This is something very much worth letterpress printing.
I do not see how I can go on without a printing press.
Some other things I want to print:
The Pragmatic Maxim: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception — and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. — Charles Sanders Peirce”
The full Shema prayer in Hebrew and English. Basically, I want to print the full text of a mezuzah, but printed and with translation.
Pesach Seder chapbooks (this is ambitious. I will design these specifically to “wear it well” — bearing the patina of wine and food stains with grace, like a yixing teapot, an oriental carpet, a well-used lugged steel bicycle, one of Christopher Alexander’s clay garden path tiles, or an old family Bible. We need more things in our lives who gain, not lose, value through wear!)
The Emerald Tablet. (I already typeset this, too.)
Phi (the Golden Ratio) to the 10,000th decimal place. (I already typeset this, too.)
My weird little snakes and trees poem, which I’ve been rewriting since the early 2000s, and I believe accurately anticipated the absurd metanaivety of now, a time when fancy folks using fancy jargon naively accept at face value their theory-infused perceptions of other folk’s naive perceptions, without a twinge of irony. A gorging ouroboros, starving as it stuffs itself on itself.
Or maybe I should just write and print my Enworldment book one chapbook at a time.
My very next project, though, is re-printing the Sefirot on a variety of papers (some hand-made) that are wandering their way across the country to my door. And hopefully, a third plate will also arrive from the die-maker soon, and unlike the first two, will be unblemished. I’m doing all these with the magical glow-gold ink I used on the 2025 pi posters.
In 2022 I made a poster for Pi Day. It was pi to the first 10,000th place, color laser printed on a 10.5 x 17″ sheet of some kind of fancy paper and each digit was color coded.
This year I did a follow-up project. Even in 2022, I originally wanted letterpress print the poster. I sent out for estimates, but it was too expensive. But now, I have access to a letterpress studio, and have begun relearning the craft.
And so I spent the first two weekends of February 2025 with master letterpress printer and print studio owner Bryan Baker and my old friend Brian McGee cranking out the Pi Day 2025 poster on letterpress. It is the same size as before (so it matches the first edition), but is now printed for real, with proper Gutenberg technology, with each digit inkily mashed down into the paper.
Instinctively I’ve always designed a particular way. I have always looked for a clear and simple inspiration to animate my design work and to invest whatever artifact I design with life. My philosophy only articulates my intuitive practice. My philosophy is probably useful only for others who already work in an intuitive way similar to how I work and who need concepts, reasons and language to explain and justify it. My philosophy won’t enable anyone to design any differently than they normally design.
(I realized I’ve lapsed into believing that my philosophy guides or shapes my practice. It doesn’t. Philosophy is primarily my defense against interference.)
There is no shortage of expertise in the world. Nor is there a shortage of knowledge, or of skill, or of intelligence, nor of diligence, ambition or industriousness. These are commodities. They are crucially important, indispensable commodities — but we have a glut of them.
Where we have a crippling shortage is inspiration and hope.
A passage in the latter stood out to me, where he describes something he calls “critical barbarity”. This is most certainly a phenomenon, I’ve seen too much of in the last decade, when critique gathered steam and inflated a great many people with hot air. Today people who haven’t cracked a philosophy or sociology book in a decade or more run around dismissing all kinds of things as “constructions” (for instance money, race, sex), while invoking indisputable fact (for instance, history, physics, critical theory) to justify the necessity of all kinds of ideological intrusions.
The selective skepticism and credulousness can seem like hypocrisy, but I believe it is truly innocent. And not only innocent; for all its talk of critical self-awareness, it is naive.
Latour describes how this naivety is maintained:
…the cruel treatment objects undergo in the hands of what I’d like to call critical barbarity is rather easy to undo. If the critical barbarian appears so powerful, it is because the two mechanisms I have just sketched are never put together in one single diagram. Antifetishists debunk objects they don’t believe in by showing the productive and projective forces of people; then, without ever making the connection, they use objects they do believe in to resort to the causalist or mechanist explanation and debunk conscious capacities of people whose behavior they don’t approve of. The whole rather poor trick that allows critique to go on, although we would never confine our own valuables to their sordid pawnshop, is that there is never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position and the fairy position. This is why you can be at once and without even sensing any contradiction (1) an antifetishist for everything you don’t believe in — for the most part religion, popular culture, art, politics, and so on; (2) an unrepentant positivist for all the sciences you believe in — sociology, economics, conspiracy theory, genetics, evolutionary psychology, semiotics, just pick your preferred field of study; and (3) a perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish — and of course it might be criticism itself, but also painting, bird-watching, Shakespeare, baboons, proteins, and so on.
If you think I am exaggerating in my somewhat dismal portrayal of the critical landscape, it is because we have had in e?ect almost no occasion so far to detect the total mismatch of the three contradictory repertoires — antifetishism, positivism, realism — because we carefully manage to apply them on different topics. We explain the objects we don’t approve of by treating them as fetishes; we account for behaviors we don’t like by discipline whose makeup we don’t examine; and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those things that are for us worthwhile matters of concern.
But of course such a cavalier attitude with such contradictory repertoires is not possible for those of us, in science studies, who have to deal with states of a?airs that fit neither in the list of plausible fetishes—because everyone, including us, does believe very strongly in them—nor in the list of undisputable facts because we are witnessing their birth, their slow construction, their fascinating emergence as matters of concern. The metaphor of the Copernican revolution, so tied to the destiny of critique, has always been for us, science students, simply moot. This is why, with more than a good dose of field chauvinism, I consider this tiny field so important; it is the little rock in the shoe that might render the routine patrol of the critical barbarians more and more painful.
At the end of the essay Latour proposes a new critical attitude, which to me looks an awful lot like the attitude held by designers at their mature best:
The solution lies, it seems to me, in this promising word “gathering” that Heidegger had introduced to account for the “thingness of the thing.” …What is presented here is entirely different attitude than the critical one, not a flight into the conditions of possibility of a given matter of fact, not the addition of something more human that the inhumane matters of fact would have missed, but, rather, a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence. Objects are simply a gathering that has failed — a fact that has not been assembled according to due process. The stubbornness of matters of fact in the usual scenography of the rock-kicking objector — “It is there whether you like it or not” — is much like the stubbornness of political demonstrators: “the U.S., love it or leave it,” that is, a very poor substitute for any sort of vibrant, articulate, sturdy, decent, long-term existence. A gathering, that is, a thing, an issue, inside a Thing, an arena, can be very sturdy, too, on the condition that the number of its participants, its ingredients, nonhumans as well as humans, not be limited in advance.
The point here is that each person involved in a matter of concern will bring their own things they believe in more or less, practices and courses of action they prefer more or less, have their own epistemological standards determining what to them seems more or less true and relevant. To determine in advance what will be gathered or not only undermines the sturdiness of what results from the process of bringing social reality into existence.
Cultivating alignment is half the work of solving problems. When we behave as if those who are not already aligned with our way of understanding and acting are interfering with solving the problems we face it exposes a deeper problem: we do not understanding what a political problem is. A political problem is first and foremost an alignment problem! No wonder we can’t solve it — we literally do not know what we are doing.
It is natural for technocrats to confuse technical problems with political ones, but it appears this is no longer going to work. Technocrats will have to forget their expertise bias and relearn politics before we will make any more collective progress.
In the last week something inspiring has come into clear view for me.
It all started when Susan complained to me that she has a dozen urgent projects to do, which all interconnect and play a part in a single overwhelming goal she wants to reach. All the projects need to unfold simultaneously. I suggested she think in terms suggested by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country:
…Dissent, and the group of writers around it, felt able to dispense with membership in a movement. They were content simply to throw themselves into a lot of campaigns. By “campaign, ” I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called “the passion of the infinite.” They are exemplified by Christianity and by Marxism, the sort of movements which enable novelists like Dostoevsky to do what Howe admiringly called “feeling thought.”
Membership in a movement requires the ability to see particular campaigns for particular goals as parts of something much bigger, and as having little meaning in themselves. Campaigns for such goals as the unionization of migrant farm workers, or the overthrow (by votes or by force) of a corrupt government, or socialized medicine, or legal recognition of gay marriage can be conducted without much attention to literature, art, philosophy, or history. But movements levy contributions from each of these areas of culture. They are needed to provide a larger context within which politics is no longer just politics, but rather the matrix out of which will emerge something like Paul’s “new being in Christ” or Mao’s “new socialist man.” Movement politics, the sort which held “bourgeois reformism” in contempt, was the kind of politics which Howe came to know all too well in the Thirties, and was doubtful about when it was reinvented in the Sixties. This kind of politics assumes that things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born.
As I re-read this passage, it brought to mind a beautiful essay from Bruno Latour, called “A Cautious Prometheus”. It begins by describing five characteristics of design, and draws parallels between the evolution of design and Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) re-understanding of scientific truth.
…what is so interesting to me in that in the spread of design, this concept has undergone the same amazing transformations as my own field. STS, that was until a few years back but a small subfield of social science, has now received the formidable support of a much larger movement. What was a slightly far-fetched and a clearly scandalous claim, namely that there are no objects but only things and disputed assemblages, is now fast becoming common sense.
The five characteristics of design he listed can be summarized as:
Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than a foundational acts of creation.
Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft, and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism, and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.
You should read the essay yourself, but I am summarizing these five characteristics of design to provide context for this inspiring passage:
Of course, all five of these dimensions of design as well as the development of STS could be taken as a clear sign of postmodernism, as a quiet and lazy abandonment of the tasks of Promethean modernism. Some diehard modernists do think that way, but I don’t believe this is the case. As I pointed out earlier, the spread of the word “design” doesn’t come at a time when there is less to do; it comes at a time when there is more to do. Infinitely more, since it is the whole fabric of life that is now concerned thanks to the ecological crisis. What no revolution has ever contemplated, namely the remaking of our collective life on earth, is to be carried through with exactly the opposite of revolutionary and modernizing attitudes. This is what renders the spirit of the time so interesting. President Mao was right after all: the revolution has to always be revolutionized. What he did not anticipate is that the new “revolutionary” energy would be taken from the set of attitudes that are hard to come by in revolutionary movements: modesty, care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details, careful conservations, redesign, artificiality, and ever shifting transitory fashions. We have to be radically careful, or carefully radical… What an odd time we are living through.
At the risk of undermining Rorty’s advocacy of campaigns (aka social design projects), I’d like to suggest that energetic embrace of designerly reform could be revolutionary.
If a critical mass of people got it in their heads that progress is not measured by proximity to perfection, but rather by how many improvements we can make to the world around us, and took up the tools of design we could improve the world considerably, find meaning in doing so, and because design seeks alignment and collaboration, do so more democratically and inclusively. This way of working generates alignment and solidarity, something sorely lacking today. …and something even more lacking: inspiration.
I’ve heard Marxists quip that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” implying that anyone who wishes to preserve capitalism lacks the imagination to want something better. But is limitation of imagination the only reason a person might have a conservative desire to defend capitalism?
I see at least two alternative explanations.
First, pro-capitalist conservatives might actually have better imaginations — at least different imaginations — better able to imagine what might go wrong if we make radical changes to the world.
Second, it could be due to an acute awareness of imagination’s limits. We can imagine utopic or dystopic outcomes of change, but in my experience, the future often unfolds in ways nobody imagined. Our imagination always omits crucial considerations that lead to unintended, unimagined consequences.
This is why I prefer reform. If we make slow, incremental changes, we are better able to foresee the consequences and to respond to the inevitable surprises . The greater the scale and speed of change, the less predictable it is and the harder it is to correct if things go off the rails.
A third important reason conservatives are skeptical of revolutions, economic and otherwise, is that conservatives believe societies develop organically, by complex, distributed, localized processes — far too complex for any expert or any group of experts to comprehend, however imaginative, insightful, knowledgable and intelligent they might be.
Experts can effectively influence and shape these organic processes. But the belief that they can create them from scratch is a sign of naive hubris. Friedrich Hayek called this “the fatal conceit.”
Obviously, I share all three of these mistrustful attitudes toward imagining radical futures.
Does this make me a conservative? It is relative. Compared to a revolutionary (whether a left radical or right reactionary), yes, I am conservative. But compared to people who think things are perfectly fine as they are, and therefore not requiring significant reform, then I look like a progressive, albeit a cautious one who respects conservatives. But I’m not so conservative that sensibly-paced, sensibly-scaled socialist solutions to social problems automatically horrify me.
But whatever else I am, I’m certainly anti-revolutionary.
An old friend of mine introduced me to a master letterpress printer who lives in the Atlanta metro area. The printer connected me with one of the nation’s best die makers. I immediately ordered a plate for my first project, which will be a letterpress sefirot.
I am doing this project because nobody else has. I have been unable to find a beautiful letterpress printed sefirot, so in order to have one I will have to print it myself. This is something that should exist. I’m excited to have a supply to give away to friends.
Design develops actant systems. Polycentric design disciplines (including service design) are optimized to integrate multiple interacting human actants into the actant systems they develop. In contrast, monocentric design disciplines were optimized for a single human actant.
One exciting aspect of seeing design this way is purely etymological. Human actants in a design system are designated defined roles in the system. They are, as such designees. In design we designate roles both to people and to engineered sub-systems as actants within our systems. Cool!
I have an idea for a book I will never write. I may just steal Borges’s beautiful move: writing a short story that is a review of a nonexistent book, outlining its key ideas. Or maybe I’ll add a new meta-level of laziness and just outline the Borgesian short story I will never write.
This never-to-be-written short story will be a fictional review of the never-to-be-written book Designing Hat, which is, of course, an allusion to DeBono’s actually-written pop-biz classic Six Thinking Hats. In this book DeBono advises strategic hat changes to address various situations. My book, however recommends putting on your one designing hat and never taking it off whenever approaching any problem involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything.
This single move, I’ll argue, can clear up all kinds of hellish nonsense we all detest. It won’t solve everything — no method can — but it can dramatically improve our chances of making real progress. In the process, it can reduce everyday hostility and nihilism while increasing solidarity and goodwill.
In the grand tradition of inflating the importance of design, I will insist that design thinking is effective far beyond its usual applications. Since almost everything we do is a variation on “problems involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything”, the advice is more or less to superglue your designing hat onto your head.
Political problems, from the pettiest household squabbles to international crises, should be addressed as design problems. Even if we are not hands-on participants in shaping domestic or foreign policy, our conversations about these issues will improve if we approach them in a designerly manner. And meetings, too… Ninety-five percent of meetings could be vastly improved if approached as design collaborations.
The review will offer a succinct summary of each chapter, showing how adopting designerly attitudes and practices makes everything better:
Segment people in reference to a clear purpose
Go to the reality you want to change and observe it for yourself
Ask people to teach you about their lives
Fall in love with problems, not solutions (I think Marty Cagan coined this?)
Win alignment; never resort to coercion
Do not argue if you can prototype and test
Do not debate; compare options
Make smart tradeoffs
There are definitely more chapters, and I’ll keep adding them as they occur to me. Please comment if you have ideas for chapters.
This morning I am reflecting on the crucial difference between two words, clumsily translated into English as “repentance”, the Greek word metanoia (a transformation in how we think), and the Hebrew word t’shuvah (a turn to, or back to God).
Almost certainly, the word used by John the Baptist and Jesus in the Gospels was t’shuvah, which is actually (I think) closer in tone to the English word, even if it etymologically maps less perfectly. In t’shuvah, we are to turn back to God in every way — certainly in our thinking, but also in our feelings, and most of all in our behaviors. Or to put it Jewishly, in t’shuvah we turn with our whole being, heart, soul and strength. (Jesus did not invent this formula. This, and many other of his most famous utterances, referred to Torah and other Jewish scripture, and derived their authority from these references.) Metanoia, on the other hand, is more spirit-first — a change in thinking or worldview that effects a change in feeling and behavior.
I’m not a New Testament scholar, but I would be curious to hear if Paul’s works-versus-grace distinction was essentially a t’shuvah-versus-metanoia distinction.
The reason I am reflecting on this question today is I am realizing that in the book I am slowly developing, I have differentiated these two concepts, and placed them under different domains. (The three domains I explore are religion, philosophy and design.) I didn’t even realize until today that I was doing this!
I assign metanoia, not to the domain of religion, but to philosophy. I take it even further, even; I make a somewhat reckless normative claim that the essential purpose of philosophy ought to be metanoia.
I assign t’shuvah to the domain of religion. T’shuvah can involve engagement with thought, but it must engage with more than thought, and more likely will with behavior, and will always engage and change aspects of our own being outside our cognitive grasp.
(And, please, when I speak of engagement beyond thought, please do not modernize what I’m saying by shoehorning it into “the unconscious”, that iron lung of late modernity, which pumps artificial spirituality into unrespirating secular bodies. It is time to pull that plug. And I don’t mean making changes to our physical bodies. I care less than nothing about neurons or neural pathways or brain physiology. These ideas are valid in some contexts, but play no role in my thinking. People who must compulsively physicalize, psychologize and scientize ideas in order to make them compatible with their existing thinking will dislike what I have to say, because, in fact, I’m gunning precisely for their most sacred ideas. They will not understand what I am saying until they undergo a metanoia that renders this scientizing unnecessary.)
The overlap between philosophy and religion consists of metanoia that effects t’shuvah, and t’shuvah that effects metanoia. Not all metanoia turns us to God. Most metanoia does not, though all metanoia experiences feel like “religious conversions” as moderns misconceive religion. Much metanoia turns us away from God’s infinitude, toward closed finite theory-systems, like Hegelianism or inverted Hegelianism (Marxism), or other closed theory-systems, such as Progressivism. These seal us off and insulate us all that exceeds the grasp of cognition.
I’ll tease one more tangentially important idea. Design (the third domain my book explores) is also concerned with material and social realities that exceed the grasp of cognition, and which can, through our thinking, feelings and behaviors, effect both religious and non-religious metanoia — and/or t’shuvah.
Last week I threw a tantrum about segmentations. I was sick, and my mood was slightly overintense. I call it “vehement”, and it is bad for my writing. The idea I wrote about is important, and deserved better, so I want to try again.
I talked about a situation designers often face. To do our work effectively, we have to understand the people who will use the things we design.
But sometimes the people we’re designing for have diverging sets of requirements. Their needs might be different, or they might have different attitudes or behaviors or use what we are designing in different contexts. We find there is not one, but multiple ideal users, and if we design only for one user, the design is unlikely to work for the others.
(Don’t be distracted by the term “user”. This is an all-purpose term for a person for whom we design. The design field has been debating this term for decades, and I’m sick of this debate, this category of debate, and the kind of person who’s into this kind of debate, aka 15-years-ago me.)
Whenever we discover that we are designing not for one ideal user, but for multiple ideal users, we develop a design segmentation. Sometimes we will express the design segments as personas — representative fictional characters who help flesh out the segments and make them feel real to designers.
I will give a real life example. I was working for a telecom, helping them design a better billing system. But we discovered that, with respect to bill payment, customers fell into three categories. People who wanted to pay as little attention to their bill as possible and didn’t much care if something was weird on the bill if it wasn’t huge, people who were way into inspecting every bill line-by-line and disputing the crap out of anything that looked irregular by so much as a nickel, and people who were living paycheck to paycheck, juggling their bills and trying to orchestrate income and outflow of cash to keep their households afloat. These people wanted very different levels of detail in their bills, very different degrees of control and very different kinds of help if something goes wrong. We called these segments something like “Set-and-Forget”, “Bill Auditor” and “Paycheck-To-Paycheck”. A successful design solution would need to accommodate all three of these segments.
With this example in mind, imagine the frustration designers face when clients tell them they already have a segmentation, and that we will be required to use those.
Why?
They have already made the investment, and it is wasteful to redo the work.
We should build on what they’ve already done, so we can move things forward instead of going back to square one.
It is important to maintain consistency. It will confuse people if every project uses different segments.
Turf. “Marketing does segmentations and personas in this organization.”
Much of the time, marketing did the segmentation.
But marketing segments for marketing purposes, and often those purposes are different from ours and have no relevance to the design problem we are trying to solve.
Imagine, for example of our client had made us solve our billing problem with typical telecom marketing segments. I’m just going to make them up:
Wire-Cutters: customers who live on wireless networks and stream everything.
Cable-Connecteds: people who still need all their devices (TV, telephone, maybe computers) securely attached to a wall, via a cable, for some combination of entrenched habit and a perception of reliability.
Sports Fans: people who care only about their sports and who’ll gladly pay for cable TV in order to see all their games.
Imagine trying to use these segments to solve the design problem of accommodating different bill paying preferences. Telecom marketing segments tell you a lot about media consumption habits and attitudes and incredibly little about bill paying.
The lesson here is that segmentations of people are always relative to some specific purpose. Again:
Segmentations of people are always relative to some specific purpose.
Another way to state it is that any schema for dividing up sets of people is useful for asking certain kinds of questions, and useless for asking other kinds of questions.
This principle is not only true of marketing and design segmentations.
It is equally true of personality types. A personality typology is psychological segmentations that might (or might not) be useful for answering questions pertaining to commonalities and differences among groups of people.
Myers-Briggs and Enneagram enthusiasts can sometimes succumb to seeing their models as capturing the essence of personalities. But that essence says more about the essence of typologist than the essence of the people they type. I can say all this as someone who actually experienced this essentialist lapse, and obsessively viewed the entire human world as a complex play of Jungian personality functions. I know this way of thinking from the inside.
But now I will get to my deeper and more urgent point: This principle applies most of all to political identity.
It is all-too-easy to essentialize political identities. It is even easier when we are equipped with sociological theories that claim these identities are the outcome of cultural processes that generate personhood. We aren’t just segmenting populations, now, we are defining the very mechanisms that produce personhood. Identity penetrates into the essence of people, and the commonalities and differences that unite and divide us as political actors.
But as with personality types, this belief about says more about the essence of the identitarian than the essence of the people they identify as belonging to one identity or another. It tells us how they understand society, culture, politics and personhood — and it also tells us how they understand themselves in relation to others.
Consider the extreme case of a white supremacist, who will insist that their identity is that of a white person, their identification with being white is far more indicative of who they are as a person than their status as a white person can possibly say. Is the white supremacist aware of this meta-identity and its significance to who they are? Usually not. Their understanding of the world has psychic roots deeper than the content of their belief. Their beliefs, and indeed, their perceptions, their animating logic, their feelings grow up from this depth and bloom as racist beliefs about themselves and others. They compulsively project this schema onto their thoughts, experiences, memories, expectations. They are imprisoned within them. And they become neurotically incapable of segmenting people in other ways that might be more relevant to resolving practical problems,
Our white supremacist has succumbed to the same rigid limitations as the marketing department we discussed earlier, or the Enneagram fanatic who must know your type right away. They’ve lost track of the purpose of their segmentation, and essentialized it as a natural structure of society or of customers or of human beings in general.
And this is true of not only right-wing identitarianism.
It is exactly as true of left-wing identitarianism also known as “woke”, and what I prefer to call progressivism.
Progressivism has essentialized its segmentation to such a degree that it seems incapable of thinking politics in any other way. Not only is its identity-centered way of thinking politics fixed, but the segmentation it has been using is fixed.
This has caused progressivists to address a second-generation Mexican Catholic who loves America, who struggles to afford rent and food, for whom social roles like mother, father, sister and brother are central to their conception of the world as POC, with essentially the same concerns as a keffiyeh-wearing trans Latinx graduate student in the Queer Studies program at an elite university. These two people probably want diametrically different things.
And if someone takes a fresh look at the diverse citizens of this nation and tries segmenting it by economic class, social values and levels of patriotism they’ll probably have a more compelling value proposition — at least to our working class, traditionalist Catholic patriot. I think there’s more of them than genderqueer anti-Western progressivist graduate students.
That segmentation will also probably work better for policy design than — let’s face it — the marketing segmentation developed by the Democratic National Committee for use in designing and disseminating progressivist marketing messages. If a school or criminal justice system, or public health system only analyzes, measures and addresses performance of people according to the DNC marketing segmentation, they’ll certainly find differences among segments. But if they were to try other segmentations — for instance income level — the differences that emerged might be dramatically sharper. Poor lives matter?
And with respect to last week’s Democrat defeat, if progressivists insist on — or just default to — compulsively relying on the progressivist identity segmentation to account for the loss, they’ll generate a heaps of hypotheses on attitudes of each DNC marketing segments toward people from other DNC marketing segments, and the answers produced through this process will be just as wrongheaded and out of touch as the ideas that lost the Democrats this election.
It is time we recover our recognition that people are, first and foremost, people, and that our beliefs about them are less about them than they are about ourselves. We have lost this understanding and it is harming our humanity and our ability to deal effectively with the human world around us.
I think this is better than my last two attempts. Certainly I’m less sick and less vehement. I’ll probably have to try a few more times to get this out right.
By the way, my segmentation of people is around their faiths and the ideologies that express those faiths. I see progressivists as an identity that trumps all other identities. Same with post-liberal trads, QAnons. Conservatives, Jewish Conservatives, Libertarians and old school liberals. These segments are far more meaningful to me than the identity schemas projected by each of these segments. I suppose today I’d call myself a metaliberal.
Below is my first attempt to convert a 2019 talk I gave to a group of UX researchers into a blog post. I’m not sure if it’s working or not, but I’m going to publish it here to get feedback.
Service designers are asked all the time how what they do relates to what other designers, especially UX designers, do. My colleagues have been asked this question by clients, and it seems a new article on this question pops up every couple of months. Everyone has their own way of answering the question. My favorite way of explaining it has three parts.
I start by showing two tools service designers use that give a concrete indication of what makes us different.
Then I use a metaphor of dimensions to clarify how different design disciplines relate.
I finish by returning to the two service design tools, and make the relationship both clear and concrete.
Part one: Two key service design tools
To begin, I will show two tools service designers use.
The first service design tool is something we call a Moment Map. A moment map shows all the paths a person can take as they receive a service. Typically, a Moment Map begins with the recognition of a need and ends with the resolution of the need. A Moment Map can depict an existing service, but more often we use them to outline a proposed future service.
A Moment Map shows all the channel paths available to a person receiving the service. By “service channel” we mean the medium by which a service is delivered. A service that is delivered via an app or website can be said to take place in the digital service channel. If you call a call center, the service channel is telephone. If you get in the car and go to a retail space or service center, we might call that the retail space service channel.
Below is an example of a Moment Map.
Moment Map example
The second service design tool is the Service Blueprint. A Service Blueprint follows one customer’s journey through a service step by step, and at each step outlines how the service is delivered. The delivery is divided into a frontstage – what a customer experiences — and backstage, where processes, policies, people and technology platforms are identified. The process of blueprinting produces a list of touchpoints and capabilities DaVita required to deliver an experience like the one described in the journey.
Below is an example of a simple Service Blue Print.
Service Blueprint example
Keep these two service design tools in mind as we move through the second part of the discussion where we metaphor of dimensions to clarify the relationship between service design and other design disciplines.
Part two: Design spaces and their dimensions
To understand the relationship between service design and other design disciplines who collaborate with service designers, for example UX designers, it is helpful to think about it in terms of dimensions.
We’ll start with a single touchpoint.
If you recall your elementary school geometry, a point is zero dimensional. When we connect two points, that makes a line. In our model, a touchpoint or a series of touchpoints is an experience that unfolds in time in a single service channel.
So a zero-dimensional touchpoint or one-dimensional “touch-line” is a single channel experience.
The space of single-channel design
Single-channel design problems are well-understood. We have tried-and-true methods for solving them. We have existing team structures, with roles who are used to working together. Many books have been written explaining how to do single-channel design, and how to do it better. This is the kind of problem most designers, such as UX designers spend their time working on.
Most UX designers will tell you that there is more to their work, though, than just focusing on their service channel. To do a good job designing in any service channel it is important to understand the context. We must understand the person for whom we are designing. UXers call them “users”. They might be “customers”, or “patients”, or “employees”, etc. In service design, we like to call them “service actors” or just “actors”. We need to know who they are, what they are trying to do, and we need to understand their needs, attitudes, beliefs, and habits. This is something designers of all kinds always want to know about the people they design for.
We also need to know what they’re doing before they use the artifact we are designing, and what they’ll be doing after. And we also need to know what other touchpoints they’ll be interacting with.
Context of single-channel design
Back in my UX design days, people were always looking for a telephone number to call, just in case they “need to talk to a real person.” And we were always concerned with how people arrived at our digital touchpoints from other channels. What expectations were set?
While UX designers (and other single-channel designers) don’t have direct control over what happens before or after the experiences they are designing, or the experiences their users have in other channels, understanding this before-and-after cross-channel context helps designers create experiences that connect seamlessly and harmonize with the other experiences that make up a user’s overall experience with the brand.
But some design disciplines go beyond understanding, and actively shape the full end-to-end cross-channel experience, for example, omnichannel design, experience design, customer experience design and patient experience design. They look at the whole experience a person has engaging an organization as they zig-zag between channels to accomplish their goals, and ensure that the whole experience at every point is seamless and positive.
This is where design gains another dimension, and we can think of two-dimensional design, or design of touch-planes.
The space of omnichannel design
Omnichannel design problems are harder to solve than single-channel ones. Methods for solving these problems exist, but they are not as widely known, and are missing altogether in many organizations. Omnichannel design teams include many of the the same people found on UX projects, but many other collaborators with expertise in all service channels also need to be involved, and many of them will be new to design methods might feel uncomfortable. And documenting, updating and activating and managing the omnichannel experience is a capability many organizations are only beginning to develop. Journey Management systems like TheyDo can help companies mature their omnichannel experience management capabilities.
Notice that the first service design tool we saw, the Moment Map, is a visualization of the omnichannel customer experience.
But omnichannel design also has a context which must be understood in order to design effectively. An omnichannel experience is only the tip of an operational iceberg.
Context of omnichannel design
The experience is both enabled and constrained by a company’s capabilities. A company might not have capabilities to deliver a good experience in the channel of choice of a customer. For instance, a customer who “wants to talk to a real person” on the phone might be frustrated by a company that does not operate a call center.
It is is also enabled and constrained by people who deliver and support the experience. Wherever in the experience the motivations of those delivering and supporting the experience are aligned with those of the customer (or other person being service) the experience is likely to be a good experience, but where motivations are misaligned the experience will be marred by friction, frustration and obstacles.
When this operational context becomes part of the design problem itself, a third dimension of design opens. We start thinking about “touch-volumes”.
The space of service design
With this third dimension, we are now in the domain of service design. Service designers not only design the omnichannel experience for the service actor who receives the service. We also design the experience of all other service actors who deliver and support it. This means we must conduct research with all service actors and understand the goals, needs, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, in order to understand how to align interests and create positive interactions between actors that afford mutual benefit and a good experience.
We also design the capabilities and operations that support optimal service delivery. We want to remove friction and obstacles that might prevent the smooth, efficient and satisfactory delivery, and we want to strategically automate wherever possible to free actors to focus on the more demanding, rewarding or special parts of the service where a human touch enhances the experience.
Notice that the second service design tool we saw, the Service Blueprint, is a visualization of the third dimension, which describes the service delivery of a service.
Part 3: Bringing it together
Once we see how different design disciplines relate using the metaphor of dimensions, we can now look at the two key service design tools, and locate single-channel design projects within them.
What the service design work does is it shows how single-channel touchpoints connect in the context of the larger service. By doing service design, and understanding the omnichannel service experience customers might have, and blueprinting how the service will be delivered, which includes digital tools employees and partners might use to support service delivery, many different UX projects can be coordinated to play various parts in a larger service experience, and that larger service experience is an important context for that design work.
For a while now, I’ve been referring to service design as a polycentric design discipline. I picked up the term from Michael Polanyi. Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, also adopted the term and made it mainstream in the wonkier regions of nerddom.
Polanyi and Ostrom use the word polycentricity to describe social systems where agency is distributed throughout the system, not centralized or imposed from above.
I’ve been using the word in related, but distinctly different way. I use polycentric to describe design disciplines that design for multiple interacting people, all of whom are treated as I-centers of their own experience. I use it to contrast service design from older design disciplines that placed one person — a user, or customer, or employee, or patient or citizen, etc. — at the center of their design work, the person experiencing the designed artifact. Service design is polycentric, where older human-centered design (HCD) disciplines like UX design or industrial design are monocentric.
But what if we also thought of service design as polycentric in the same sense as Polanyi and Ostrom? From that perspective we could say that polycentric design establishes conditions where mutually beneficial social arrangements emerge, as spontaneously as possible, sustained by voluntary choice.
This is not just theoretically interesting. It has practical importance. With increasing frequency, my clients are coming to me with situations where they are trying to persuade partners who are outside their direct control to collaborate with them to deliver services to their customers in specific ways at a high standard of quality. Problems of this kind absolutely must be approached polycentrically.
This connects with something I’ve noticed many times in my three decades as a designer. Design thrives where people have choice and agency. Wherever people have choice and agency, we must abandon coercion and manipulation, and instead appeal to them as people who make free decisions based on their experience.
When the internet opened a broader range of choices to consumers and equipped them with more information to make smart choices, their agency increased, and this sparked a sort of design methods renaissance.
But now, due to a variety of factors, employees and non-employee partners also have more agency and more choices, and access to information required to choose options that works for them.
We are still not yet in an economy where all organizations need service design.
As long as an organization can command their employees and partners to behave however they want, a polycentric approach like service design is not necessary. The organization can just engineer rules and tools for service delivery, and everything will work like a well-oiled machine.
But if you are not in a position to boss your service delivery people around, either because they don’t work for you, or because they can choose to stop working for you if they don’t like being bossed around, service design is your best choice.
So, to summarize, when I say “polycentric design”, polycentric refers to two kinds of center: 1) experiential centers, and 2) agential centers.
For the last week, I have been closely and carefully reading a long, gnarly and crucially important passage from Buber’s I and Thou, in both the Smith and Kaufmann translations.
One benefit of understanding this book to be a prayer is that I am much more relaxed about getting through the book. The point of it is not to acquire information, but, rather, to allow it, invite it, entreat it to work on me. I have been taking my time and giving myself ample space to respond.
I want to share two key excerpts from this passage, each in both the Smith and Kauffman translations.
The first excerpt compares and contrasts Buber’s own Jewish faith with other forms of faith. He focuses on Buddhism, but Buddhism stands in for ascetic faiths in general.
This comparison is important, because Buber’s Judaism differs radically not only from conventional exoteric theisms, but from conventional esoterisms. It is a different religiosity that is often excluded from consideration. In my own experience, expressions of this faith — particularly practical ones — can trigger psychic allergies in both conventionally religious and “unconventionally” spiritual people.
Smith’s translation:
The Buddha describes as the goal the ‘cessation of pain,’ that is of becoming and passing away-release from the cycle of births.
‘Henceforth there is no return’ is the formula of the man who has freed himself from the appetite for living and thus from the necessity to become ever anew. We do not know if there is a return; we do not extend beyond this life the lines of this time-dimension in which we live, and do not seek to expose what will be disclosed to us in it own time and disposition. But if we did know that there is a return we would not seek to escape it, and we would long not indeed for gross being but for the power to speak, in each existence in its own way and language, the eternal I that passes away, and the eternal Thou that does not pass away.
We do not know if the Buddha actually leads to the goal of release from the necessity of returning. He certainly leads to a preliminary goal that concerns us — to the becoming one of the soul. But he leads thither not merely (as is necessary) apart from the ‘thicket of opinions,’ but also apart from the ‘illusion of forms’ — which for us is no illusion but rather the reliable world (and this in spite of all subjective paradoxes in observation connected with it for us). His way, too, then, involves disregard; thus when he speaks of our becoming aware of the events in our body he means almost the opposite of our physical insight with its certainty about the senses. Nor does he lead the united being further to that supreme saying of the Thou that is made possible for it. His innermost decision seems to rest on the extinction of the ability to say Thou.
Kaufmann’s translation of the same:
The goal was for the Buddha “the annulment of suffering,” which is to say, of becoming and passing away — the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. “Henceforth there is no recurrence” was to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. But if we did know that there was recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible.
Whether the Buddha leads men to the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly he leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. But he leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the “jungle of opinions,” but also away from the “deception of forms” — which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for is simply belong to it) the reliable world. His path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when he bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what he means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does he lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You.
In response to this, I wrote a margin note: “L’Chaim! Declaration of faith.”
The second excerpt pertains to what I have called “enworldment”.
Smith’s translation:
The beginning and the extinction of the world are not in me; but they are also not outside me; they cannot be said to be at all, they are a continuous happening, connected with and dependent on me, my life, my decision, my work, and my service. But they do depend not on whether I ‘affirm’ or ‘deny’ the world in my soul, but on how I cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world, to real life — and in real life the ways of very different attitudes of soul may intersect. But he who merely ‘experiences’ his attitude, merely consummates it in the soul, however thoughtfully, is without the world — and all the tricks, arts, ecstasies, enthusiasms, and mysteries that are in him do not even ripple the skin of the world. So long as a man is set free only in his Self he can do the world neither weal nor woe; he does not concern the world. Only he who believes in the world is given power to enter into dealings with it, and if he gives himself to this he cannot remain godless. If only we love the real world, that will not let itself be extinguished, really in its horror, if only we venture to surround it with the arms of our spirit, our hands will meet the hands which held it fast.
I know nothing of a ‘world’ and a life in the world’ that might separate a man from God. What is thus described is actually life with an alienated world of It, which experiences and uses. He who truly goes out to meet the world goes out also to God. Concentration and outgoing are necessary, both in truth, at once the one and the other, which is the One.
God comprises, but is not, the universe. So, too, God comprises, but is not, my Self.
Kaufmann’s translation of the same:
The origin of the world and the annulment of the world are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not — they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. But what it depends on is not whether I “affirm” or “negate” the world in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life — and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. But whoever merely has a living “experience” of his attitude and retains it in his soul may be as thoughtful as can be, he is worldless — and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasms, and mysteries that happen within him do not touch the world’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in his self, he cannot do any good or harm to the world; he does not concern it. Only he that believes in the world achieves contact with it; and if he commits himself he also cannot remain godless. Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms — and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.
I know nothing of a “world” and of “worldly life” that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-world, the life of experience and use.
Whoever goes forth in truth to the world, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful.
God embraces but is not the universe; just so, God embraces but is not my self.
This excerpt contains something close to a definition of enworldment, and notice that it includes an element of pluralism in affirming the weaving together of different attitudes of soul as intrinsic to actual life. Smith’s: “…how I cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world, to real life — and in real life the ways of very different attitudes of soul may intersect.” Kaufmann’s: “…how I let the attitude of my soul toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life — and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross.” This connects powerfully with my vocation of polycentric design.
Importantly, this endeavor involves embrace of dread: Smith says, “If only we love the real world, that will not let itself be extinguished, really in its horror, if only we venture to surround it with the arms of our spirit…” and Kaufmann says, “Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms…”
This is my first reading of I and Thou since Bruno Latour induced my “material turn” ?a little over a decade ago.
At the time of my initial Buber immersion, I preferred ?Buber’s essays (especially those in Between Man and Man) to I and Thou, which at points seemed someone obscure and poetic, especially when it extended the I-Thou relationship beyond interpersonal interactions.
This time around, having embraced both an “apeironic” materialism and a Jewish life, the whole book makes perfect sense, and I cannot imagine preferring any prose to this prayerful poetry.
In my “Six Sensibilities of Service” course, I’ve gone back and forth on naming one of the sensibilities. I’ve called the same sensibility both “Reciprocal” and “Mutual”.
Each has advantages and tradeoffs.
“Reciprocal” emphasizes the interactivity inherent to the sensibility. An interaction takes place where value is exchanged between participants in a service.
“Mutual” emphasizes sharedness — specifically, shared benefit. In a good service, an exchange is well-designed when it is of mutual benefit.
This sensibility is meant to represent an idea in Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) which has variously been called “value exchange” or “value-co-creation”. The former seems to favor “reciprocity”, where the latter seems to favor the latter, as the participants in the service collaborate to produce an event of mutual benefit to all involved.
I still don’t know which term I prefer. This is partly because this sensibility belongs to a larger system of sensibilities, which includes one called “Polycentricity”, which is a way to translate pluralism into designerly terms. Until recently, most designers who have defined their goals with a single subject in mind — a user, a customer, an employee. Even when they have designed to accommodate multiple personas, those personas were understood as isolated subjects of the experience. In service design multiple participants experience the service simultaneously, and experience one another within that service, each a center-point of their own experience. It is within this polycentricity that reciprocity and mutuality occurs or fails to some degree.
I was talking to my friend Blondeau about the oddball glory of the Brompton foldable bike, and I found myself saying something that seems worth keeping:
The belief in absolute perfection — perfection without compromise — is the death of design. Design is the art of relative perfection — perfection within constraints for some limited purpose.
I intended to link Brompton to my description of how foldable bikes design always involves stark tradeoffs, optimized to some purpose, and sacrificing other desirable qualities, and how this constraint, precisely, is what makes foldable bike design beautiful. Except, it turns out I never posted on this subject. So I will dig through old emails and texts and try to patch together a post I should have written years ago.
I guess I’ll start with an email I wrote Blondeau.
One word of warning: If you get a Brompton, you’ll never be able to do without one again, especially if you’re living nomadically. Any Brompton-less bike stable will feel incomplete.
What sold me on Brompton was looking at the design problem different foldables tried to solve. Each optimizes for some purpose.
Some are all about easy shipping of mostly-normal bikes from one location to another. Set up and breakdown requires significant effort. Once the bicycle arrives at a location, you set it up, and leave it set up. The design is optimized solely for providing a conventional cycling experience, and ease and speed of folding and unfolding is sacrificed.
Brompton is designed for multimodal transportation. It breaks down and sets up in about 1 minute. The folding-unfolding is assumed to happens one or more times in the course of a trip. You set out for a train station on the Brompton. There you fold it down and carry it onto the train. When you arrive at your stop you unfold the Brompton and ride it to your hotel. There you fold it down again and take it up to your room. If you are Eurailing around the continent and want cycling to be part of how you get around, you cannot beat Brompton. They make all the right tradeoffs for that style of getting around, and I love that.
If you just want to have a bike with you in Spain and maybe other places you visit having a normal bike that folds might be better. You’ll get a smoother, more refined ride.
Brompton is pure quirk.
Another design that made clear, decisive tradeoffs is the Mazda MX-5 Miata. The origin story of the Miata is one of clarity of vision and refusal to blur it in order to live up to the bland ideal of meeting the expectations of most people for most purposes. The product managers, designers and engineers behind that car sacrificed passenger and storage space and engine power for a very specific roadster driving experience. They knew exactly what the car was for, and what it was not for, and every decision was driven by that clarity.
Another beautiful story of tradeoffs was the development of the Palm Pilot. That team watched Sculley-era Apple try to brute-force design the first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), the Apple Newton. The device tried to be a handheld computer that could do anything. Consequently it did nothing well. It was too big, so it did not fit in a pocket. It tried to recognize natural handwriting, but failed comically most of the time. It supported syncing with computers, but the process was similar to a data backup procedure. Palm optimized its device for data lookup. It assumed most data would be entered on a computer and synced to the device. They devised a clumsy but reliable text entry scheme called Graffiti instead of relying on immature handwriting recognition technology. Best of all, the device was tiny and pocketable. And it came with a syncing cradle that supported one-button sync. The product took off, despite being vastly less advanced that the doomed Apple Newton.
If you read these two case stories, you’ll notice crude prototypes play a central role in refinement of the product, but also in building alignment around the vision, and enthusiasm for that vision.
Funny. I’ve been watching videos and listening to audiobooks by product management guru, Marty Cagan. I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed. What he describes as a revolution is stuff we’ve been doing for the last 30 years in UX and Human Centered Design.
But today I’m wondering if the problem is that designers try to do this work from a position of weakness. Maybe when we do this work from a position of strength, and take responsibility not only for the user experience, but also the feasibility and viability of the product (all power entails responsibility!), we are no longer just designers. We become product managers.
I wonder if that is the profession I should have pursued? I love tools. I love beautiful, clearly-conceived, faithfully executed products. But this difficult work cannot be done by charm, influence and lobbying alone. It requires power.
Hmm.
(Now I’m thinking about the app reviews I’ve written over the last decade. The majority of them are addressed to the product management — usually bad — of the app, not the features or the design. I get angriest at the product management philosophy behind wrongheaded design decisions.)
Below are two passages from Buber that can read as rebukes to the designerly faith. The first evokes UX, the second, service design.
1.
Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness.
Only now can the other basic word [I-It] be put together. For although the You of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I — an object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will become hence-forth — but as it were an It for itself, something previously unnoticed that was waiting for the new relational event.
Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each-other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object. Now, however, the detached I is transformed — reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one-dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects — and thus approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it, and joins with it to form the other basic word. The man who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity.
2.
He perceives the being that surrounds him, plain things and beings as things; he perceives what happens around him, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and processes that are bounded by other things and processes and capable of being measured against and compared with those others — an ordered world, a detached world. This world is somewhat reliable; it has density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands-right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure — and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take it for your “truth”; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody, it is prepared to be a common object for you; but you cannot encounter others in it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability preserves you; but if you were to die into it, then you would be buried in nothingness.
I will just let these two passages sit without comment for now.
