The pragmatic meaning of a designed thing is the set of behaviors that follow from its activation.
There are other meanings of a design, of course, but from the perspective of business viability this is the literal cash value of any designed thing.
Category Archives: Design
Artificial style
My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.
Artificial taste is not taste.
In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.
The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.
By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.
I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.
I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.
Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.
I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.
Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.
It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.
Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.
Service system development
The interface between business viability and design desirability is behaviors.
The success of every business initiative hinges on customer behaviors, and to a slightly lesser extent the behaviors of people on the front lines who serve those customers, and the behaviors of many others who support the front line.
Design specializes in what motivates those behaviors, which inhibits or redirects them, and what kinds of conditions encourage networks of behavior that produce favorable business outcomes.
The interface between operational feasibility and design “desirability” (I prefer “adoptable” or “joinable” or even “partakable”) is the shaping of the actual conditions that produce the behaviors. This, of course involves the production of the customer touchpoints designers shape. But in service design, internal touchpoints exist at every interface between people and the rest of the organization. Besides touchpoints, there are also organizational infrastructure that are not touchpoints in any conventional sense — policies, team structures, technologies, partnerships, etc. These enable or constrain conditions for behaviors, and these are carefully considered and, where appropriate, changed.
The interface between business viability and operational feasibility is the initial and ongoing investment to produce the conditions that will produce the behavioral return on investment.
The overlap of all three together is what I call the field of service system development, one third of which is service design, fluent in business viability and operational feasibility, but specializing in adoption/participation factors.
Protected: Seven elements of design
Quadrephania
Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.
Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.
Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.
Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.
Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?
Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.
The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.
The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.
The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.
And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.
Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.
Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.
Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.
Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.
Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.
In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.
By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.
But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.
And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.
This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.
Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.
Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.
The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.
I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”
I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.
“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”
Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?
Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?
I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.
Systemic gift-rejection
Any service designer will tell you that value exchanges (or cocreation) are our core concern. At every point in the unfolding of service, value is exchanged or generated among those receiving, delivering and supporting that service. If the value exchange is solid, the service feels worth it to everyone, and everyone plays their part. If it stops feeling worth it, people stop participating, or they withhold full cooperation, and the service starts to unravel.
Typically we think of these exchanges as investments and returns. ?Everyone puts something into a transaction, in order to get something out.
But there is another element of value exchange that is neglected, if not rejected: those things we give because we need to give them. These are our gifts, and giving these gifts gives our lives purpose.
When we are given opportunities to give our gifts, life enters the services we serve, and invests our organization with purpose and consecrating radiance.
Few system-builders consider this crucial and infinitely renewable resource.
Most organizations are ready to squander everything in order to avoid wasting time and money.
Years ago I made a list of resources designers should consider. Somehow the original list got lost, but I found one record of it in a list of planned talks:
“Lean How?: How Design Methods Make Waste Tradeoffs” – Lean methodologies tend to emphasize efficiencies of time and money, but these are often gained at the cost of wasting other resources. This talk proposes looking at forms of internal waste (time, money, team morale, organizational credibility) and external waste (customer goodwill, innovation opportunities, attention and brand equity) and seeing choice of methodology in terms of waste trade-offs.
Volume titles
I’ve had many names for this book brewing in my head, each with its own thematic emphasis.
The book always concerns the relationship between design practice, our own personal and collective psychic-orders (faith) and our experience of the world. The core claim is always the same: our conceptions of design, of philosophy and of religion could benefit from a specific kind of revision.
Of course, each domain is fascinating and contested, and has undergone ceaseless revision since inception. And the intersections between the domains have been explored, often fruitfully, at least in pairs.
My tall claim is that if we shift our understanding of all three of them together in a particular way, they can be understood together in mutually reinforcing ways, that they gain clarity, relevance and inspirational force together as a metaphysical whole and separately as focused domains.
I have seen them this way for about two decades now, and this understanding has only strengthened, brightened and sharpened over the years. It has been uncomfortable, for it has misfitted me everywhere I would most love to belong, but these social costs are far outweighed by the practical, theoretical and inspirational benefits.
But these reunderstandings do not stop at theory. They have pragmatic and existential consequences. And the reunderstandings do not start with theory, either. What has necessitated the theoretical work has been the inadequacy of words and concepts to serve reality as directly intuited. The explanations we give for things we experience often neglect, dismiss, obscure, confuse the most important givens of everyday life.
So, while the medium of the work seems to be philosophical writing, its message points beyond philosophical content, and urges some revisions to the fundamental ontologic that shapes literally everything, sets relevance, affords and constrains possible responses, before it even occurs to us to think about anything.
So what is in question, although it is handled philosophically, and philosophy plays a central role, is not a philosophy. Nor is it an observation or a practice. It is all of these at once. And once adopted, it constitutes a different way to understand, inhabit, participate in and experience reality.
For that reason Enworldment has been a front-runner all-along, and the likely final title.
But Exnihilism is close, and it might split off into a short work of its own, perhaps a manifesto. Exnihilism will emphasize the uncanniness of revealed possibility, always from nothingness (ex nihilo); the harrowing ordeals a person must endure in order to receive such epiphanies; and the changed relationship with nothingness that such epiphanies bring, namely that nihilism becomes impossible. But revelation is not the right word. What is taken — received, perceived, conceived — is not just sitting there like some thing to grab onto and have. A person must go out and meet it, engage it, wrestle with it, collaborate with it, come to terms with its reality, make it one’s own. They are always part-created, configured, co-created, crafted in active-receptive participation. We will follow Bruno Latour, and call this kind of coming-into-being instauration. The experience of ex nihilo instauration leaves the one who undergoes it an exnihilist. The title might be a bad pun, but it is a holy bad pun, and it is charged with life, and it is the idea most needful in these dark times.
In the first half of the 2020s, Second-Natural was still near the front of the pack, and from time to time it took the lead. Second-natural addresses a long-forgotten goal of design — intuitiveness. Over the last fifteen years, designers have become increasingly enamored with systems thinking, so much so that construction of systems has eclipsed the matter of holism. When designers say “holistic” now, they tend to mean “all-inclusivity” and it usually refers to systems. A system that systematizes every relevant element is, to them, holistic. But the view is third-person perspective. Even subjectivities are understood in third-person. These are objective people, who have things called goals, needs, thoughts, feelings and so on. (This tendency is so pronounced, I have wondered if younger designers even mean the same thing as older designers when they say “empathy”. They seem to believe it a matter of having the same feelings another person has, which of course is impossible, but that is not what empathy does. Empathy does pluralism. Young empathy only states pluralism as a static fact, with each person isolated within one externally unknowable inwardness, and with everyone obligated to believe this and abstain from attempts to bridge these inward states and to see out from them, even if approximately. Empathy, like justice, is successful only when perfectly, indisputably and finally accomplished, and otherwise total failure.) Anyway — what is lost in all this third-person systemic holism is the first-person holism of gestalts.
The result of this is a philosophical shallowness that materially harms design practice, and consequently the world we inhabit. From a system-holism perspective, once an all-inclusive functional system is constructed and all relevant parts are incorporated, the work is done. For designers who still pursue gestalt-wholeness, this is only the cost of entry. The system must also be spontaneously perceived and experienced as a simple whole — a gestalt.
If we neglect this, our world is experienced as utterly overwhelming and our dealings with it exhaust us.
And if too many of us come to see truth as constructed — as factual systems built up into theoretical systems — but these truth systems are not received spontaneously as given, but, instead, intercept givens, and replace them with elaborate explanations — then we lose contact with the world, with our own intuitive sense of things, and truth becomes rote acceptance and conformity of ideology. A population in this alienated state is susceptible to mass manipulation.
Second-Natural proposes a goal of good truth design, that equips us with words and concepts that balance systemic thoroughness, completeness and integrity — systemic-wholeness — with gestalt-wholeness, so we can enworld ourselves intuitively.
Because philosophy is a genre of design whose materials are words, symbols and concepts, whose medium is understanding and whose goal is convergence of gestalt and systemic understanding supporting enworldment.
And this brings us to yet another title Everso. The premise of this work is that we misunderstand subjectivity in a topological way. We think of reality as essentially objective, and subjectivity as essentially emergent from objective processes. Everso everses this relationship — flips it inside-out. All perceived or conceived objects are artifacts of some objectivity, which belongs to some ontology in some enworldment or another. This does not imply metaphysical idealism, but it does imply methodological irreductionism. Reality is given in objectivity, but what may be given is limited by what a subject may receive. And this self-ordering of subjectivity — psychic order — is what I mean by faith. Faiths are changeable — radically so — but they cannot be changed arbitrarily. Faiths are instaurated, and the means of such instaurated changes (or instaurated maintenance of stability) are… philosophy, design and religion. And of these three means, religion is most focused on faith states. But faith is not strength of belief. And faith is not belief without evidence. Faith is that by which truths are understood in the first place, and that by which truth is experienced as true in everyday life. Faith is subjective form.
I will also note that a personal subject and an academic subject are essentially alike, and differ only in material form and scale. Many problems and confusions we run into in design, philosophy and religion are topological category mistakes.
I feel like I have four books in me, but none can be isolated, which I guess is what necessitates multivolume works.
The uncanny craft of parenting
For the last several years, Susan and I have been collaborating on a philosophy of parenting. It is an application of a more general philosophy, and that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment. (For background see the autobiographical endnote.)
This parenting philosophy (like the general philosophy and all its various applications) is a relationship-centered philosophy.
The job of a parent is the intentional development of a parent-child relationship from one of inequality and dependence to one of equality and independence. Within this relational matrix (the essence of matrix) — within this social womb — an adult personality takes form, in stages, from relative passivity to active partnership in configuring the relationship. Adulthood is achieved when from this process, a new adult emerges who is capable of equality relations with the parent and with others, and of performing the job of parent.
Parenting is a strange craft.
In every craft a crafter collaborates with a material until a work is formed and fully actualized, often, in the process transforming the crafter. But in parenting, what is actualized is a fellow-crafter. Parent craft begets parent craft.
What makes the craft of parenting so challenging, fascinating and unnerving is that the process of crafting iteratively changes its own conditions and inner logic, often radically. It is like a game whose object is to transform the game itself; and with with each move, the game and the rules by which the game is played are reinvented.
Susan gave this philosophy an elegantly self-descriptive name: Raise-to-Relate.
Autobiographical endnote:
“…that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment.”
This enworlding faith began forming the minute Susan and I met and began fighting about religion.
I was a standard-issue spiritual-but-not-religious liberal materialist with a rebellious curiosity about religious understandings. I grew up in UU milieu. UUs prided themselves on religious tolerance, but that tolerance seemed both incurious and impotent. Even at ten years old, it was obvious to me that these UUs lacked all means of effective intolerance. Wherever they had the power to pull it off, they were more than eager to suppress opposition. The primary locus of this suppressive power, of course, was with youth. Even the faintest trace of intolerance would not be tolerated. And as I got older, beginning with a conclusion that religion is something to tolerate, and never seriously questioning or challenging that premise, struck me as a mark of shallowness, immaturity and boringness.
Susan was a lapsed Catholic on a mission to recover her faith and reenchant her disenchanted world. Growing up, she was a strange child, and was persecuted by scandalized nuns for the heretical mystical rituals she invented and taught on the playground. College shattered many of her naive beliefs about the world, and her religion shattered with it. She wandered into light libertinism for a few years, but quickly became disgusted and demoralized by it, and had begun systematically reforming her religious life to get back in order. Disenchantment is relative, though, and, by my standards, Susan was still so saturated with enchantment that her being hit me like a heroic dose of acid. Her weirdness and her discipline were magically alien.
Within our first half-dozen clashes she turned my own intellectual conscience against my facile utilitarian morality with a simple devastating appeal: “You can certainly argue utilitarianism, but does it account for the intensity of your disgust toward immorality? Do you really care that much about the smooth functioning of the social order? Really?” I was used to butting heads with philosophical opponents, but Susan hit from the heart. She won that round decisively and permanently.
We have been locked in machloket l’shem shamayim ever since.
Whatever I learn is set in our marriage crucible, and whatever I say or make pours from its lip. My philosophy comes from something deeper than philosophy. It can be expressed generally, but it can also be focused into defined domains of activity like design or parenting, and perhaps this is where it becomes most comprehensible.
The Yes on the bridge
My own philosophical development, guided by the problems I intuit and feel most urgently, has led me through but past the regions of reputability established by twentieth century academic philosophy. I carry with me the beautiful and indispensable insights of pragmatism, phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics. But in the course of rethinking how I think, why I think also changed. My philosophical goals and ideals changed, and now returning to mere argument, accounting or even understanding as it is commonly understood is impossible. I cannot see it otherwise, now: the goal of philosophy is comprehensive transformation to self and world together. It is a change in attitude, disposition, inclination, sense of relevance that penetrates beneath the content of thought, beneath intellectual methodology, beneath habit, to the society of intuition known as “faith” in given reality, and given truth.
The always-elusive goal of philosophy is to assist radical change in enworldment, from intuited “worse” toward intuited “better”.
When I compare the aims of contemporary academic philosophies with the aims of pre-modern philosophies it is clear that I have arrived at a point of consanguinity with the latter, but having never reversed course, never forgotten what I learned on my way here, having never renounced any of it. I’m newly ancient, pure post- with no pre-. If I am not mistaken, I’ve done some sort of circumnavigation. But being me, I mapped my course very sloppily. My logs were haphazardly kept and provide only vignettes. There is nothing resembling a positioning system, let alone turn-by-turn directions.
I am not one to reject the Enlightenment. With its blessed artificial light we have been able to read twenty-four hours. We’ve pulled a three-century all-nighter, and we have gotten a lot of valuable work done that will continue to benefit us centuries to come. But we are tired. We are starting to nod-off and forget much of the knowledge we’ve crammed and the wisdom we’ve acquired — most of all that precious political wisdom called liberalism.
We are starting to slip into hallucinatory semi-dream and semi-nightmare. Or is it death? It has been so long since we’ve turned out the lights and allowed ourselves to sleep. When have we had darkness sufficient to see a star-filled heaven? We can’t find a place to stand and look out that isn’t covered over by the orange glare of burning gasses in space-time continua. We have shed bright, sharp, enduring, progressing, effective light on the What and How of the natural world, but at the cost of instrumentalist light pollution, which has obscured the Why at the heart of human existence. We have gone nihilist but no longer know how to ask Why. Instead we inquire into chains of causes and purposes that might retroductively account for the void in the core of our being.
Why am I saying this today? What is my purpose? What transformation am I trying to effect here?
With few exceptions, my morning writing has no instrumental purpose, and is free of all technik “in-order-to”. It is an artifact of transformation-in-motion, an expression made for no further reason than itself.
It is pure Why, and provides reason for everything else I do, chosen or compelled.
Years ago, when I’d undergone enough formation-world conversions to have undergone a meta-conversion to creation-world (what I now call “exnihilism”), I asked myself if I would continue philosophizing even with certainty that it had no practical purpose. The answer was whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-bodied Yes.
This asking happened in a time and place. It was definitely mid-morning. I was definitely cycling over the Bill Kennedy bridge over I-285. I think it was spring, and it was either 2003 or 2004.
Saying Yes, two things happened.
First, I became aware that this impracticality had enormous practical value. It made everything else valuable. Whatever played a role supporting my blessed morning reading, now had a utilitarian purpose I could feel as real. I did it in-order-to do this useless reading. My chain of in-order-to was now charged with felt purpose.
Second, from that point on, my thinking did become useful, even though it didn’t have to be. It became useful for the How and Why design, for focusing design on generating that Why value in our shared world. This Why is perpetually threatened existentially by the nihilism of technicians, technocratic administrators, professional-managerials and other servants of technik — people unable to find positive motivation for action, and so instead motivate themselves solely with avoidance of negatives.
(I would not call this type my enemy. They tend to be the most conscientious, thorough, detail-minded perfectionists. They keep the world running efficiently and that is admirable, necessary and deserving of gratitude. We cannot do without these system builders. But this type drives blindly wherever it is pointed. People like this can serve a vital community or a thriving business, and drive both to success. But it can also be programmed with malevolent ideologies of whatever kind, and it will apply the same virtues to win successes here, too, of the darkest kind. Adolf Eichmann was a very successful man, and any business would have benefitted from his virtues. He judged himself just by the perverse justice to which he subscribed. Had he been American at the time he would have been celebrated today as a hero. If he were alive now, he would serve Progressivism, because, in this time Progressivism is the ideology of the successful and respectable. But this builder will construct with whatever bricks it is given, and it can get along perfectly well without any cornerstone Why. The construction will become increasingly hard to believe and even harder to love. These builders are the intellectual light brigade. Theirs is not to reason Why; theirs is but to do and die, with an intervening comfortable retirement.)
Back to the Yes on the bridge. It gave my life its Why, and provided a Why-grounded instrumental reason for my design work. I would call this my knitbone moment. This is when my taproot found its depth soil, and my leaf growth found its practical horizons: my meaning, my patch of garden.
I don’t know what to call myself. I am both post- and neo-. Post-respectable. Post-philosophical? Neo-mystical? Neo-sketchy?
Post- retains the treasures of the past, and avoids the universal sin of turning back famously committed by Mrs. Lot and Mr. Orpheus. Traversing post- after post- can bring us to the best kind of neo-.
I need to bring together the precise, empirically grounded, carefully reasoned philosophical work I’ve done with the reckless but fruitful intellectual leaps I’ve made.
Years ago, crafting myself design rhetoric to help win designers some space for design work in a technik-dominated environment unable to comprehend our methods, I gave this bridging work a name: “leap-and-creep”.
If designers allow ourselves to learn beyond our own limits — which is what the best design research does — we can gain insights that we can apply practically, long before we can articulate or justify them. We owe our organizations justifications and arguments, but these justifications and arguments should follow intuitive application in prototypes. If an intuition works in practice and shows promise, then a team can get to work accounting for why, and making arguments why it might also work “at scale”.
(This is why we have “premature” ideas in the field. Our conversations with our research participants reshape our general understanding of our problem space in elusive and pre-effable ways. With “new eyes” opened by rapport with our research participants, we catch sight of novel possibilities we were unable to detect prior to the change. We were blind to opportunities that we now very clearly see. I have a name for this, too: precision inspiration. “Rigorous” design technicians who know the correct techniques and recipes try to suppress these ideas. I view them as data. Rapport is the most important understanding we acquire in the field, and our “premature ideas” are often our first expressions of these otherwise inexpressible acquisitions.)
If we are required to justify and account for everything we intuit before we are allowed to try it — if we are required to creep bit by quant-backed bit to our bold innovative leaps — this limits a team to the tiniest and least inspired incremental steps. Anyone who works this way, or worse, imposes this way of working on designers, lacks insight into what design essentially is and does, or has forgotten this insight, lost their own craft, and, to put it bluntly, has sold their soul to technik.
This technical, soulless insightlessness is evident in most reports constructed by professional research teams at most corporations. The reports are stuffed with qualitative and quantitative facts. Some of the facts are formulated in industry-standard “insight” format, but these insights somehow never effect real insight, that is, shift the significance of the fact-set as a whole in some revelatory way. But approximately one-hundred percent of corporate researchers are technicians who see such matters as idle philosophizing, and a total waste of time. So research teams are burdened with the task of mastering enormous bodies of existing research content, and blocked from direct access to the people and realities that inspire new and meaningful interventions. But most large organizations have given up on all goals beyond fixing broken mechanical problems in their soulless offerings portfolio. They are in the chickenshit business, and they can add bullshit later, when the semi-functional boredom heaps are sent to advertising for its shiny coat of bullshit.
…but this is all epic-scale digression.
I have made some crazy philosophical leaps and landed on some sacred ground. I need to creep back so I can map it, pave it, and get some people to join me over here in exnihilism. I have some explaining to do!
Prototype archetype
I was just poking through old posts looking for an old Rorty quote (roughly, “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed…” when came upon an old post from July 2021, where I realized something simple and shocking: language is one prototyping material. And I will add now, it is often not the best one, but it is inexpensive. Talk is cheap. And anyone who sits in meetings all day will tell you, it is inexhaustibly plentiful.
Whenever I think about prototyping, the same image comes to mind.
It is a bad digital image of an improvised artifact someone at IDEO hacked together using whatever materials were sitting around to communicate an idea for a surgical instrument that could be gripped in a new way. They grabbed a cheap plastic clip, a 35mm film canister and a white board marker and hastily taped it together. The thing induced a collective eureka and eventually became a real product used by real surgeons.
In the Rorty / linguistic prototyping post I announced an intention to make a linocut print of the IDEO prototype.
Reading this today, I experienced a moment of smug self-satisfaction, for soon after I’d written this, I radically one-upped myself. It occurred to me that it would be even better to have a sculpture of that archetypal prototype! So I painstakingly tracked down the original materials and reproduced that prototype. And then I mounted the reproduction in a shadow box for display. I will not pretend I was not proud of both the idea and the execution.
My feelings toward this object are bittersweet. For years, when I still belonged at my organization — back when prototyping was central to our thinking methods — the prototype archetype reproduction was on loan to my organization, and sat proudly in our lobby to remind us of who we were and to provoke questions from visitors.
Now that everything we do is reports and words and talking and projections and plans and complicated system models, we are no more designerly and no less corporate than our clients. This symbolic artifact that once served as quirky evidence of who we were became a phony poseur prop, so I recalled it and moved it to a location where it was still true. It sucks to lose a home you helped build, furnish and ensoul. But, you know, this is how things go. This is why I always say: “Bros before cos.” Never trust an organization. Wah, wah, etc., etc. —
But enough crybabying. I have an idea.
I am returning to this idea of printing the prototype.
I am imagining a small card with a lino image of the IDEO prototype, with lead typeset slogans beneath it:
Stop talking. Start making.
or
Prototype it.
or
We think also with our hands and hearts.
or maybe an edition of each of the three.
Wow, I want this to exist.
I want to own it myself, and I want every designer who is still a designer to have one.
This is what I love most about letterpress.
I’m not in it to express myself or to strut around showing what I can do.
I am motivated by pure avarice. I want something to exist that doesn’t yet exist, so I can have it.
And then I become more generally offended at that thing’s nonexistence.
So I make it exist. And then I get to have that thing, and enjoy that thing’s existence.
There is a beautiful, true, dense and compact book that should exist.
It does not exist, and its nonexistence is my responsibility.
Its mysterious absence is increasingly obtrusive and painful.
I feel it like a futural phantom limb.
Social metaphysics
Well, I took the slack bait and responded to one of those inane “watercooler topics”. I’m posting it only because the term social metaphysics emerged in my response, I think it’s a good coinage.
“Social metaphysics” has a nice ambiguity to it, too. It implies a socially shared metaphysics as well as a metaphysics of the social.
I take it both ways at once, of course, because somewhere in the neighborhood of Beriah, givens get radically polycentered — givens and takers, alike — each instaurating the other in givennesss.
Protected: Dear diary
Recovering design
As a designer I care about three things.
I care about making things people care about for many different but interconnected reason. An example, might be a pen with an appearance and tactility that resonates with the role of writing in their life. Or a bicycle that rides beautifully, but also reinforces the rider’s sense of himself as a person and as a cyclist. Or… most recently in my career, the as yet unachieved goal of an organization who provides those who serve it by serving from it a vehicle for their own root service, the opportunity I call knitbone.
I care about coming to transcendent understandings with teammates. These understanding were inconceivable prior to the design research, but actually conceived through the work, thanks to the specific conditions imposed by design: 1) multiple designing subjects, 2) multiple designant subjects, 3) a matter of concern common to all, 4) access to the raw reality, the actual matter, 4) no easy escape from the ordeal, where the path of least resistance is directly into and through the inconceivability.
I care about iterative philosophical refection on design practice, and philosophically guided practice, and the design praxis that develops and the strange, strange design enworldment such reflective practice instaurates. (Instauration is the revelation-creation that craft summons to life. It is what Charles Stein calls configuration.)
Chokhmah obscura
I think of Chokhmah as the infinitesimal pinhole of a camera obscura through which the infinite light of Keter projects into an almost as infinitesimal five-dimensional plane the width, breadth, depth, duration and awareness of the whole cosmogonic unfolding. In this projection within One, each one of us lives and dies as an everted holographic vision of the whole, a subject of Malkhut.
This is a response to a (god)heady passage from Scholem:
Among the symbolical descriptions of the unfolding of God in His revelation, special attention must be given to that which is based on the concept of the mystical Nothing. To the Kabbalist the fundamental fact of creation takes place in God; apart from that he admits of no act of creation worth that name which might be conceived as fundamentally different from the first inmost act and which takes place outside the world of the Sefirot. The creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God Himself. This is also a crisis of the hidden En-Sof who turns from repose to creation, and it is this crisis, creation and Self-Revelation in one, which constitutes the great mystery of theosophy and the crucial point for the understanding of the purpose of theosophical speculation.
The crisis can be pictured as the break-through of the primordial will, but theosophic Kabbalism frequently employs the bolder metaphor of Nothing. The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God is externalized and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En-Sof, the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is this mystical ‘nothingness’ from which all the other stages of God’s gradual unfolding in the Sefirot emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the “supreme crown” [Keter] of Divinity. To use another metaphor, it is the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence. Some Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for instance Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain that in every transformation of reality, in every change of form, or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible. Nothing can change without coming into contact with this region of pure absolute Being which the mystics call Nothing. The difficult task of describing the emergence of the other Sefiroth from the womb of the first — the Nothing — is somehow managed with the aid of copious metaphors.
In this connection it may be of interest to examine a mystical jeu de mots which comes very close to the ideas of the Zohar and was already used by Joseph Gikatila. The Hebrew word for nothing, ain has the same consonants as the word for I, ani — and as we have seen, God’s “I” is conceived as the final stage in the emanation of the Sefirot, that stage in which God’s personality, in a simultaneous gathering together of all its previous stages, reveals itself to its own creation. In other words, the passage from ain to ani is symbolical of the transformation by which the Nothing passes through the progressive manifestation of its essence in the Sefiroth, into the I — a dialectical process whose thesis and antithesis begin and end in God: surely a remarkable instance of dialectical thought. Here as elsewhere, mysticism, intent on formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the instrument of dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by no means the only witnesses to this affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking.
In the Zohar, as well as in the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon, the transformation of Nothing into Being is frequently explained by the use of one particular symbol, that of the primordial point. Already the Kabbalists of the Geronese school employed the comparison with the mathematical point, whose motion creates the line and the surface, to illustrate the process of emanation from the “hidden cause.” To this comparison, Moses de Leon adds the symbolism of the point as the centre of the circle. The primordial point from Nothing is the mystical center around which the theogonical processes crystallize. Itself without dimensions and as it were placed between Nothing and Being, the point serves to illustrate what the Kabbalists of the thirteenth century call “the Origin of Being”, that “Beginning” of which the first word of the Bible speaks. The somewhat pompous phrases in which the opening lines of the Zohar’s interpretation of the story of creation describe this emergence of the primordial point — not indeed from the Nothing as remarked in another context, but from the ethereal aura of God — can serve as an example of the mystical imagery of the whole book:
“In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recess of the mystery of the Infinite, En-Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, neither red nor green, and of no color whatever. But when this flame began to assume size and extension it produced radiant colors. For in the innermost center of the flame a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En-Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the ethereal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely unrecognizable until under the impact of its break-through a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and therefore it is called Reshit, that is ‘Beginning’, the first word of creation”
By the Zohar, as by the majority of the other Kabbalistic writers, this primordial point is identified with the wisdom of God, Chokhmah. God’s wisdom represents the ideal thought of Creation, conceived as the ideal point which itself springs from the impulse of the abysmal will. The author extends the comparison by likening it to the mystical seed which is sown into Creation, the point of comparison apparently being not only the subtlety of both but also the fact that in either the possibilities of further being are potentially, though as yet invisibly, existent.
Beyond the “servicemaster”
For the last several months I have convinced myself more and more completely that service system development should follow the example of software system development, and formally assign a trio of roles responsible for the desirability, feasibility and viability of what is being developed.
In software system development, the product trio is:
- The UX designer is responsible for desirability, that is, everything concerning user adoption of what is being developed. If we build it, will people adopt it?
- The software engineer is responsible for feasibility, that is, ensuring that whatever is being proposed is developed within given constraints. Given what we have to work with, can we build it?
- The product manager is responsible for viability, that is, for ensuring that the system once built and adopted by users will help the organization flourish. If we build it within constraints, and people adopt it, will it serve the organization’s strategic goals?
Of course, teams are collaborative, so they must, in IDEO’s parlance, be T-shaped. Each team member must have a general understanding of design, engineering and business sufficient to support effective collaboration. But each brings a depth of understanding in their specialty and their domain of responsibility.
Given that service systems are at least as complex as software systems – plus additional layers of organizational and logistical complication – it seems self-evident that assigning responsibility for ensuring the desirability, feasibility and viability of a service to one role guarantees that something, and likely much more than something, will be lost.
Asking one designer to specialize in and bear responsibility for all three shows a failure to appreciate either the complexity of services or of human limits. A service designer who attempted it would have to work 120 hour weeks to juggle all three of these responsibilities, or 80 hours to juggle just two of the three. And ask any designer which of the three always gets dropped first.
In service system development the service trio should be:
- The service designer is responsible for desirability, that is, everything concerning service actor participation in the service being developed. If we activate this service, will all service actors willingly participate in ways that support it?
- The service system engineer is responsible for feasibility, that is, ensuring that the service is operationalized within given constraints. Given the organization and its conditions enabling and constraining it, can we activate, maintain and evolve it?
- The service system manager is responsible for viability, that is, for ensuring that the service once activated by participation of service actors will help the organization that delivers this service flourish. If we activate it within constraints, and service actors participate as intended, will it serve the organization’s strategy?
Until we stop reducing the vast and complex domain of service system development to “service design,” the field will remain stuck in the age of the webmaster. Remember that guy? The webmaster was the guy in headquarters’ basement who figured out what an organization’s presence should be on the Information Superhighway, and then sort of hacked it all together. He was an overworked jack of all trades and master of none, especially not the design part.
Today what we call “service designer” really should be called “servicemaster” in honor of our pre-UX jack-of-all-trades predecessor.
The big hurdle, of course, is that the closest thing we have to each of these defined roles is still the overstretched, overburdened service designer. It is hard to staff roles with no existing practitioners, but my hope is that defining these disciplines might inspire enterprising, restless operations folks, process or industrial engineering types, CX professionals, or random multitalented domain-blenders to come along and fill these brand new, unclaimed shoes.
Dang. This is funny. I might post this on LinkedIn, under the disclaimer that this is my own opinion and not the opinion of my employer.
Alchemical design
Craft is material dialogue. Dialogue is conversation craft. Alchemy is the craft of crafts.
First, I intuited it implicitly in R. J. Bernstein and Gadamer. Later, I found it stated directly in Buber: our best access to divine being is through dialogue with others.
Dialogue presumes two things: alterity and a possibility of transformative understanding.
Dialogue requires two things: shared good faith to arrive at understanding and shared material to serve as the medium for this understanding.
In alchemy not just any material will do.
The material must be real enough to perform its configurative, transformative task.
In alchemy, material is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of ideal dross, and rendered pure matter (hyle), pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.
In alchemy, soul is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of accidental dross, and rendered pure spirit, pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.
In alchemy, fragmentary soul and material are dissolved and purified and passed through the narrow neck of the alembic into the chamber to combine and unite, and unified are then drawn back through the neck to recrystallize together, refaithed, rematerialized, reenworlded. New artifact, new artifex, new chamber.
This is why designers go to the rough ground of reality.
It is only here we find matter-rich materials that can support radical new understanding. What gets passed along in organizational media is precisely form, not matter. The form of the medium filters whatever data it cannot convey. The data that survives transmission is too anemic to support anything but compulsive rethinking of old thoughts.
It is the media, the material forms, the forms of understanding, the very soul-form of the organization that is in play in radical design.
Radical design is alchemy.
This sacrifice of form in radical design must be performed in the faith that resouling and reenworlding will redeem the sacrifice.
Subject and object shed form together in order to be reclothed, refurnished, rehoused, reenvironed together, all at once, in new enworldment.
This is the artifice of design.
Design is a craft requiring much technique, but much more than technique.
Mere technicians can only construct systems of unnatural artificiality. They are limited to assembling preformed components. They can build only structures the components afford. But today, the problem is the form of the components. This is why the design work of design technicians is sterile and entirely uninspiring, which is good enough in a joyless world that no longer desires or expects anything beyond fixed function.
The higher goal of design is second-natural artifice that summons whole worlds teeming with inconceivable new beings and meanings.
Alchemy might have preceded modern science, but modern science refused the very cornerstone of alchemy: its transformative Why.
This rejection of Why, first methodological, then later metaphysical, is the nihilism concealed in the heart of technik, which knows only the questions What and How, and hears that implicit question behind every truth. When someone asks “why?” the ear of technik hears a prescriptive “in order to what?” or a descriptive “how did this occur?”
Design is alchemy’s true heir, but to receive its inheritance it must reject the rejection of technicity.
Design must restore the Why to technik’s What-How so the technocratic world of techno-scientific engineering and management can answer to a higher Ought and serve our human purpose instead of enslaving humankind to its Whyless systems.
Not only are we allowed to do this, we must do what we Ought.
Protoconsultant Chuang Tzu
Solid consulting advice from Chuang Tzu, twenty-three centuries before the invention of consulting:
Yen Hui went to see Confucius and asked permission to take a trip.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to Wei.”
“What will you do there?”
“I have heard that the ruler of Wei is very young. He acts in an independent manner, thinks little of how he rules his state, and fails to see his faults. It is nothing to him to lead his people into peril, and his dead are reckoned by swampfuls like so much grass. His people have nowhere to turn. I have heard you say, Master, ‘Leave the state that is well ordered and go to the state in chaos! At the doctor’s gate are many sick men.’ I want to use these words as my standard, in hopes that I can restore his state to health.”
“Ah,” said Confucius, “you will probably go and get yourself executed, that’s all. The Way doesn’t want things mixed in with it. When it becomes a mixture, it becomes many ways; with many ways, there is a lot of bustle; and where there is a lot of bustle, there is trouble — trouble that has no remedy! The Perfect Man of ancient times made sure that he had it in himself before he tried to give it to others. When you’re not even sure what you’ve got in yourself, how do you have time to bother about what some tyrant is doing?
“Do you know what it is that destroys virtue, and where wisdom comes from? Virtue is destroyed by fame, and wisdom comes out of wrangling. Fame is something to beat people down with, and wisdom is a device for wrangling. Both are evil weapons — not the sort of thing to bring you success. Though your virtue may be great and your good faith unassailable, if you do not understand men’s spirits, though your fame may be wide and you do not strive with others, if you do not understand men’s minds, but instead appear before a tyrant and force him to listen to sermons on benevolence and righteousness, measures and standards — this is simply using other men’s bad points to parade your own excellence. You will be called a plaguer of others. He who plagues others will be plagued in turn. You will probably be plagued by this man.
“And suppose he is the kind who actually delights in worthy men and hates the unworthy — then why does he need you to try to make him any different? You had best keep your advice to yourself! Kings and dukes always lord it over others and fight to win the argument. You will find your eyes growing dazed, your color changing, your mouth working to invent excuses, your attitude becoming more and more humble, until in your mind you end by supporting him. This is to pile fire on fire, to add water to water, and is called ‘increasing the excessive.’ If you give in at the beginning, there is no place to stop. Since your fervent advice is almost certain not to be believed, you are bound to die if you come into the presence of a tyrant.
“In ancient times Chieh put Kuan Lung-feng to death and Chou put Prince Pi Kan to death. Both Kuan Lung-feng and Prince Pi Kan were scrupulous in their conduct, bent down to comfort and aid the common people, and used their positions as ministers to oppose their superiors. Therefore their rulers, Chieh and Chou, utilized their scrupulous conduct as a means to trap them, for they were too fond of good fame. In ancient times Yao attacked Ts’ung-chih and Hsu-ao, and Yu attacked Yu-hu, and these states were left empty and unpeopled, their rulers cut down. It was because they employed their armies constantly and never ceased their search for gain. All were seekers of fame or gain — have you alone not heard of them? Even the sages cannot cope with men who are after fame or gain, much less a person like you!
“However, you must have some plan in mind. Come, tell me what it is.”
Yen Hui said, “If I am grave and empty-hearted, diligent and of one mind, won’t that do?”
“Goodness, how could that do? You may put on a fine outward show and seem very impressive, but you can’t avoid having an uncertain look on your face, any more than an ordinary man can. And then you try to gauge this man’s feelings and seek to influence his mind. But with him, what is called ‘the virtue that advances a little each day’ would not succeed, much less a great display of virtue! He will stick fast to his position and never be converted. Though he may make outward signs of agreement, inwardly he will not give it a thought! How could such an approach succeed?”
“Well then, suppose I am inwardly direct, outwardly compliant, and do my work through the examples of antiquity? By being inwardly direct, I can be the companion of Heaven. Being a companion of Heaven, I know that the Son of Heaven and I are equally the sons of Heaven. Then why would I use my words to try to get men to praise me, or try to get them not to praise me? A man like this, people call The Child. This is what I mean by being a companion of Heaven.
“By being outwardly compliant, I can be a companion of men. Lifting up the tablet, kneeling, bowing, crouching down — this is the etiquette of a minister. Everybody does it, so why shouldn’t I? If I do what other people do, they can hardly criticize me. This is what I mean by being a companion of men.
“By doing my work through the examples of antiquity, I can be the companion of ancient times. Though my words may in fact be lessons and reproaches, they belong to ancient times and not to me. In this way, though I may be blunt, I cannot he blamed. This is what I mean by being a companion of antiquity. If I go about it in this way, will it do?”
Confucius said, “Goodness, how could that do? You have too many policies and plans and you haven’t seen what is needed. You will probably get off without incurring any blame, yes. But that will be as far as it goes. How do you think you can actually convert him? You are still making the mind your teacher!”
Yen Hui said, “I have nothing more to offer. May I ask the proper way?”
“You must fast!” said Confucius. “I will tell you what that means. Do you think it is easy to do anything while you have {a mind}? If you do, Bright Heaven will not sanction you.”
Yen Hui said, “My family is poor. I haven’t drunk wine or eaten any strong foods for several months. So can I be considered as having fasted?”
“That is the fasting one does before a sacrifice, not the fasting of the mind.”
“May I ask what the fasting of the mind is?”
Confucius said, “Make your will one! Don’t listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don’t listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.”
Yen Hui said, “Before I heard this, I was certain that I was Hui. But now that I have heard it, there is no more Hui. Can this be called emptiness?”
“That’s all there is to it,” said Confucius. “Now I will tell you. You may go and play in his bird cage, but never be moved by fame. If he listens, then sing; if not, keep still. Have no gate, no opening, but make oneness your house and live with what cannot be avoided. Then you will be close to success.”
Single-prompt interview research
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a “single-question magic interview“. Placing this question between two genuine interlocutors really does something astonishing, important, rare and rarer by the day.
It made me want to letterpress print this question.
I love words that act directly on a souls.
Whenever I find such words, I want to sink them deep into the surface of paper.
This is my letterpress impulse.
I am now interested in instaurating more single-question interviews. I want to collect and print them.
I will, of course, do this work in faithful, observant service to design praxis, which is sacred and therefore not to be used, but the everse of using. Faithful, observant service to praxis means giving ourselves to our praxis and allow ourselves to be used as its agent, or (as Latour put it) the actant of praxis.
I have a big fear mitigated by some hopeful hypotheses.
My fear is that an increasing number of people have unwittingly been taken by ideological faiths — what some have called “political religions”. Religion, though is not only a misnomer, but a category mistake of the highest pragmatic consequence. Ideologies are fundamentalisms.
Fundamentalism is not religion taken too far, but religion aborted and never reborn in a barren soul.
A fundamentalist faith is (I believe this also came from Latour?) a distinctive attitude toward beliefs. It could be called a belief about beliefs — beliefs being objective facts taken as true.
A genuine religion tries to transcend factual beliefs. It does so by way of a different attitude toward truth, a different mode of of believing, a different configuration of soul, which has believes on a trajectory beyond conceivability, toward “something” ungraspable by the objectively comprehending mind. (See “Religious notes” below for more.)
To a religious soul, fundamentalism is ideo-idolatry, a confused reduction of an essentially inconceivable, incomprehensible reality to a comprehended concept. The fundamentalist worships something that is inside their own heads, and part of themselves. We do this all the time, even in mundane life, when we love an idea of a thing and forget that the idea indicates a reality beyond that idea, whose value is precisely what the idea cannot capture. We confuse mental categories of groups for real persons and love or hate the mental image. We confuse stories for the complex polycentered unfoldings of real events. It’s just how we are, especially when we forget to try to be otherwise.
So — An interview with a fundamentalist, whether that funamentalist adheres to a right-fundamentalism of mis-taken religion or a left-fundamentalism of scientististic psycho-social-political beliefs is unlikely to reveal anything beyond more and more belief system content, which never touches the eclipsed host of these believed-in beliefs.
But it is precisely and exclusively this eclipsed being — this unique intuitive living in the heart of each soul — I want to coax out in these single-question interviews.
Here is where I permit myself the mitigation of hopeful hypotheses.
First, I hypothesize that any apparent soullessness is only apparent, and that what actually happens is only eclipse. A person’s weird, intuitive uniqueness never stops existing, however much it is occluded by opaque belied-in factual content. A belief-system is its own place, which makes heavens of hells and hells of heavens, but these places are not the souls who become imprisoned within them by identifying with what holds them captive. Someone is in there to be sprung.
Second, I hypothesize that the path to an occluded soul (the exit from the cell) is craft. Craft is where a person engages a reality unmediated by language, skin to skin. Where are they blurring the boundaries between their soul, their body, an instrument, and an emerging work in music or visual arts or other flavor of alchemy? Where have they become someone new with someone? Where are they losing themselves in physical exercise? Where do words fail them, precisely where their bodies and souls succeed? I need single questions that puncture belief-systems and get at these experiences.
Third, to get there, I might need to abandon the limitations of conversation. I might need to adopt some of the most radical practices of design research, which preclude the asking of questions. For in generative research we are not interested in answers to our own questions. We are after the implicit questions constituting the subjectivity of our research participants. What questions are relevant to them? To get there we do not ask direct questions, we request lessons. We ask them to teach us about their lives. This is why our research briefs are not defined by questions to answer, but areas of inquiry to learn about.
So the obvious single-question interview about craft might be neither a question, nor an interview. It might simply be:
Please show me your best craft.
In research, things never go as expected. It might be a finished artifact, or it might be a demonstration of doing the craft. Either way, I will have to go to the participant’s place.
The research will have a dual-nature. I am doing the research in order to produce a learning-teaching event, and it will be iterative prototyping testing of the research protocol itself.
The final deliverable of the research will be one or more short, letterpress printable prompts.
These will be used to make some kind of beautiful sacred printed objects, maybe a booklet, a set of cards, a small poster or reference sheet or some combination of these.
A good friend of mine suggested another question:
What is the worst thing that ever happened to you, and how did you benefit from it?
If any researcher or interviewer or front-line service provider or talented conversationalist happens up this, and has a soul-coaxing prompt or question that has worked for them, I am collecting them.
Anyone who contributes a prompt will get a copy of whatever gets printed.
Religious notes:
1.
Generally, fundamentalism believes that a belief system and sound life practice is constructed upon a foundation of concrete fact.
Religion senses a divine ground beneath all objectivity, supporting it, though less solid than water, or even aether. But without this grounding, all fact disintegrates into isolated grains of truth, unable to support even humble truth constructions, much less towering edifices of fact meant to penetrate the ultimate.
2.
Religion believes toward … Toward what is essentially inconceivable, and is not what, but someone who is better but not perfectly characterized as Why or Who. An interrogative combining Why, Who, How, What, Where, When would approximate it better than any one of them. But perhaps refusal to name this interrogative mystery … or even to invent a category for … is a better response. Perhaps we just address … with a simple situating of Nefesh-Ruach in I-here-now: “Here I am.” To say “Hineini” is for Neshamah-Chayah to inhale the pneuma of Nefesh-Ruach into itself, like an atmosphere receives back a lungful of exhaled breath.
3.
All this, of course, is said in the language of my own chosen faith, or, rather, the faith who chose me. Speaking of which, much has been made of the expression “chosen people” but this expression is rarely heard oriented by the best question. It is natural for any envy-inclined mind to hear in this a response to “Which people were chosen versus which other people who were not chosen? A better question would be “Which people made a choice of faith, and which people were made by being chosen by a faith?”
Chosenness does not signify a status: chosen versus unchosen. Chosenness signifies only who chose whom.
Update (August 4, 2026): The goal is development of a craft, “sacred interview”.
Design definitions
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 name 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
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.