Category Archives: Design

Design definitions

Design, Philosophy

Design is the practice of specifying things to be produced by others for others.

Let us start by defining the roles involved in all design.

Let us start by naming the role of a person for whom a design is specified and produced. Historically, this name has always been borrowed from other fields, always with distracting semantic baggage. User, audience, customer, consumer, persona and service actor have all at various times served this purpose. To clarify the field of design, it is necessary to coin a technical term of art, one signifying this role relative to design practice. Let us call any first-person subject for whom a thing is intended, specified and produced a designant.

Let us call the role of those who make or deliver the specified thing producers.

Finally, those who develop the specifications for the thing are designers.

And the specification of the thing is its design.

The specification is the result of myriad decisions made by designers, all aiming at a set of ideal goals. This is the change the designed thing is meant to have on reality. This is the design intention.

The defined intention of the work, plus the enabling resources and limiting constraints governing how the intention may be actualized, is the problem definition, or simply, the problem.

A design problem is a problem that includes within its definition considerations essential to design practice.

That is, a design problem includes within its definition not only the thing to be produced but the designants for whom the thing is intended.

A design methodology solves a design problem systematically, using techniques that address the particular challenge of designing for designants who are other than the designers who work on resolving the design problem.

Without inclusion of designants, a problem is not defined as a design problem.

Without design methodology, a design problem is not being approached as what it is.

Again: Design is the practice of specifying things to be produced by others for others. By this definition, a great many problems ought to be defined as design problems, but are not.

Further, a great many problems that are or ought to be defined as design problems are not approached using design methodology.

To use a simple analogy, a great many design problems are misdiagnosed as other kinds of problems; and many design problems, both incorrectly and correctly diagnosed, are treated incorrectly.

Things become messy almost immediately:

First, multiple roles can be played by the same person. In service design, for example, the service actors who deliver the service on the front lines, or who support the service behind the scenes, are also among those for whom the service is intended. They are both designants and producers. Another example is designing something for ourselves. If we design our kitchen, we may also do the installation and construction work and be producers, and, once we inhabit and use our new kitchen, we may also be among our own designants. But if we are alert, we will notice how our role shifts and how we think, feel and behave differently in each, often in surprising and conflicting ways.

Second, a designed “thing” can be many kinds of things, produced from many materials, some of which are not even physical substances — for example actions or concepts. And many design materials are complex and heterogeneous.

Finally, the nature of designed things is quite different from the objective way we normally think about things. This will require extensive rethinking, and will be a subject of discussion later. For now, suffice it to say, even the simplest designed things are in fact participatory systems. Designed things are not only for designants, they involve the designants as participants in the designed thing, and through their participation activate and complete it.

The most interesting, important thing in the entire universe

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

An appendix Thomas Kuhn added to later editions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had a continuing influence on my understanding of design. In this appendix Kuhn explained that scientific paradigms should not be viewed exclusively in terms of thought. A paradigm is not just theoretical, or theoretically guided practice or practice informed theory (praxis of science, considered apart from the scientific knowledge the praxis generates), but also in terms of the physical instruments used in experimentation and observation. He used a vivid example of how a paradigm of electricity as a fluid shaped jar-like electrical containers, which the later electrical charge paradigm rendered naive.

So a paradigm shapes concept, concept system, language, behaviors and tools all together as a mutually-reinforcing system.

Years later, Lucy Suchman, one of the founders of modern design research brought ethnomethodology to the nonhuman actors in the office environment.

Ethnomethology is a branch of microsociology that locates social meaning-making as a function of mostly tacit symbolic performances, which are called ethnomethods, thus the name ethnomethod-ology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. (Many designers casually believe that design research is a less formal and thorough version of ethnography, which is not entirely wrong, but slightly confused. Our roots are more ethnomethodological than ethnographic, and that root was sunk by Suchman.)

Suchman’s mind-blowing practical insight was to treat a copy machine as a social actor, and to see her own design task as equipping that copier with ethnomethods required to participate gracefully in its social setting. This shows a strong family resemblance to Kuhn’s materialized paradigm.

It could even be said that Kuhn described unusually explicit and disciplined ethnomethods of science. Within the overarching principles and practices we call scientific method are multiple scientific ethnomethods, which are paradigms. Or it could be said that ethnomethods are looser, less explicit, more implicit paradigms.

Both paradigms and ethnomethods tend to focus themselves within specific spheres of social activity, as does the close study of either, or in the case of Actor-Network Theory, which began its expansive life ethnomethodologically studying human and nonhuman actors who populate and constitute laboratories.

But these approaches themselves all outgrew their humble origins, and became something resembling their own objects of study. The study of paradigms induces a meta-paradigm that seeks paradigms in any community of activity, even ones that are not communities of rigorous scientific activity. Ethnomethodology could easily study the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists, and without even looking into it, given the kind of metaweirdo attracted to this field, I am unable to doubt that this happened within minutes of the establishment of ethnomethodology. There is no way at all this did not happen unless every ethnomethodologist automatically assumed what I am automatically assuming and decided not to bother. And anyway, why do something so obvious that it automatically occurs to everyone?

All this innovation happened at a time when flatness was fashionable. It was a daring and disarming move to say that Kuhn’s paradigm of paradigms was just another paradigm among paradigms, and not something belonging to another plane of metastudy. The ironic move of studying the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists would be, ironically, an ethnomethod symbolically acting the unexceptionality of what ethnomethodology does.

But are these acts of principled, humble reflexivity truly innocent? What if there is a shade of benevolent bad-faith in it, an artificial doubt, a violation of Peirce’s principle: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

We choose to investigate paradigms or ethnomethodologies or to live a life of design because these things seem to us more expansive, profound and universal in important ways than even what they investigate. If they do not start out that way, they mature in that direction, and precisely because they are so expansive, profound and universal — because they overgrow their initial content of study, and then their own praxis, and culture and human condition, and, potentially, the metaconditions of the human condition (aka metaphysics), I call these all-encompassing meta-ways enworldments.

I might be wrong in my conceit that enworldments operate on a higher metaphysical plane than their objects of study (the knowledge they generate), than their subjects of study, (in the academic sense of subject, the shared praxis, the body of reciprocally-developed practice-informed theories and theory-guided practices of the discipline), than even their materialized praxes (tools, supplies, environment and other material supports).

I might even be stupidly wrong to believe in metaphysical planes at all in order to see such assignments.

But I am a person, and I am allowed to be stupid. That is my right as a relatively unimportant being! Why shouldn’t I confidently assert metaphysical truths that are absolutely true, as far as I can tell? If others see problems I miss, let them make their own counter-assertions. Let them catch me by total surprise if they can. I can’t squander my personal resources, anticipating every possible attack, or compulsively re-acknowledging that such attacks might be effective. Of course they are, and so what?

I prefer to be faithful to my true human beliefs than to be cagey in an attempt to avoid being caught and ridiculed for insuffient caution, humility and self-skepticism, or to make myself a less enticing target. I cannot help wondering what inclines people to spend their lives lurking about, looking for mistakes to catch and ridicule.

Ironically, false humility can be hubristic, and disingenuous hubris can be humble.

I think I am onto something of enormous importance and interest, I cannot doubt it, and I refuse to pretend to doubt it. If there is anything more fascinating and important in the world than the phenomenon of enworldment and its related phenomena (especially instauration ex nihilo) and the role design plays in it, it is entirely beyond me. So I intend to stand here within my own abilities and limitations and work this out in intense, innocent inspiration.

And when I look out into the world, what seems most lacking is inspiration, meaning, excitement and hope.

It seems to me that what blocks all these good, needful things is a fear of being caught making mistakes or showing our personal limits. Our negative goal of eliminating imperfections leads us to neglect the positive goal of doing things that are deeply and powerfully right.

The nihilism pandemic we are in might be the result of a misguided attempt to be tiny flawless gods according to narrow and mostly unexamined standards of what is better and worse, instead of living as imperfect, incomplete, interdependent vital organs of something greater than any or all of us, toward whom metaphysics reaches with all our being — mind, soul, body and all our myriad designed extensions of being.

We must get right with being wrong.

Domain-subdomain throwndown

Design, Metaphysics, Philosophy

To an objectivist (an adherent to an epistemology confined to objective comprehension), all truth is objective knowledge of objective reality.

Objective knowledge — as opposed to what? Subjective experiences.

If a subjective experience motivates behavior, it triggers an event in objective reality, and now can be known objectively as truth. Until then, subjectivity is objectively real only as neural processes productive of mental epiphenomena.

Objectivism sees objects of sight, while excludes its own seeing as real.

Objectivism is often materialist, but not essentially.

Objectivism concerns form; materialism concerns substance.

Matter is unformed but formable; understood formationally matter it is material.

A metaphysics of matter differs from a material metaphysics.

Someday, when materialists figure out how to explain the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious matter, without committing the performative contradiction of assuming and relying upon both their own consciousness and the consciousness of those to whom they explain away consciousness, I’ll take them seriously as philosophers.

Until then, I’ll regard them as scientistic technicians unconsciously overstepping the bounds their mastery into metaphysical questions they do not yet even know how to ask, much less answer.

The methodological reductionism so virtuous and necessary to science is, when applied to metaphysics is not only unhelpful but vicious. To confuse the ontology and practice of science with the ontology and practice of metaphysics is to conflate objective braininess with wisdom (the intuition of reality beyond the cognitive grasp of objectivity).

We can, and maybe should, place panpsychism outside of the domain of science, but we should never allow the domain of science to limit or even dominate or even try to found/underpin/regulate the super-domain of understanding to which science belongs as part.

The same error that places knowledge under the rule of science, and locates subjectivity within objective reality also sees design as a subset of engineering. Design is the superset, and all engineering work should be defined, guided and supervised by design.

“Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Existentialism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary:

“What has a name is real.”

“What lacks a name is unreal.”

What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural.

What has a name is (taken by us as) real; what lacks a name is (taken by us as) unreal.

In order for something to be unreal to us, however, it must already be given to us in some way, in order to be denied as unreal. Otherwise, it is ungiven, and, to us nothing, and, as nothing, can be taken neither as real or unreal.

In every age, most of all now, some of our most important givens are rejected as unreal to our deepest detriment. And some of our key given truths are ideas and only ideas, mistaken for intuitable realities, also to our detriment.

The designerly task of the philosopher is to identify these rejected, nameless unrealities, and name them, so they can become real to us.

To quote Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Etymology will provide us some basic ideas required for the work of restoring reality to crucial ideas that are unreal to us. They will root and anchor our work.

Etymologically, the word “datum” means given; “data” is multiple givens.

Etymologically, taking is what we do when we receive something as given to perception or conception. The root “-ceive” refers to the act of taking, and “-cept” refers to that which is taken.

This etymologic frames a set of give-and-take questions:

Given how? Given by or via what mode of giving?

Taken how? Taken by or via what mode of reception?

In order for us to take something (through sensory perception or intellectual conception), it must, in the first place, in some way, be given.

Otherwise, we are oblivious, and the datum remains ungiven and is, to us — not unreal, but, rather, nothing at all. Whatever it is, however real, if we are oblivious to it, it has entirely escaped our awareness, and it is nothing to us. It remains submerged in pristine nothingness, until it itself penetrates our awareness, or someone else directs our attention to it.

A brief ecstatic interlude: At this very moment, I am directing your attention to nothingness. Nothingness, however, is only given to us by the experience of revelation ex nihilo, the radical surprise of the irruption of something from nothingness. Whatever the reality, it was there all along, but not to us, until the moment of epiphany. Sometimes such irruptions introduce a whole new mode of being, requiring everything (as we have it) to be re-understood. This is the most fascinating truth of the human condition: the omnipresent possibility of revelation ex nihilo, and the inspired reunderstanding of everything-all-at-once, which transforms the world and our place in it, on the whole and in every part, in literally inconceivable ways. Nothingness is not what it seems, and to know this exnihilates nihilism. Nothingness is eternally pregnant preexistence, the furthest possibility from dead nonexistence. Exnihilism is the best news a soul can enceive.

The mode of givenness that concerns us most is the direct, unmediated givenness known as intuition.

Intuition, as we are using it here, is the immediate awareness that something is, without reason or language recognizing what it is. Intuition apprehends being, prior to comprehension. Intuition apprehends with know-that.

Notice the “media” words: “unmediated”, “immediate”. “Medium” is another. “Media-” means middle. Something that comes between. Here the medium is reason, often, but not always, via another medium, language.

When our intellect comprehends it adds “know-what” to an apprehended “know-that”. It links this known what to a vast network of other whats and whys and hows, and makes sense of it in the context of everything else.

Etymologically, comprehension means “together-grasp”. To comprehend means, first, to grasp-together the intuited object in all its complexity as what it is — as an object of comprehension — and, second, to grasp what it is in the context of everything else, as part of a comprehensive totality we call “everything”.

But “everything” is relative, in ways unphilosophical folks seldom appreciate. When we say “everything”, we mean everything as given to us, and everything is given to each of us quite differently.

Some everythings are larger, denser and subtler than others. In order to avoid the strange pluralization of the normally singular everything, let us refer to any given everything as an enworldment.

An enworldment is everything, as given to some particular subject.

Let us understand that each enworldment appears to the enworlding, enworlded subject as the one and only everything. We naturally confuse “everything” with infinity, but infinity is infinitely more inclusive than what any of us can mean when we try to speak of infinitude. We are made in the image of the One, but we, alas, are and can only be one, unless we accept our place as organs of the infinite, what we Jews indicate when we say Adonai Echad.

When we comprehend, always with our intellect, we integrate some datum into our own given everything, which is our enworldment.

The data we are most prone to reject as unreal are given by intuition. We intuit that something is, but we do not recognize what it is. We apprehend that but cannot comprehend what. “Our reach exceeds our grasp.” We become apprehensive. In these situations we may explain our intuition away, by comprehending our apprehension as an unreasonable response to something “nonexistent”. “It was nothing real.”

Is this explaining away bad? Heavens no! We do this rejecting of misfit intuitions to preserve our enworldment. It is normal intellectual hygiene, required to maintain subjective health. Not every intuition should be admitted and integrated within our enworldment.

Which intuitions ought to be named is a matter of personal judgment, not criteria and rule.

But the judgment should revolve around matters of alienation. That is, they should consider where we are obstructed from participation in realities that matter most to our own lives together.

When the way we enworld ourselves preclude love, community, belonging, selfhood, beauty and value in general, that enworldment might need philosophical intervention.

Here is a quick litany of alienations: The positivistic limitation of real entities to objects of physics. The reduction of all meaning, including love of others, to emergent properties of purely physical processes, to evolutionary psychology. The reduction of identity to social categorization. The reduction of religion to scientistic explanation. Not to mention the reduction of science, itself — science being the disciplined systematic interaction with, observation of and understanding of matter under various conditions — to scientistic explanation! The cynical suspicion of every spontaneous conception as bias, paired with the gullible acceptance of expert claims as the remedy to bias!

Across the board, what is nearest and dearest and most concretely present in any human life is explained away as “subjective” or imaginary or distorted, in favor of far more distant, abstract and depersonalizing notions, many of which are not rooted in any possible intuitive immediacy.

These are features of an alienated and alienating enworldment shared by perhaps the majority of young members of the lower-overclass. It is responsible for a growing nihilism, manifesting in self-destructive politics and collective and individual mental illness.

If we manage to exnihilate this enworldment, we will emerge on the other side into a renaissance ex nihilo.

Mapping olamot

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

An enception is a conceptual capacity, the ability to “get” a concept. Once an enception is established (by our enworlding neshamah to our conceiving ruach), its conceptual form can be received (whether intuitively perceived or intellectually conceived) as given wherever its corresponding form occurs in reality, both by our conceiving ruach in Yetzirah, and our constructing/construing nefesh in Assiyah.

Or so I think. I’m trying to map my own experiences to the experiences of others who seem to know this strange space I navigate. Today it seems that:

Assiyah is a world of actuality, where, using given objects of perception and truth, we (as nefesh) construct systems of materials and ideas and methods, and truth is understood pshat, construed objectively in terms of their place in a constructed system, but that objectivity is determined by the conceptual repertoire given by Yetzirah. Whatever is not in that repertoire is inconceivable and is perceived as senseless chaos. Assiyah actualizes an enworldment, giving it perceptible material and symbolic form.

Yetzirah is a world of formation, where pure concepts interrelate, harmonize or clash, overlap, attract, repel, stabilize, destabilize and restabilize at various scales, forming subjective patterns of receptivity, obliviousness, attraction and revulsion in us (as ruach) which determines what is and is not given as real and true in Assiyah. Ruach is organic enceptions within enceptions, a capacitive system in everse. Yetzirah defines the limits and terms of intelligibility within an enworldment. Ruach understands in the mode of remez, that is it recognizes and relates forms, thematizing, analogizing, discovering the connectable dots and associating them, within an enworldment. Yetzirah is concerned with carrying a possibility of enworldment into its development of integrated forms and developing, integrating and strengthening it to the point where the enworldment can be actualized in Assiyah.

Beriah is a world of instauration (creation and revelation) where a new enworldment can enter Yetzirah, always ex nihilo, effecting radical expansion and reordering of subjects (ruach), how they enworld themselves (nefesh), on the whole and in part, in actual life. Amidst this change to ruach and its enworldment, a higher self maintains its continuity in Beriah as neshama. Conversion experiences are of Beriah, and they are understood in the mode of drash, homiletically, in pure and spontaneous interpretive application without objective construal, disclosing everything as belonging within an intuited, given enworldment. Beriah is where enworldments differentiate themselves within an infinite field, where difference is possible in principle.

Atzilut is the world in which all being is rooted, regardless of degree of awareness of this rootedness, in whom all neshama is of common chaya. It is from here that all value flows, and when we feel a rush of intensely inspired gratitude and joy with an epiphany from Beriah, that is the light of Atzilut, the brilliant bloodflow of the world, and it is understanding in the mode of sod. I am almost entirely sure there is much, much more to sod than this, but this is what I have had of it, if I am not mistaken.

For many years, and with increasingly intense focus, instauratio ex nihilo is crucial to me as a designer, philosopher and mystical fanatic.

My live question is cartographic. It is bound up with Beriah, but I’ve wavered on “where” it happens. I think I am moving toward (or into) an understanding that takes Beriah as a holistic world conception that perfects at Malkhut of Beriah, and bursts whole into Yetzirah as its Keter. And what it bursts through is the veil of nihilitude demarcating the worlds. On the side of Beriah, the nihilitude is part of infinitude, but on the side of Yetzirah, it is the outer limit of existence, beyond which there is nothing.

I have learned never to take that nothing on the outer limit of existence at face value. As a designer, as a philosopher and as a mystic I have pressed against the nothingness, and punctured it, and I testify: there is very real, very beautiful being on the other side of it, and if we cross over we return with transformative treasures, the best of which is exnihilist faith.

I am writing this same piece over and over again. I am circling this problem like a GPS satellite, photographing what is below, sending geolocation data down to the surface so I can figure out where I am.

A few years back, my friend Jarrett, team alchemist, gave me a framed print of a Ptolemy, as hermetic cartographer, lunar compass in one hand, solar globe in the other. This demonstrates why I have always loved working on her teams.

The one-question magic interview

Autobiography, Design, Letterpress

Years ago, when I was refocusing my career from the doing of design (and design strategy) to design research, I tried to design a protocol for interviewing my friends.

Part of my motivation was to give my friends the experience design research participant have being interviewed by researchers who are urgently interested in what they have to say. Often they don’t want it to end. They say it is better than therapy. Yet they’re just talking about mundane experiences. Being listened to closely by someone whose entire attention is focused on what you are saying is apparently rare.

So I invented what I thought was a set of fascinating questions. But it sucked. It made people more confused or anxious than inspired. I kept tweaking and tweaking. The more ordinary the questions got, the better the responses.

Eventually, after much experimenting, one question stood out. The interview never made it past this point. People would start talking, and then have an epiphany and try to answer in a new direction. They started playing and creating, and the responses were like a tour of their soul.

Some people told me that experience changed how they saw their lives and themselves.

The question is magic, and now I’m realizing I need to letterpress print it.

The interview is:

If you were writing
your autobiography,
what would be the
table of contents?

The key to the magic: the question invites a person to lay out their values architecture — to articulate the schema of what matters in their life.

Service design rhetoric (notes on a WIP)

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I think I am making progress on developing simple ways to talk about service design beyond the service system engineering most service designs do.

Before I start, though, I want to clarify something: I’m not knocking service system engineering. It is hugely important, and this is why organizations buy it. An organization with broken touchpoints and unintegrated operations is going to be so nonfunctional it will be unable to do anything else. Broken touchpoints is pretty easy to do. Integrating operations to enable them to deliver adequate, seamless service is something service design is better at doing than any other profession. Solid service system engineering is a necessary condition for both adequate service and exceptional service. But service system engineering is only a sufficient condition for adequate service. For exceptional services that inspire personal loyalty from not only those who receive it, but also those who deliver and support it, design of value exchanges is needed. And the more exceptional and the more inspiring the service aspires to be the more it needs to get serious about personal meaning and motivation.

Scrap 1: Essential services and organizational “knitbones”

This sets the stage for the rhetoric I’m developing today. It all centers on a concept: essential service. Essential service is what separates a functional socially engineered adequate service from exceptional, inspired designed services.

A person’s essential service is that thing they do for others that gives their life purpose and meaning. Perhaps we all have an essential service, if we discover what it is and find an organization that allows us to provide it. But in reality only some lucky souls find such opportunities,

Let’s call such lucky souls a “knitbone” service actor, after the knitbone plant, also known as comfrey, a plant known for its soil enrichment capabilities. A knitbone plant has a deep taproot that extends to layers of earth inaccessible to other plants and draws nourishment up to the surface. Wherever knitbone is planted, neighboring plants flourish. This is why wise gardeners plant knitbone throughout their gardens.

Service design applies the same principle to organizations. Service design tries to strategically place knitbone service actors where they can infuse meaning into their organizations. If they are on the front lines, the service they provide is felt as genuine and valuable to those who receive the service. They make strong positive brand impressions, and cultivate external brand relationships. If they support the service at or behind the front lines, they generate a culture of meaning for other employees or partners responsible for delivering or supporting services.

A knitbone service actor is inwardly motivated to perform their essential service. The value of doing this service is intrinsic to its performance. A knitbone requires little to no external motivation. There is no need for carrots nor sticks nor monitoring. They only need opportunities to perform this service, which means 1) finding other people who need and value this service, and 2) receiving whatever supporting services from other people they need to perform their own essential service effectively.

Perhaps not everyone in an organization has an essential service. Some job roles might be intrinsically motivated by anyone. I think neither of these are true, but it doesn’t matter if you disagree with me. The goal is not to achieve some perfect utopia of an entirely inspired intrinsically motivated organization. The goal is to approach it and achieve it as much as possible.

And if the vision of this kind of organization is not intrinsically compelling, and you need external motivations to care about it, consider these:

  • External motivations encourage artificial behaviors that leave neutral or negative impressions, and do not inspire loyalty. It all feels phony, empty and “corporate”.
  • External motivations are expensive. If someone wants to do something anyway, you don’t have to pay them as much as you do to get someone to do something they loathe and resent being made to do.
  • Systems designed for external motivation are expensive. The infrastructure required to monitor and enforce behavioral compliance cost a lot of money to establish, maintain and staff.
  • Externally motivated organizations will struggle to retain precisely the most valuable talent (aka its knitbone employees) who will leave the minute they have an opportunity to find a more supportive and inspiring environment.

Wow, I am starting to seriously love my magical knitbone symbol.

Scrap 2: Start with service experiences, and operationalize backwards

Another point is equally important, and complementary to essential services and knitbone service actors.

It is simple: Services should begin with service experiences and develop systematized operational capabilities to support such experiences.

Fact is, the exact opposite happens.

The way most organizations evolve is function first. The organization is organized into units that develop and perform key organizational functions. The organization needs financial accounting and other money stuff to get taken care of? Establish a finance function to cover it. Computers are important? Establish an IT function. The organization needs to get the word out and persuade customers to buy their product? Marketing. If a need arises, and none of the existing units can do it, that means it’s time to form another functional unit.

Each of these units develops its capabilities mostly in isolation from one another. And with rare exceptions, the people who will use these capabilities are barely even considered, much less involved in the development.

At the tail end of this process comes a patching-together attempt, and it is usually only patched for the customers, not the hapless souls on the front line stuck with using them to try to deliver decent services to these customers. And those who try to support the front line in various ways also struggle with the sticked together pieces-parts frankenstein monster that is their organization.

Trying to reform the organization for service is an enormous task, which involves the deepest, most complicated and difficult organizational problems involving desirability, feasibility and viability imaginable. It is at minimum three highly demanding jobs.

Postscript: More whining about the missing two-thirds of the service trio

But service design is still an immature discipline that not only lacks a service system engineering role (equivalent to the software engineer role in the classic product trio) and a service manager role (equivalent to the product manager role) — it lacks awareness that this is a problem.

And because it is way, way, way too big a job for any one person, it succumbs to the managerial/technik habit of dropping Why, and focusing solely on What and How, and in effect reduces itself to service systems engineering, enhanced with amateurish attempts at business strategy. And the profession begins to attract service system technicians who don’t even miss the desirability part of the work. And the profession as a whole devolves into a dry flavor of management consulting increasingly incapable of delivering anything inspiring or meaningful.

Distillation-in-progress

Design

To the degree a people system harnesses and serves felt and motivating value, that system will depend upon design methods for its success.

To the degree a people system is driven by coercion, that system may be socially engineered.

Most organizations are somewhere in the middle region, maybe 61.8% toward the social engineered side. These organizations use bribes, blackmail and sub-volitional manipulation (aka “behavioral economics”) to turn its unwilling gears.

A better balance would be 61.8% toward design. It would locate the inward resources of the organization — the essential services that flow meaning into the lives of those who are given the conditions to give their gift — to infuse the organization with vitality, and the charisma that naturally radiates from organizations animated by genuine desire to serve.

An example: Schools who hire motivated teachers and manage the school with the goal of supporting the teaching every born teacher naturally does will produce vital classrooms that engage and inspire students to learn and develop. This cannot happen in institutions that assume that teachers must be mechanically motivated, carrot-and-stick style. They “run the organization like a business”, setting quantifiable objectives, establishing rewards for achieving these objectives and punishments for falling short of them. This requires systems for providing visibility to the rewarding, punishing bureaucracy. Schools must “instrument” instruction so compliance to procedure may be monitored and enforced and effectiveness measured and rewarded or punished. All this diverts attention away from the teaching itself, requires hours of off-hours drudgery and causes frustration and eventual burnout. But this is not such a big problem, because the system is designed to run entirely without morale.

But this makes schools into joyless, meaningless places that all but a few students hate. So the students, also must be driven by external rewards and punishments, as opposed to an intrinsic desire to learn. This, too, is ideal for a world where businesses are “run like a business” and employees are driven to goals like stubborn mules with carrots and sticks.

Another example is healthcare. The best nurses are inwardly driven by an innate need to give care. In my own field research, I’ve been shocked at how much resistance and strain this care-drive will tolerate. But if nurses are subjected to excessive commercial, managerial and logistical duties, this depletes them of time, morale and other personal resources required to deliver the care their patients desperately need. They get stretched thin and worn down by tasks entirely unrelated to care. Healthcares facilities run this way become “clinical” — impersonal, dehumanizing, degrading and scary places.

And of course, businesses “run like businesses” are the same way. They harass, coerce, intimidate, humiliate their employees, subject them to utter chickenshit then pour bullshit onto the chickenshit, and then demand in return compelled bullshit from the employees. They must pretend to respect purposeless tedium and to feel bullshit “passion” for soulless drivel no human being could possible care about.

No organization, business or otherwise should be “run like a business”, because this is code for imposition of technik managerialism which masters What and How and the expense of authentic, felt, motivating Why, replacing it with the managerial technik counterfeit: “in-order-to”.

I just talked to Susan about what essential Why is.

Essential Why is utterly non-rational and non-technical. It has no “in-order-to” because it is itself the in-order-to for the sake of which everything else is done. It is the motivation and meaning and purpose that drives everything else.

When someone asks us “why?” of our essential Why, we have no answer. If we are in touch with our own truth, we’ll say, this is what we are about. It is the heart of the value of everything else. It is the meaning of my life. Or we just confess ignorance. “I don’t know. I just love it.”

But if we’re dominated by managerial / technik worldview, we’ll confabulate an in-order-to. We’ll pretend it has a function. “I’m visiting Rome in order to get some R&R so I can return to my work refreshed.” Whatever.

I offered her an old myth I made up. I said the Scientific Revolution made the understanding of nature much easier by focusing solely on What and How, and excluding Why from the problem.

It is a little like picking a restaurant. Two people can easily find a place. Adding a third makes it much harder.

Science has made enormous progress by excluding Why considerations from its problems. A scientist seeking a scientific account of a natural phenomenon asks What the relevant elements are and How they behave together as a system. This has worked spectacularly well. We can now force nature to do many things beyond the imagination of anyone living three centuries ago.

But success can be our worst enemy. We have over applied exclusion of Why to just about every sphere of life, even places like politics and even religion to where Why is essential. Why should never have been excluded from business.

And that is why we are suffering a nihilism pandemic.

We have excluded Why from too many places that most social systems available to us drive us like demotivated mules until we are demotivated mules.

And, despite what young managerials say, this is not “because of capitalism.” There has never been deeper, depressing, cynical nihilism anywhere on this earth than in places where Marxism was attempted.

The problem is the scientism, managerialism, technik, interminable chains of in-order-to, Whyless functionalism that is the root of scientistic, technocratic governance of every soulless organization of every scale, from global bureaucracies, to nation states, to the kinds of loveless marriage this Whylessness makes inevitable.

Kabbalah and design

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

People ask me how kabbalah relates to design. Here is how:

To nefesh in Assiyah, whole means comprehensive system.
To ruach in Yetzirah, whole means gestalt given.
To neshemah in Beriah, whole means enworldment.
To chayah in Atzilut, whole means atonement.

In Atzilut, only the One is whole, transcendent.
In Beriah, wholes are enworldments, given ex nihilo, revealed-created, instaurated.
In Yetzirah, wholes are given gestalts, conceived.
In Assiyah, wholes are comprehensive systems, constructed.

The Whyless philosophy

Design, Philosophy, Trefoil

It all really just keeps coming back to Liz Sanders, doesn’t it?

Our working philosophies are color-blind to meaning.

Our philosophy has What and How receptors, but lacks receptors for Why.

Through this Whyless philosophy we look at something that is useful and usable and otherwise functionally valuable, and are unable to distinguish it from something desirable. It’s the same dull blue-gray color, whether we are drawn to it for mysterious reasons or because it is more convenient, effective, efficient or reliable.

We cannot help thinking that Why is another What-How function. We ask “why?”, expecting an in-order-to. Why isn’t like that. Why doesn’t ask, because it knows. It intuits value spontaneously, directly. It is like perceiving a color.

I have actually had designers say: “If it is useful and usable, doesn’t that make it desirable?”

I think we know better. We just don’t know what to do with it.

Notice, I dont say that we are color blind to meaning, only that our philosophies are.

This means that we can intuit meaning, but when we try to talk about it, or think about it, or account for it, or justify it we find ourselves unable to do justice to our experience. And many of us are in the habit of invalidating these things we cannot talk about.

Years ago my friend Jokin told me a Basque saying “what has a name is real.” The corollary to that is “what lacks a name is unreal.” One of my job functions as a philosopher is to find concepts and language to do justice to our experiences so they can have names and the dignity of reality.

I can do this job because, for whatever reason, I refuse to deny any of my experiences reality, just because my philosophy is inadequate to it. My inclination is to take these experiences seriously and explore them to see what they’re all about. In some ways, I love philosophy because I am more independent from and less dependent on my philosophy, so I can tinker with it, without becoming too horribly schizophrenic for prolonged periods of time. Instead, I become moderately schizophrenic in short bursts, maybe most of the time.

And our meaning-blind philosophy has a way of disposing of unreal experiences. We relegate them to an unreal domain we call “subjectivity.” That is a fantastic place to put it because this same philosophy has no idea whatsoever how subjectivity works, nor how it relates to objectivity. Subjectivity is a realm of pure mistake, distortion and arbitrariness that interferes with our ability to perceive the objective world, which is more or less the exact eversion of what subjectivity is.

These strange analytical problem-solving design disciplines I keep drifting into — first UX design, then strategic design, then service design — all seem to attract practitioners with meaning-blindness. Back in the day, UX was overflowing with project managers, who saw the work as a conceptual closet organizing endeavor, and cognitive scientists, who thought the job was a matter of schema-matching between a user’s understanding and navigation structures.

It seems I’m always fighting for desirability as an irreducible element of design against people who don’t even seem aware that it is core to their job.

But I find design to be pure drudgery if desirability is not a part of it. Or, I guess I could say that only desirability makes design desirable for me.

And people wonder why our lives are so meaningless. Or they don’t wonder, but rather explain it away with one of the prefab diagnoses the Whyless philosophy provides nihilist malcontents.

When our organizations, our services, our products, our spaces are designed only for function, what do we expect to happen?

The service design industry has responded to AI disruption by zigging directly into radical Whylessness.

I am zagging.

Service system engineering

Design

If service design becomes alienated from the pluralism at the root of all design praxis, it devolves into social engineering — the construction of systems assembled from nonhuman and dehumanized, choiceless human components.

Service design is only design to the degree that it maintains awareness of the humanity and freedom of the service actors who participate in the social systems we develop, and serves precisely this humanity, this freedom in participation.

Designers are designers only when they are tacking between multiple first-person perspectives:

  • Their own first-person design perspective which combines pluralism and craft
  • The perspectives of their clients and stakeholders
  • The perspectives of the service actors who will eventually participate in the service system they are designing

The tricky part of this is that client and stakeholder perspectives are rarely pluralistic, and these are the people with whom service designers collaborate. Paradoxically, if designers empathize too strongly and for too long with their client collaborators, and become too fluent in their language and too reliant on their key concepts, they can lose touch with their design perspective.

They can “go native” in the corporate world, and adopt as their own primary perspective that of management, technology and technocrats. And from that perspective, the perspectives and experiences of service actors will lose importance, and become secondary to behaviors.

This is the first factor in service design’s collective alienation from design.

A second factor compounds the first: where services are seriously broken at a fundamental, functional level, functional fixes are sufficient. A service designer can employ the engineering aspects of our discipline and dispense with the design part, and just by fixing the most egregious malfunction, still provide enormous value.

Service design is one of the few fields that approach organizational operations comprehensively and systematically. We have methods in our toolbox that can effectively fix this kind of breakdown. Service designers are a pretty good fit for solving operation systems problems.

But a more mature service systems field would, like every other mature design discipline, provide designers with an engineering counterpart. This kind of system repair work would be done by a “service systems engineer”.

It is only because this role does not yet exist that service designers do it. But this work can be done perfectly well by non-designers with sufficient training. Identifying operational malfunctions (“pain points”), assessing the behavioral responses to the pain, estimating the business impact of these behaviors, helping organizations prioritize and sequence a repair backlog, and establishing long-term detection-and-repair practices — these are all management and/or system engineering functions. They are colossally important. But they are not design. Calling them “design” just because designers are currently doing it suggests someone might have already fully lost touch with what design essentially is and does.

But there is a third factor, that compounds the already-compounded problem.

Most of the demand for “service design” right now is precisely service systems engineering work.

Service design is still relatively new, and has not yet had time to impact the general quality level of services, like, for instance UX has. Atrocious services are still pretty common, and in some fields where service matters most — healthcare, insurance, telecoms all come to mind — atrocious service is the norm.

It is precisely these fields which hire service designers. They’re all in various stages of emergency. Their roofs are caving in and their toilets are geysering. They’re the ones who call service designers, because they’re the ones with the tools needed to repair these problems.

In deeply broken industries, the advantage goes to the least broken organization. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Competition is relative function versus malfunction.

It is comparable in some ways to the early days of computers, when people got the best functioning one, or the cheapest one, and had no expectations that a computer might be delightful to use, reflect their sensibilities, become something a normal (non-engineer) person could become attached to. At that point in the evolution of the computer industry design was secondary, especially the design of what was on the computer screens.

It is only when functionality becomes table stakes that design comes into its own as design. Everything can be assumed to work, so which option resonates with me as a person. What strikes me as compelling, meaningful and represents or expresses in some unsayable way, who I am and what I care about?

It’s sort of a Maslow’s hierarchy sort of thing:

  1. Does anyone have a use for it?
  2. Does it work at all?
  3. Does it work well? Is it reliable and efficient?
  4. Can people figure out how to use it?
  5. Can people use it easily?
  6. Do people who need it, like it enough to choose it over alternatives?
  7. Do people feel emotionally compelled by it?
  8. Do people value it and want it to be a part of their life?

Design only becomes important somewhere between 4 and 5, and grows more and more indispensable from there.

But service design still operates mainly in the 1-4 range.

Meanwhile, the service designers who excel in the engineering aspects of the discipline are dominating the field and gradually turning it into an engineering consulting profession.

Designers who care about human perspectives, experiences, motivations — what makes people care about things and connect with them — are far less valuable, and will remain so until the field grows up more and the field of competition advances beyond “are we pissing people off?”

But (at least from where I’m standing) the field of service design appears to be optimizing for its engineering and management functions and allowing design to atrophy. The field might even be selecting for non-designers. Indeed, I see vanishingly few virtues of design in the work done by service designers. Outputs are extraordinarily complex and lack all simple, let alone meaningful or inspiring gestalt. They are oriented far more around elimination of flaws and gaps than the presence of positive connection. The whole discipline is dry and technical. The only remaining trace of design left in any of it is better visual production and decoration of deliverables.

Material, medium, form, object

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I’m thinking through the relationship between the essential elements of a design discipline — those things that define any design discipline.

First, though, I want to define design in general against disciplines, with particular emphasis on engineering and art, two domains into which design often blurs. Of course, it is an obnoxious fool’s errand to insist on technical precision in everyday speech, so please take these definitions as intended, as artificial sharpening done for the sake of precise understanding.

Design is the development of systems in which free-willed people participate as essential parts of that system. By free-willed, I mean they can (to some degree) choose whether and how to participate. A designed system is not complete until free-willed people are participating in it. As I have said zillions of times before, this is why design research is part of all design work. A system without free-willed people participating in it is still only an engineered sub-component.

Engineering is the development of systems without free-willed participants. Whatever the materials used in the system, whether concrete or logic, the components behave choicelessly. Often we engineer when we should design. We use various governing techniques to remove choice, so people become engineerable components in our social engineering projects. Or we exclude people from our problem framing, and focus solely on whatever thing we are making, presumably for them, but not in reference to them. Or we make assumptions or speculations that people will behave as we expect and hope. But the engineered thing is viewed as separate from the people who will eventually come along (or not) and try it (or reject it) and adopt it (or abandon it). Design never considers its thing apart from the people interacting with it.

Art is the development of a thing primarily in relation to the artist, and only secondarily to other people. In design, the people for whom the thing is being designed are primary and the designer is present only as a semi-reliable proxy. Some art is more systematic than other art. The essential difference is that art can (and arguably should) be made without involvement of people who will eventually participate in it by experiencing it. Gadamer argues that an artwork is never complete without its audience (and that is where I picked up this line of thought). But while the artwork is being made, the artist is the audience who completes it. While a design is being made, only representative people for whom the designwork is being made are suitable.

The most important difference between design and both art and engineering is that the latter can be done without involvement of other people who might eventually encounter what is being made, where design cannot. Design succeeds or fails by the choices of the free-willed people who are intended to participate in it.

When design becomes stylistic self-expression, it slides into art. When design becomes systems-development and problem-solving and loses touch with the free volition of human participants experiencing these systems from inside, it slides into engineering.

Now, let us establish terms, grounded in some accessible examples. Material, medium, formation, object.

Water is a material that can become a medium for a wave. The wave formation moves through it, by it, as it. A wave can keep moving beyond water, as long as some other material serves as a medium. People playing on the shore can be that material, and this is what happens when we enjoy being tossed by waves. We become a wave medium. So the wave is not essentially water, but the essence of a wave necessarily involves some mediating material. When we look from a distance, at water being moved by a wave formation we see an object: water formed into a wave.

Now, let’s get flaky. Setting aside whether this is real or true, what is meant when someone claims to be a spirit medium? It means that they as a person has become a material (like the water) through which a spirit moves or acts or speaks. The spirit moves, acts or speaks through the medium, by the medium, as the medium (for as long as the medium is serving as a medium). But the spirit does not stop with the medium. It keeps moving. It moves, acts and speaks to the people who witness the mediation, and extend the spiritual motion if they are willing to be moved and perhaps reformed or transformed by what they witness.

Design involves a variety of materials, some physical, like water, and some mental (mind-like), like our spirit medium example. Some of the forms conveyed or transmitted through media is mechanical force of the kind engineers harness, and some of the forms are ideational, emotional, symbolic (like the forms inherent in television or social media content) and some is behavioral, a mixture of physical and mental, ranging from mostly physical, unconscious reflexes to fully deliberate volitions (imitation or fashion trends among people).

The most complex material designers have learned to shape is the densely hybrid material known as organization.

This is the material the discipline of service design shapes.

Of course, organizations can be decomposed into a vast variety of materials, but this only complicates and confuses matters.

A fanciful analogy: Imagine a choreographer, who works with the material of human bodies in motion, who decides to chart, not only the movements of his dancer’s limbs, but the entire physiology, internal and external, of each dancer. He is not wrong that these materials move with the body, but this additional data overwhelms and obscures his orchestrated bodies-in-motion problem without adding much or anything of value, and demonstrates not thoroughness but shallowness of understanding of the essence of the choreographer’s craft. Indeed, compulsive thoroughness is symptomatic of lack of depth of understanding, and is a kind of compensation. When the intellect cannot penetrate deeper or saturate into what it seeks to know, it splatters, spreads out or piles up upon the surface of the matter. Ironically, this dense breadth is misnomically called “going into depth” but depth is precisely what it lacks. Depth abstracts precisely the simple essence of a matter, and allows the concrete details around it to logically crystallize around it. A dancer’s internal organs will take care of themselves if the choreographer focuses on dance movements.

So, the material of service design is organizations.

What is its medium, and what forms are conveyed via this medium?

The medium is behaviors — more specifically interactions between service actors, some of which are human and many of which are not (thank you, Bruno Latour!), across interfaces of myriad types. Currently, service design is still drowning in philosophical debt from its origination in customer experience design (a customer-centered flavor of HCD) that it focuses its attention on customer touch-points, but this only a subset of the many interfaces by which a service is woven together. Service design is drowning in philosophical debt from building itself out from a CX philosophy, and endlessly hacking and patching its methods on this inadequate, monocentric philosophical platform. (And tragically, because service design is becoming a handmaiden to journey management, which is also customer-centered in its logic, and the technological platforms being used as journey management infrastructure follows this logic, it looks more likely that service design will regress than progress.)

Now we have the material of service design, which is organizations.

And we have the medium, which is interactions via interfaces.

What is the form conveyed through this medium? Value exchanges! Each interaction directly or indirectly moves value among actors. This movement is what animates services and organizations (in two senses of the word: setting them in motion and ensouling them).

And, finally, what is the object service design produces? A network of brand relationships, each a perception of the organization, experienced as a boundary object. Brands are so much more complex than most people have the philosophical capacity to understand.

Let’s try this framework out on UX for a moment. Material: digital technology. Medium: human-computer interactions. Form: experience (of momentary value exchange!). Object: Digital thing (product, app, website, game, etc.)

A managerial cannot distinguish the form (experience) from the object, because they are exclusively objective, meaning they have access only to one objectivity (aka subject). So when they say they are building an experience, they are referring to the artifact they are coding. And they can build it just fine without involvement of people. And if the experience they build has usability problems, no problem. The experience was “instrumented” and the problems can be caught and corrected. So the experience is always improving.

But the experience actual people have — the experience designers are concerned with — does not improve. Because when they open their app to use it, they never know what to expect. It is constantly changing. They are constantly required to relearn it. And half of what they use has not been properly tested. They themselves are the usability test. Which means they are constantly subjected to usability problems of various kinds.

If you look at it this way — again, the way designers see it — it is not hard to see that this is an atrocious experience, however much the product itself improves. But managerials don’t look at it this way. They see only things, not people experiencing things over time.

A service designer sees it even more clearly. Product managers are backstage actors who shape the delivery of a service, which is the management of an experience of a digital product over a long span of time. And these services are profoundly broken because on the whole the field of product management is oblivious to the fact they are not managing a product, but service actors — custodians of a long customer experience that needs even more management than their product does.

I do sometimes bridle at service designer games which reduce every product to services, but here it sheds very useful light on the true nature of product management.

And that light becomes glaring when we look at product managers the same way we look at frontline service actors, for example, call center agents. The worst customer experience problems we find in call centers often originate in poorly conceived scorecards, that put agents’ and customers’ goals at odds with one another. The agents are evaluated by how much they can upsell and cross sell, or how quickly they can resolve a call. They are misaligned with what customers need, which is focused help achieving their own goal of getting help, or buying something inexpensive that fits their modest needs. Likewise, product managers are often evaluated by their productivity, that is how frequently and how much they are able to improve (aka change) their products. But if users need a reliable, steady tool that they can learn once and keep using, these changes harm the experience of the product, which, to say it again, is not the awesomeness of the digital thing frozen at some point in its development. Far from it.

A few ideas that emerged organically in this post that I want to catalogue for future development.

    The concept of philosophical debt. Think of this as the compounding accumulation of theories, practices and general praxis upon a misconceived point of departure, which requires eventual change of paradigm, and the discarding of many core tools and methods (redescription of Kuhn, for managerials)
    The idea of nonhuman service actors as service actors, an idea lifted directly from Latour, who always saw social orders constituted of nonhuman actors as well as human ones. Service design will probably have to catch up with Latour now, with AI agents functioning more like human actors than tech platforms.
    Design discipline defined by material, medium, form, object. It seems to me these have been smeared together, and it has caused quite a bit of methodological confusion. Most super-clever managerials are eager to avoid the inefficiency of involving service actors directly in design practices and lack philosophical capacity to grasp why this is disastrous.
    “Managerials” as a pejorative, for managers of people, products, journeys who take engineering approaches to design problems. Because they are unable to understand pluralistically in a variety of first-person terms about human interactions with each other and with nonhuman actors — they think from the one first-person perspective that dominates corporate life, a technicic objectivity that renders everything an object that behaves in quantifiable ways, and may be made, through engineering approaches, to behave differently. Whatever a managerial touches becomes social engineering. I think James Burnham influenced this coinage.

Knitbone manifesto

Design, Star

Part 1: The Hidden Costs of Carrot and Stick Management

Most organizations, as mechanically efficient as they aspire to be, motivate people very wastefully.

Instead of understanding people’s natural intrinsic motivations — their sources of meaning, fulfillment, inspiration, resilience and endurance — they rely on artificial extrinsic motivations. These positive and negative external motivations are often referred to as “carrots and sticks”.

No organization can entirely dispense with external motivations, for the simple fact that many employees are largely externally motivated. But some are not, and when employees who are internally motivated cannot find an outlet for them, and are managed as if they must be externally motivated, bad things happen, which we will discuss.

Let us call the habitual overuse of external motivations “carrot and stick management”.

Instead of creating conditions where people have opportunities to do the kind of work they feel called to do, carrot and stick management prefers bribes, blackmail and psychological manipulation to extract behaviors from their human resources.

Here are some downsides to carrot and stick management:

First, there is the expense of the carrots and sticks themselves. When work is a labor of love, people naturally work tirelessly just for the reward of doing it. When work is a labor of getting paid and not suffering consequences of noncompliance, pay must increase accordingly. Penalizing noncompliance also is not cheap; it requires documented processes. Carrot and stick management squanders cash on artificial motivations required to make folks do what they don’t want to do because natural motivations are lacking.

Second, carrot and stick requires considerable bureaucratic overhead, which is costly to create and maintain. In order to properly reward the desired behaviors and to correct or punish undesirable ones, managers must monitor those behaviors. They must build expensive technologies, establish reporting processes and enforce compliance, because these are dull activities people avoid if they can. Carrot and stick management squanders money and time on artificial motivation technologies and processes.

Third, carrot and stick management wastes an organization’s deepest and best resources — passions that, if channeled into the work, could infuse energy and vibrancy into the organization. Instead these passions are channeled into evenings, weekends, vacations and hopes for a better career elsewhere, where they are valued. The organization, instead of benefitting from these gifts, is resented for rejecting, undermining and obstructing them. And people are left feeling coerced, dehumanized, devalued and unfulfilled, which, for obvious reasons, is corrosive to an organization’s culture and contributes to turnover. Carrot and stick management squanders employees’ and partners’ morale, energy and desire to give.

Finally, demoralized people are demoralizing to interact with. Even if they stay at a job they don’t like and try with all their might to hide their feelings or numbness, they’ll behave in a spiritless, artificial and slightly phony, scripted way. They feel “corporate” in the worst sense of the word, and even the most perfectly executed corporateness is impossible to like. Brands that feel corporate do not inspire positive feelings or personal connection, and undermine brand relationship. Carrot and stick management squanders brand equity.

Part 2: Lessons of the Knitbone

Knitbone is the folk name for the comfrey plant (Symphytum officinale), a plant prized for a great many useful properties.

Traditionally, it has been used medicinally, especially to make poultices which help a wounded body heal itself. A knitbone poultice applied to a broken bone helps it knit itself back together. When my wife gave birth to our first daughter, our midwife prepared a poultice from knitbone we grew in our own back yard garden to help her recover.

But the knitbone used in the poultice had been planted for an entirely different purpose. We planted it in order to improve the soil in our herb garden.

The leaves of the knitbone are extraordinarily rich in minerals, and when they shed and fall onto the ground, they enrich the soil. They create a sort of fertile poultice for the plants around it. A knitbone ripples rings of vitality into all neighboring plants, which is why gardeners plant knitbone throughout their gardens.

Why does the knitbone have this effect on living things? The secret is its roots. When a knitbone is planted, it drops a taproot into the ground, which burrows into the earth, deeper and deeper, sometimes ten feet or more into layers of earth otherwise unreachable, drawing obscure, buried resources up to the sunny surface, where they can be accessed by other plants, animals and human healers.

Part 3: Restart with Whys

My essential service is understanding other people’s driving Why — those natural intrinsic motivations that give a person a sense of fulfillment and life purpose.

Before we can understand what a driving Why is we need to understand what it means to ask a why question.

Because most of us suffer a kind of philosophical color-blindness. Just as the retina of a color-blind person is missing a color receptor, our vision of work is missing a whole category of understanding.

We lack a Why receptor. We have only What and How receptors.

So when we ask Why, we perceive only a What-How answer. We expect an in-order-to response.

Why do you go to work? In order to get paid. Why do you need to get paid? In order to pay my bills and build savings. Why do you need to pay your bills? Why do you need to save money?

Of course, most of what we normally do all day is stuff we do in order to do other stuff, in order to… in order to…

And that is fine, as long as one condition is met: the in-order-to chain is grounded in something that is done for its own sake. It is done for no other reason except its own value.

Here there is no in-order-to. The answer to Why is “I cannot say why.” It is what I do. It is what gives my life purpose. I do it because I love it.

This is what the question Why seeks, and the response cannot be given in language. It is given in feeling and action. Words, at best indicate it, but when they are expected to give that Why, the meaning is lost entirely.

But if a person’s chain of in-order-to is plugged into Why it is all charged with significance. A person feels motivated to do x in order to do y, and z when the connection with Why is felt.

Further, an organization where Why is felt by enough people also enjoys a purposeful culture. Meaning is in the air and infuses the work, even for people who are largely externally motivated. The activities, expressions and outputs of internally motivated people enrich the soil of the organization, and the culture of the organization is nourishing.

People are not motivated by the slogans or mission statements or strategies or justifications of strategies. They are motivated by the energy, the sense of purpose, of importance, the atmosphere of intrinsic motivation.

To achieve this, it is of the highest importance for organizations to start accounting for their stores of intrinsic motivations, and ensure they aren’t wasting or blocking them.

It must understand where these driving Whys may naturally be designed into its operations, so they drive the organization in the direction it is trying to go. And so these driving Whys animate its interactions with customers, who feel and appreciate its charismatic sincerity.

It also must understand where people need these gifts from others — where someone who needs to be needed in a particular way — who wants to give their essential service — can serve another person who needs it. Whether this happens externally — for example when a customer who needs technical assistance is helped by someone who feels personal fulfillment using their expertise — or internally — for example a junior employee is mentored by a senior leader who wants to share her hard-earned wisdom — an internal exchange of value is a win-win.

These win-win points are the energy generators in an organization. This is where the organization provides opportunities for people to give what they need to give, and receive what they need to receive. This is where people feel gratitude and loyalty to one another and to the organization that mediated the exchange.

The choreography of these win-win value exchanges, and all the other value exchanges that power the human interactions that constitute the organization is the very heart of the work service design does.

Service design shapes, as its material, everything that makes up an organization, so it can mediate value exchanges among those who participate in it, whether receiving its products and services (as a customer) or delivering or supporting it. Whatever various materials are used, what sets the whole system in motion — what animates it and gives it vitality — is the exchange of value.

The material of service design is organizations; its medium is exchange of value, and the most vivifying value, the lifeblood that makes the system a living organic system and not a soulless mechanical system, is the driving Whys, the essential services that come from people who have found purpose serving within the organization.

A note on “Creation redescription”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but negation does not negate or exclude or subtract from infinity, it negates, excludes, subtracts within infinity, as an intrinsic part of infinity. Oblivion is essential to infinity, and nihilitude is a fine name for it. Nihilitude makes finitude possible and actual within infinitude.

Nihilitude can be seen as a distributed tzimtzum. In Sloterdijk’s idiom, where tzimtzum suggests a grand cosmic sphere of divine nothingness, nihilitude suggests a whole spherology of scales, of granularities. Nihilitude can be a foam, or a bubble, or a globe, or an everything-sized universe or even a more-than-everything-size metaphysics.

As a designer, I constantly encounter piercing of foam-scale nihilitude — “oh, wow, I never noticed that!” — “oh, I see what you mean, and now I can’t see it any other way!” — “Oh, I heard it differently, but now I’m hearing it your way!” — “This. Changes. Everything.” — We paper these events over with opaque language. But I see and cannot unsee them as everyday minor miracles.

I didn’t always see things this way. The meta-event of coming to see these everyday surprises as minor miracles came as a piercing of a slightly larger bubble-scale nihilitude. It was a paradigm shift — a localized conversion experience, that jostled my overall enworldment but did not burst it.

But several times in my life I have burst my enworldment. My ultimate, outermost heaven-dome was pierced. An epiphany irrupted into what seemed given, and forced a rippling comprehensive transformation of everything-all-at-once. The first time it happened it seemed like truth itself had exploded into what had been pure enslavement to convention, and that was true as far as it went.

But when this happened again, and then again, an even stranger epiphany pierced of an even vaster sphere of nihilitude.

Etcetera, ad infinitum, ex nihilo.

The creativity that we know is combination of givens we have passively received.

The nothing we know is just exclusion from a finite everything that, to us, seems limitless because it is bounded by oblivion, a nothingness that is absence precisely when it is present.

And the infinity we know is the endless concatenation of whatever givens we have been given, ex nihilo, and therefore with nothing beyond it.

Jacob’s Lattice

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

In the Jacob’s Ladder figure (which a designer might be tempted to call Jacob’s Lattice), four Sefirot appear in vertical arrangement, each a world, overlapping at Malchut-Keter.

The terminal consummation at the foot of the world above (its fully realized Malchut) initiates the world below (that world’s Keter). Each world is suspended between an inheritance and a bequeathal, a coronation (Keter) and a kingdom (Malchut). The King is dead; long live the King.

Each world is the emergence of a category of transpiration. A mode of transpiring transpires.

In Beriah, creation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate emanated world, Malchut of Atzilut, culminating in a consummate creational world (Malchut of Beriah) where formation can commence (Keter of Yetzirah). Here transpires creatio ex nihilo: something from nothing.

In Yetzirah, formation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate created world, Malchut of Beriah, culminating in a consummate formational world (Malchut of Yetzirah) where actualization can commence (Keter of Assiyah). Here transpires formatio ex spiritu: something from something.

In Assiyah, actuality transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate formal world, Malchut of Yetzirah, culminating in a consummate actual world (Malchut of Assiyah). Here transpires ars ex formatione: thing from something — first, inception of an idea, then its unfolding as multiple possibilities, then development as one specific possibility, then finally to full actualization as a voiced word or physical act or artifact — a material actuality.

If material is invited to reciprocate — as it should, for this is the material dialogue of craft — the influence ripples back upwards. Material responds to actions, actions respond to form, form responds to creation, and presses into inconceivability, impossibility — nihilo —

…And sometimes a response issues from the emanative beyond — a divine echo of creation, revelation from nowhere, revelatio ex nihilo, also known as inspiration. Some shocking, inconceivable impossibility is conceived as a given possibility.

And when this happens, two things happen. The qualitative meaning of infinity is experienced directly as radical surprise. And the person who receives the surprise is transformed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, occasionally completely, and neither they nor the world they now inhabit is ever the same again.

Conversion is reenworldment ex nihilo. With a sufficient number of reenworldments, a person might become metaconverted to a world of enworldment, where reenworldment ex nihilo is permanently possible and forever expected. Such a person can never take nothingness, inconceivability or impossibility at face value ever again, for nothingness is the tender mask of infinity, worn for our own fragile finitude.

Let us call this metaconversion exnihilism.

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Star

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.

Presequence, consequence, richness

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

A statement is made in the nexus of two implicate meanings, one preceding it as an implicit question to which it is an answer, and another following it as every possible practical response implied in what is stated. To understand a statement is to understand both the presequent and consequent implicate meanings, together in one thrust of meaning.

Hermeneutic presequence — an implicit question, to which the statement is a response.

Pragmatic consequence — the full set of ramifying practical implication that follow from a statement.

The range of possible hermeneutic presequences and pragmatic consequences varies from philosophy to philosophy, and can be called its semantic scope. Semantic scope is the ideal set of every possible meaning a philosophy can attempt to express, however well or poorly it expresses them, and whether or not it actually makes the attempt.

Three important notes:

First, the range of possible meanings should not be confused with realities to which a meaning refers. The latter should be called metaphysical scope. A philosophy with large semantic scope might focus densely on a narrow metaphysical scope, and a philosophy with narrow semantic scope might extend itself across a vast metaphysical scope.

Second, there is no accessible superset of semantic scopes. Every semantic scope appears to itself to be the ultimate superset, and whatever stands beyond it lacks sense, and may, more often than not, really be nonsense. But claims of nonsense cannot be proven, especially if we take hermeneutic presequence seriously, as heirs of positivism rarely do.

Third, this framing distinguishes ontology from metaphysics. Ontology belongs to semantic scope, not to metaphysical scope.

A fourth note is even more important: The overlap of meanings and practical responses to meanings in realities, especially social realities (collaboratively generated), has a perceptible positive quality. Pluralism is not only an accommodation for many various solitary individuals, it makes shared realities more tangibly, richly real. In this richness we feel the presence of other souls and the value of this reality and its sharedness.

A corollary of the fourth note: If semantic scope is shared between people, this opens the way to expansion of metaphysical scope. Shared semantic scope enables showing and sharing more and more reality.