

When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.

…

Religion does not even attempt to race to know the beyond, but attempts at breaking all habits of thoughts that direct our attention to the far away, to the absent, to the overworld, in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was before misunderstood, distorted and deadly, of what is said to be “what was, what is, what shall be,” toward those words that carry salvation. Science does not directly grasp anything accurately, but slowly gains its accuracy, its validity, its truth-condition by the long, risky, and painful detour through the mediations of experiments not experience, laboratories not common sense, theories not visibility, and if she is able to obtain truth it is at the price of mind-boggling transformations from one media into the next.

What is it to be alive to craft?

How does the world feel on our fingertips when we remove the thick mittens that control our hand movements?

We feel what material suggests. We are medium. We, our instruments, the being coming are fused in medium.

My eye, my hand, the pencil in my hand, the vibration of pencil tip against paper tooth, that trace of graphite my pencil leaves, the form on the paper, the urge for a line here, a shading there, my eye and my heart — they are inseparable. Words, memories, stray emotions drift about discreetly. They know not to get in the way. Something comes into being through the work, among the converging materials, borne on media.

An unknown goal draws the present toward its desire. This is how it is to craft.

In craft we are alive to reality. In this state, we receive reality, take it in, incorporate it, grateful for what is given. We finally know that we do not need much, only a handful, but this handful makes us and the world real. Without that, there is nobody present to possess a retirement fund the size of the entire S&P.

Do you feel the unreality of what you take for life? Do you suspect you are living in a simulation? Entertain the reality that it is true. You are living a simulation — and this lingering suspicion is your last tenuous contact with reality.

Our being streams out into the world around us. Every soul is nebula-shaped and its ethereal arms radiate to the ends of the cosmos. The world streams into us, and its tendrils convey light and life from oblivion, the benevolent mask of infinitude. The streams crisscross, interweave, and each brightly knotted nexus is someone.

A Service Is Not a Tree

Design, Philosophy, Pluricentrism

Reading Christoper Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree” I am realizing the extent to which a service, also, is not a tree — and the extent to which we service designers try to force services into tree-structures.

Alexander’s signature move, dating from his earliest work, is what I would characterize as polycentralizing design: identifying the multiple centers and fields of activity, noting where the fields overlap and interact, and how these overlapping fields are embodied and changed — most notably, vivified, strengthened, weakened or killed — by physical form.

Alexander’s eternal enemy is orders that abstract and simplify the complexity of life, and design structures reflecting this simplified abstraction, that are intended only to support this partial understanding, and end up severing vital connections that allow built environments to live.

Why is it that so many designers have conceived cities as trees when the natural structure is in every case a semilattice? Have they done so deliberately, in the belief that a tree structure will serve the people of the city better? Or have they done it because they cannot help it, because they are trapped by a mental habit, perhaps even trapped by the way the mind works — because they cannot encompass the complexity of a semilattice in any convenient mental form, because the mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception?

I shall try to convince you that it is for this second reason that trees are being proposed and built as cities — that is, because designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act.

More to come…

Weird coincidence!

Autobiography, Design

I went down a set theory rabbit hole this morning.

Charles Stein (in his book Light of Hermes) was discussing infinine divisibilty and transfinitive sets. This reminded me of the weird math we Gen-Xers learned as kids. We were taught set theory in like 2nd grade. We were learning rudimentary Boolean logic. I’m convinced that this is why all designers of my generation are always making Venn diagrams. I found a cool book in the political history of new math — the origin of all the set theory curricula. That inspired a long and odd post on my bizarre relationship with math.

So lately I’ve working on a top secret project concerning product management practices, especially Teresa Torres’s “opportunity solution trees”. I am interested in what product management tends to exclude, and what service design might be able to reintroduce. And suddenly the word “tree” jumped out at me, and I recalled this old Christopher Alexander paper “A City is Not a Tree”. And I thought — Wow, maybe opportunities and solutions are also not a tree! And maybe these tree structures are the kind of thing that makes silo-ization inevitable in organizations. And of course, silos fragment services and introduce discontinuites, gaps, inconsistencies and all the other stuff of bad experience.

So I start reading “A City is Not a Tree”… and here is how it starts:

The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction.

I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been deliberately created by designers and planners artificial cities.

Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.

It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

Both the tree and the semilattice are ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems goes to make up a large and complex system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets.

In order to define such structures, let me first define the concept of a set. A set is a collection of elements which for some reason we think of as belonging together. Since, as designers, we are concerned with the physical living city and its physical backbone, we must naturally restrict ourselves to considering sets which are collections of material elements such as people, blades of grass, cars, molecules, houses, gardens, water pipes, the water molecules in them etc.

When the elements of a set belong together because they co-operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.

I think what I’m trying to say is this:

Screenshot

Math weirdness

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy

I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.

It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.

I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)

I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.

It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.

The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.

My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.

An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:

James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.

When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.

All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.

I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.

For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.

In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.

Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.

There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.

I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.

I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.

I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.