Category Archives: Design

A Service is not a tree

Design, Philosophy, Pluricentrism

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

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

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

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

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

More to come…

Weird coincidence!

Autobiography, Design

I went down a set theory rabbit hole this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screenshot

Math weirdness

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy

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

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

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

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

It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.

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

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

An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Materials, media, messages

Design

Each design discipline works in its own materials, through some particular medium and deploys methods systematically in ways suited to its materials and media.

At first the distinction between material and medium is unclear. They seem ambiguous if not synonymous. An artist might speak of working in some medium, and then characterize the medium materially. But artists (at least visual artists) work mostly alone to produce a finished artifact for others to experience after the production is complete.

Designers work in teams to produce an artifact for others, and therefore must communicate intent, methodology and projected output with a far higher degree of technical precision.

But, as usual etymology helps us tease out distinctions when then sharpen on closer inspection. Material — Latin materialis, “of or belonging to matter,” from Latin materia “matter, stuff, wood, timber”. Medium — Latin medius “in the middle, between; from the middle”.

Medium is something placed between — most often in order to convey something else.

When waves travel through the water, the material water becomes the medium through which waves move. When a spiritual medium channels a spirit, a person becomes a channel conveying a message from a source beyond the individual.

Material is the substance from a thing is made — the ingredients of a thing, considered apart from its form or function.

Let us now apply this to design.

Materials are that from which a designed artifact is formed. These are include, but are not limited to physical substances.

The form itself — which must consider the materials from which it will be actualized in implementation as an artifact, but which is not yet materialized — is the design.

So what is the medium? The medium is that which conveys being through heterogeneous materials, once the designed, actualized artifact is activated — set in motion and used by people who will complete the designed system by participating it.

While we are splitting hairs, let us make another rarely acknowledged but crucially important distinction:

The essential difference between a designed artifact and an engineered artifact is a difference of ontological scope. An engineered thing is complete when all its parts function together as a system of objects. A design is only complete when its parts and participants come together in a social system of interacting subjects and objects.

An engineered system can be tested and assessed apart from their eventual contact with humans. The system is complete (and testable) prior to use by people.

A designed system can only be tested and assessed if humans take their place in the system and participate in it. Their experience and their participation are intrinsic and inseparable from the design.

Bruno Latour named systems that mingle subjectivity and objectivity “hybrid systems”, and argued that societies are irreducibly hybrid. According to Latour, any attempt to understand “the social” abstracting the subjective aspects from social systems is bound to give an incomplete or falsely complete picture of how societies are.

Design intentionally shapes social subsystems, understood to subsist within more extensive social systems. To say it again, social systems are understood as hybrids of subjective and objective being, interacting, combining and producing hybrid effects that are, more often than not, difficult to unravel into objects and subjects.

Of course, very few designers use this kind of language, or even think explicity at this depth about what they do when they design. Most adopt pidgin MBA language, enhanced with designy jargon, but the words roughly refer to shaping hybrid systems involving a range of materials that include people acting in various formal roles.

Now the medium function of design can seen clearly against the enabling materials.

Medium is concerned with the being circulating through the various materials — the being in which each participant partakes when they experience the designed system, responds to it, and interacts within it, and in so doing, contributes to the being of that system. The habitability of materials, what which affords an animating flow of life of some specific kind — this is medium.

Marshall McLuhan famously and insightfully said “the medium is the message.” What he meant was that the being of society is conducted through social systems, which draw us into distinctive kinds of participation, and shape us as people into participants of some species. This participation is the “message” of the medium, and the content we consume in this process is secondary.

So visual designers, regardless of what materials used for surfaces, pigments, dyes, light-emitters, or whatever physically conveys light patterns into a person’s eye works in the medium of visual composition.

Architects famously work in every imaginable construction material to work in the medium of space.

Communication designers, regardless of what materials convey light and sound to a person’s sensory perception works in the medium of information.

Service designers go even broader and combine every material available to an organization (a hybrid system) to work in the medium of value exchange.

And the discipline of service design — in the brief moments when it unforgets what it exists to be — carries a message of exchanging functional, emotional and social value through densely woven, intensely intended win-wins. The message is not, however, the explicit offerings, nor is it the implicit “jobs to be done” by these offering, but rather, that everything good in this world circulates through such exchanges.

The minute service designers forget this, they cease to be designers — service designers or otherwise — and become social engineering business consultants. Such designer-branded professionals may dress up in hipster costumes, but, whatever they wear, beneath the cloth, you find the same corporate stuffed suit filler.

And the message of that medium — the medium of corporate consulting — is that human beings are resources to be utilized by organizations to meet quantifiable organizational goals.

A hermetic design discipline would take seriously that design is concerned not just with form, material and function, but also, and perhaps most of all, medium. And the crucial importance of medium in the life of human beings — not only at its climactic moments, but in everyday mundanity between — might be the heart of its message.

Additional notes, Cinco de Mayo 2026:

The discipline of engineering works on many of the same materials as design. But its medium is different. The medium of engineering is control, to six sigma exactitude.

This is no argument against engineering. Engineering is indispensable. We must control some aspects of reality, often with precise exactitude. But this control must not be the sole — or even dominant — medium of social existence. ? If our organizational medium is engineered, regardless of the words it says, its message message ?cannot avoid being “submit to control”. ? Conform to your role and ?perform it consistently, efficiently and professionally. Be corporate.?

A few days ago I re-read Christopher Alexander’s classic essay, “A City is Not a Tree”. In it, Alexander contrasts two formal structures, the tree and the semilattice. A tree is how things are given to one logic. It is monostable. A semilattice on the other hand, is multistable. When a reality is invested with semilattice structure, different logics? can encounter it and perceive in it two or more different, but harmoniously related, tree structures.

Alexander makes a passionate argument that we model our ?cities on overlapping semilattice structures, because it is only in this overlapping that life emerges.? I believe this is equally true of any designed reality, especially organizations.

A semilattice supports psychic diversity, by giving the same reality in different but harmonious ways, not as social constructions? to be laboriously figured out part by part (construed), but as perceptual and conceptual gestalts, understood spontaneously as intuitive givens. Semilattice structures are shared “boundary objects” that allow people to be together in difference.?

So engineering is one tree, but it must function within a semilattice. Whatever is contained within engineering — whatever is forced to be a limb, branch or leaf on an engineered construction will be animated by merely mechanical forces.

Asphyxiating

Autobiography, Design

The little air remaining in the field of design — after its professionalization, after its submission to technicity, and after its deemphasis and almost complete abandonment the first-person perspective at the heart of its work — has been sucked out by the myriad promises projected upon AI by terrified, ambitious, manic managerials.

Intuition has been squeezed out of design, and what remains is calculation, explication, prediction, profusion of words.

The workworld is closing in on me and I can no longer breathe.

Younger design professionals seem perfectly fine with this evolution of the field.

And now I am recalling a passage from Richard Rorty said about institutions:

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”

They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon…

Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic,” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

I long for the days of mere claustrophobia, when I could still sneak a breath of inspiration and now and then make a leap of intuition, provided that upon landing I pulled on my Hermetic cowboy boots and carefully backtracked from where I arrived, paving a path of logical footsteps. +O(

Service design’s core mission

Design, Pluricentrism

It is a terrible thing to be prevented from giving what you were born to give, and, instead, to be forced to give what you don’t have.

It is the gift of gifts to give what you were born to give to others who need and value it, and, in exchange, to receive what you lack but badly need.

And one of our greatest needs is to give.

The mission in the heart of service design, buried beneath mechanical rubble and organizational slime, is a holy thing.

Intro to a philosophy of design of philosophy

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

Premise:

Designers philosophize all the time. It is part of our job, and for many of us, it is the best part of the work, and the part of the work that generates the most valuable change.

But it is also the part that is hardest to explain, the hardest to tame and the hardest to protect. This is intrinsic to philosophical work.

This inability to explain and protect — even to gain personal clarity on what is happening — prevents designers from securing the conditions needed to do design’s most important work. And it impedes design’s expansive development into new fertile regions.

“What?” you might say at this point, “I don’t recall doing philosophy at work.”

Most have some notion of what a philosophy is. According to Wilfred Sellars, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Let us adopt this as our definition of philosophy, as thing, as noun.

But far fewer of us understand philosophizing as an activity. We understand it so little — or worse, misunderstand it so much — that we do not recognize what is happening when we find ourselves in a philosophical problem. We imagine that doing philosophy is like arguing or constructing a theory or indulging in abstract speculation. These, however, are merely using a philosophy to do thinking — to produce complex thought systems. Any designer knows, using a tool and making a tool are different matters.

Philosophy means immersing in a philosophical problem, of the form, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it “I don’t know my way about.” Which is to say it is not even yet a problem and what it lacks is precisely form. That is, it is an aporia, a perplexity, also known in the field of design as a wicked problem.

But simply naming it is not the same as knowing it. It locates it on a map, but it does not convey how it is to be in the place depicted on the map. It presents it objectively, in a comfortable third-person perspective. But philosophical problems a subjective crises, experienced from inside it, from the first-person. And this experience is not merely uncomfortable or ambiguous. They are often uncanny, unnerving, infuriating and excruciating. And not when the process is going wrong. They are this way precisely when they are going right.

But people hate this feeling. They feel hellish heat, and if they are in a position to do so, shut down the kitchen.

Design is hard to do because philosophy is hard to do, and we lack norms to help us discern healthy pain (like morning sickness, labor pains, growing pains) from unhealthy pain (infection, malnutrition, organ failure, death pangs). As soon as any pain happens, out comes the anesthesia, anti-anxiety medicine, quarantine, scalpels — whatever makes it go away. And as with many ill-chosen medical interventions, the pain is not alleviated; it is exchanged for some variety of numbness, and often some future health failure. It is not dealt with, head-on and directed toward recovery of health, much less growth and flourishing.

Promise:

By understanding the role philosophy does play and can play in design, design can escape the tyranny of misnorms (application of the wrong set of norms to a situation, which prevent the situation from developing toward improvement), and work more effectively in its current spheres of activity, and, better, expand this its domain to areas where other ways of working have failed to produce positive change, or even failed catastrophically and made matters worse.

Nihilism pandemic

Design, Exnihilism, Philosophy

In our time, and in all times like this one, nihilism is in the air.

I do not only mean that nihilism is in the news or in art, or in the nihilistic blending of news and art. Each time some lost youth commits a politically-charged murder, but their ideology cannot be pinned down because — let’s be real — these young pale criminals are barely able to think, much muster the integrity to believe anything whole-heartedly or whole-mindedly, which is the crux of the problem! — and it appears they are caught in the nowhere between the extremist poles of the horseshoe. where the only possible point of agreement is hatred of this world, whatever has produced such a world of which they are both product and victim (and, of course, inevitably whatever hydra head of Jew-hatred is in fashion, whether anti-Pharisee, antisemite, anti-Elders Cabal, anti-Zionist).

Such amorphous hatred craves an object upon which it may condense and have form — a thing to vent itself upon, and justifications for the venting and its object. A universal loathing — ressentiment — precedes all ideological justification. But the theories, the alleged causes, the expressions, the abuse are only stations on the way to fully embodying the nihilistic impulse in consummating acts of annihilation.

The ideologies, manifestos, memes and suicide notes are not the logic behind such murders. They are the final sputters of failing language on the way to the ultimate expression of nihilism: murder.

But again, the nihilism in the air is not only, or even primarily, the topic of nihilism or nihilism as diagnosis.

Rather, nihilism in the air is the rebreathed bad breath we draw into our lungs wherever a critical mass of people at some time or place is meaning-starved.

I have been in a great many corporate headquarters. In some, I was disturbed by an odor of fear. In others, I have choked on despair. We can also sometimes smell negativity (detect “bad vibes”) in retail spaces (especially big box stores and malls), cultural events, political demonstrations, places of worship, and, let us not forget! — schools. Anywhere that people of similar disposition gather, the air carries a spirit, a breath of some kind, most noticeable to outsiders.

People who breathe fumes of fear, despair, disregard, contempt, absurdity — if they are not of the kind who actively exhale that kind of air — are enervated by it, and gradually, passively lose their taste for life. They lose hope. They stop caring about the future because they cannot even feel the possibility of future meaning. They do only what they are forced to do, by others or by themselves through that internalized slavery we call “self-discipline”. And they do not much mind the idea of the world being destroyed, if it spares them the wearying prospect of being at work tomorrow. They might even siphon a little energy from counter-nihilists who hate the order in which they are trapped. “The enemy of my enemy” might not be my friend — in fact, the enemy might despise passive complicity even more than their active enemies — but from a safe distance and through a shielding screen, the destruction of my own oppressors (by potentially worse ones) emits heat, noise, flashing, vengeance, pity-fodder and moralistic escapism.

And the products and services of such unhappiness is the same kind. If these brand emanations are not energetically negative, they are energetically nil — that half-pointless, half-phony charade we call “corporate”. Abandon all hope, employees and vendors who enter here, physical or metaphorical. And consumers of their productive output beware.

All this together — the strip-mining of human souls to extract depleted psychic resources — a world overflowing with unlovable and meaningless consumer products, supported by listless, robotic, over-scripted services — education optimized for life in these conditions, in schools that epitomize these conditions and suck life, hope and enthusiasm out of children and replace it with meaning-depleting ideological mechanics — entertainment-news media whose message is inattentive, flitting and spastic consumption — produce conditions ideal for active annihilation — righteous violence, vengeance, martyrdom of self and others to causes that justify it. We know victory by the enemies of our enemies will be even worse than what we have, but at least we can indulge a moment of schadenfreude watching our despised tormentor suffer and perish a few moments before it is our own turn.

Here we are.

But this can be reversed. Or rather, eversed. And the passage is precisely where we least expect it: nihilo.

And our best access is, believe it or not, design. Not the kind of servile and domesticated corporate consultant “design” optimized to meet or exceed the expectations of C-suite sociopaths and their demoralized drones — but rather design which challenges the hegemony of technik.

Ontological membranes

Design, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Nihilitude is the active ingredient of relevance, or, rather, of irrelevance.

And so nihilitude is also the essence of abstraction, of focus, of all selective attention of thought.

Why suppress what is real but irrelevant? Why selectively focus (and filter) attention? Why read abstract order into (or, more accurately, leave myriad alternative orders unread from) the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of chaos surrounding us?

It is a necessity of maintaining finite being. An anomalogy: To hear any signal in radio frequency noise, we must tune a radio receiver to one narrow band of frequency, instead of listening to the white noise of the full range of frequencies and enjoying all the signal simultaneously like some kind of god. We do it for the same reason living organisms have skin, and organs have membranes. Any being that desires duration encloses, shelters, clothes, envelopes itself within semipermeable boundaries, holding itself in dynamic balance between openness, closure and carefully controlled disclosure — between dissolution, consumption, digestion, dissipation and insularity, stagnation, isolation, starvation, asphyxiation. (Tif’eret, the principle of balance, the spinal essence of being within greater being, linking sole with crown).

Nihilitude is ontological membrane. It is the horizon, the far side of every object, the receding undersurface, the back of one’s head, the thing you’ve never noticed, and the imperceptibility of your own perception.

An enworldment is what emerges when some finite aspects of reality emerge from nihilitude. The enworldment “projects” (through subtraction of all else) a schema or template of definite beings. Nihilitude flows between each definite thing, each object of experience, a “not”, against which it is defined — literally, de-finitized.

Whatever prevents the schema from crystallizing (finitely manifesting its continuity within infinitude) is coated with nihilitude, and drowned in irrelevance — tuned out, set aside, downplayed, explained away — or submerged in nihilitude, and is so irrelevant that it is never noticed. It drowns in oblivion.

Nihilitude makes possible a holistic organic understanding needed by a living being. A soul, in order to persist as a soul, must spontaneously perceive and conceive real entities (givens) as whole units – gestalts — and spontaneously perceive and conceive these given wholes as themselves belonging to higher order wholes. Simltaneously it also perceives and conceives these units of being as constituted of lower order whole units, not only objective (third-person) entities, but also first person subjective beings within and exceeding that of one’s I or another’s thou. Sketchy genius Arthur Koestler called this kind of order of nested wholeness “holarchy”. Souls are holarchic.

But souls can, with effort, non-spontaneously connect whole entities with others in order to construct truths. It can argue, figure out, analyze and construe knowledge. This is what is called “constructed truth”. The basic units of such knowledge remain spontaneously perceived and conceived ideas, but the way these givens are combined are not.

Constructed knowledge must be memorized and recalled in order to be known in any particular moment. When they are not in active recollection the knowledge exists as data and rules of recombination. Constructed truth laboriously rebuilds bridges across gaps of nihilitude, linking fragmentary clusters of knowledge with one another. Sometimes construction links objects in ways that obscure rather than illuminate their continuity. The more the construction obscures rather than reveals the continuity among given entities the more force of will and artifice is required to sustain it. It is a the kind of artificiality that gives the word “artificial” its connotations of unnaturalness.

But sometimes constructions reveal, rather than obscure, continuity. Something “clicks’ and a layer of nihilitude clears away, admitting new givens traced out by the constructions.

These are not only intellectual motions, like what we do when we dance along with a philosophy book or choreograph ideas of our own. They can also be physical movements — physical dances, moving from some steps to feeling the rhythm and grace in response to music — or perceptual pattern-finding — like perceiving the animating beauty in art or noticing natural patterns or forms in nature and suddenly experiencing continuity between one’s own nature and the environing nature to whom one belongs as a natural creature. Between two people it can be finding rhythm flow and rapport, and becoming swept up in a literally animated conversation. This is the intimate congeniality of thought and life beyond thought.

This heterogeneity is one reason why the? term enworldment is preferable to worldview or perspective or other ontologically-limited or reductive terms — even ontology. Enworldment concerns the entire field of being, not only thoughts or thoughts about being.

Being rises from oblivion and shows itself, often reconfiguring what is spontaneously given, smashing artificial constructions, submerging (de-emphasizing) givens that had been relevant, and pushing irrelevant given into the foreground. And this also often requires new constructions capable of bridging gaps in this new reconfigured landscape — this new ontological archipelago rising from an ocean of oblivion, new faith-moved mountain ranges. This is the experience of conversion.

Some conversions convert the converted soul to a metaphysics where conversion and its revelations ex nihilo are an ever-present possibility, especially when this possibility is inconceivable.

Let us name this conversion to permanent possibility of conversion, irrupting precisely from the inconceivable oblivion of nihilitude. Let us call it exnihilism.

…to be continued… refinements, exrensions… application to design…

Woo-woo

Pluricentrism

I take books like drugs. Doubt me?

Chaos is not absence of order, but precisely the opposite – the presence of infinite orders. Each of us, sheltered in the shade of our own minuscule I-here-now, benefits from
sphere upon sphere upon sphere upon sphere of ontological filters — deflecting, transmitting, sky-glowing — each successively diffusing and reducing infinity infinitesimally. Each sphere bears its own portion of infinity. Each contains a holographic infinity, a jewel-node in Indra’s Net, conveying within itself the entire jeweled net, refracting and refracting and refracting and refracting to infinite density in one centripetally radiant photon of infinite, dimensionless magnitude.

Craft as conversation

Design, Enworldment

To be alive to craft is to converse well with materials. Good conversation is reciprocal exchange — give and take, hearing and responding — within an event of emergent meaning.

Hans-Georg Gadamer said that in the best games, players are participants through whom the game plays itself, and, similarly,  in the best conversations, the conversation has itself through its interlocutors.

In craft, artisan and artifact, speaking a common language of materials — physical or otherwise — participate in the emergence of form.

Designerly metaphysics

Design, Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Before any beginning is infinitude.

Pure infinitude. Ein sof.

Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.

At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.

Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.

Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.

For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.

From within finitude, piercing of the cloak is ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.

Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.

Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.

Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.

Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.

In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.

The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.

The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.

The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.

And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.

Bright blood

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

The weirdest, best insight I learned from Nietzsche is that our hierarchy of values more or less determines our faith and that this hierarchy guards itself through prohibiting questions. Defy those prohibitions, interrogate settled matters closed to inquiry, and all kinds of uncanny things happen. Valuing is inseparably soul-forming and world-forming. Any significant change in value hierarchy transfigures self and world together: a reborn I in a re-enworlded world.

If you are nodding along and think you already know and agree with this — has it ever occurred to you that many of these prohibitions are good and necessary and ought to be upheld? Most obedient young radicals have not. Nor have they had the courage to question — let alone challenge — anything outside of those pre-defeated values our own dominant value hierarchy demand that we ritually re-interrogate. We obediently perform the rebelliousness we are expected or compelled to perform, and rage against whatever exceeds the strict and narrow limits of our radical thoughts.

But back to value hierarchies. Within a range of diversity (a quite narrow, and necessarily narrow range!), each of us values different things. Some of it is circumstantial (we have deficits and gluts of goods) and some is essential (our taste prioritizes goods differently). And this is why we exchange value. We have too much of one good and too little of another. A situation creates momentary need of a good that makes other goods in our possession or capacity relatively dispensable. We find it easy to generate a good that others desire but cannot generate themselves. We sense ineffable sacred importance in one good and are unmoved by other goods held sacred by others. So we enter into exchanges.

If these exchanges are mutually beneficial, and conditions are such that they dynamically stabilize, an organization comes to life. Its lifeblood is the value, inhering like oxygen, in the myriad goods exchanged. The need for exchange — the needs and wants, the surplus and abilities — makes the goods circulate through exchanges — and causes an organization to live and act and to have real, living being. And we who participate — who act, who are acted upon — have actancy within our organization.

Reading Charles Stein’s extraordinary The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, I just learned a new word, thumos:

We are no doubt familiar with how English verbs are proxy for actions expressed either in the active or the passive voice, roughly approximating the difference between acts that one performs and those that happen to one. But there are actions where neither of these voices seem to apply. An action might not be the product of a person’s willful agency and still not be something that passively happens to him or her as if through an impersonal chain of causes. Poetic inspiration is a case in point. A number of recent authors have discussed the middle voice where it proves useful in the analysis of natural and linguistic phenomena because neither active nor passive constructions seem adequate. …

The Greek and the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language have, in addition to an active and a passive, a middle voice that, among other things, expresses the inspiration of the Muse and would be used wherever it seems that a god impels, instigates, induces, or inspires some action. The Homeric-Hesiodic dialect expresses the instigation of such action by saying that a god strikes the person in the thumos — an “organ” in the middle of one’s body that is activated in this manner. If Eros strikes, one falls in love; if Mars, one is impelled to rage, violence, or courage in combat; if Hermes, deeds of mind, cognition, planning, cleverness — all the devious and ingenious devices of the Hermetic character. The consequence of being struck in the thumos by the god is clearly not the work of one’s independent free will, but it is also not entirely a passive reaction to an external force. The god is not entirely external to one’s psyche, and yet he is external to it, too! … Zeus might actively strike your house with his lightning bolt, but the striking of one’s thumos is not quite like that. When Eros or Hermes touches this organ, it is the most intimate of phenomena. Often translators are forced to use such locutions as “love was awakened in his heart” — as if the response were passive. But it isn’t passive. It is an arousal at the very root of one’s powers of action; it is that which is not quite you but which activates what is active in you as you.

Thumos is the mythical organ of actancy — present but missing, like Da’at in the sefirot.

What does thumos do? I will venture that it governs intuitive participation in transcendent being. It receives and responds as an organ in a superpersonal organism. That superperson (egregore) might be, for example, an organization. Or some other enveloping being, like a friendship or marriage. (“In true love it is the soul that envelops the body,” says Nietzsche.) Or… a faith.

Regarding actancy, I learned the word actant from Bruno Latour.

What is a force? Who is it? What is it capable of? Is it a subject, text, object, energy, or thing? How many forces are there? Who is strong and who is weak? Is this a battle? Is this a game? Is this a market? All these questions are defined and deformed only in further trials.

In place of “force” we may talk of “weaknesses”, “entelechies”, “monads”, or more simply “actants.”

…

No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.

Is an actant essence or relation? We cannot tell without a trial (1.1.5.2). To stop themselves being swept away, essences may relate themselves to many allies, and relations to many essences.

…

An actant can gain strength only by associating with others. Thus it speaks in their names. Why don’t the others speak for themselves? Because they are mute; because they have been silenced; because they became inaudible by talking at the same time. Thus, someone interprets them and speaks in their place. But who? Who speaks? Them or it? Traditore — traduttore. One equals several. It cannot be determined. If the fidelity of the actant is questioned, it can demonstrate that it just repeats what the others wanted it to say. It offers an exegesis on the state of forces, which cannot be contested even provisionally without another alliance.

If Actor-Network Theory (aka ANT, sociology of actants) is a social science, service design can be seen as its technology, although vanishingly few designers go beyond knowing about Latour, usually via a forced trudge through We Have Never Been Modern in grad school.)

Service design was the first explicitly polycentric design discipline. It is concerned with forming durable arrangements of value exchange among people, mediated by “things” in the broadest possible sense — both, human and nonhuman, alike, considered actants — interacting within an organization and around the organization within its ecosystem of customers, partners, competitors, regulators and other stakeholders.

The systematic interaction of actants, each participating as its own experiential-agential center within the system gives rise to a polycentric order — which service design views as an emergent order with its own kind of being: a service.

But no service is known from “a view from nowhere”. It is always experienced by someone, from some point in the system, holographically (the image of the whole subsists in each of its parts. Each participant in the service is a jewel in the Net of Indra, which experiences and acts from its own node. This multiple view-from-within is what could be called pluricentricity.

Service design is concerned both with the third-person / objective polycentricity of organizations and services and the myriad first-person / subjective pluricentricity of actants within organizations and services, and how polycentricity and pluricentricity mobiously, thumocratically (!) interform one another.

I’ve said before that I worship the distributed God. God’s distribution, of course, saturates all being equally, but to finite beings like ourselves it is concentrated in souls, the nucleus of which is thumos.

When I think about value exchanges I associate it with the circulation of the divine light in the sefirot.

(“Enlist every ounce of your bright blood, and off with their heads!” In Tarot, the letter shin is associated with Judgment. And here the Kahnemaniacs lose their last shred of patience. “Barnum!” Yes. But before you start stoning me with your cognitive bias accusations, ask yourself this: Do I know my own faith? We certainly know what our peers accept as true. We know very well what will get us ostracized if we voice doubt. Some of us know what we can successfully argue and defend. But do we know what truths we would bet our life on? I suspect not. No, no: We’re all post-truth now, especially those of us who insist on truth. We all suffer spurious ideas for the sake of identity. None of us believes three quarters of our “beliefs” and maybe least of all the ones we get emotionally worked up over. We think we’ve “done the work” of overcoming our biases, but we have not overcome the fact that we harbor extreme cognitive bias toward where our biases are and aren’t. We are blind to where our justice itself is most glaringly unjust, and if we refuse to acknowledge this… well, that is blindness doing blindness. If we are honest, which we are not, we will acknowledge that we have already sold ourselves out to pay admission to our social class. We are intellectually and spiritually insolvent. We have no personal integrity to preserve. So why not indulge the Barnum effect for the sake of serious, joyous play? Witness: if we are hospitable and entertain ideas that entertain us, we may receive invitations to higher worlds. The invitation is addressed to our thumos, and we accept with “hineini”.)

Liberal saint Richard Rorty famously taught “Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”

I want to redescribe design to make it look and feel spiritually important.

And I want to redescribe the spiritual to manifest its pervasive presence in the ordinary,

And I want to redescribe both together to accentuate our duty to shape our world and invest ourselves in it so the world manifests its spiritual provenance and destiny.

We are responsible for forming a world we can care about and willingly serve.

)O+

The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations

Chord, Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve said it and texted it so many times I assumed I must have posted it, but I can’t find it: The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.

Many clumsy verbosities have been massively improved by the battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding.

Two examples. First rock tumbled William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

The raw rock:

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Another is from Hannah Arendt. Rock-tumbled:

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.

Raw:

Human action, like all strictly political phenomena, is bound up with human plurality, which is one of the fundamental conditions of human life insofar as it rests on the fact of natality, through which the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while. If, therefore, by starting natural processes, we have begun to act into nature, we have manifestly begun to carry our own unpredictability into that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.

But because I’m such a repetitious and arrogant person, happy to quote and requote myself poorly, subjecting my own clumsy words to “battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding” until they become nice smooth gems. For example, “The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.”

I’ve been playing with the idea of making a letterpress book on design lifted from Jan Zwicky’s brilliant Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. Each entry will be a quotation, accompanied by an extended reflection on how it illuminates some facet of design. I will be using the improved, rock tumbled version of quotations, not originals.

I love long collaborative traditions. No one person could have made anything as perfect as a bicycle.

Notes on design esoterism

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

Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.

Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.

Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.

Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.

And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.

And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.

To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.

(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)

Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.

Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.

Esoterism wants to materialize.

Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.

Exnihilism is at the heart of it.

New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.

Empathy? Or…

Design

This LinkedIn post illuminates the source of my current dismay with the direction service design has taken, which is toward journey management.

None of this is a complaint about journey management per se, only the notion that journey management is a natural extension of service design — something for which service designers should feel affinity.

Journey management is an emerging field, with few trained specialists to fill the roles it creates.

Service designers are among the most qualified.

This is not unusual. Designers often find themselves at the edges of emerging fields, and often flow into these domains, and infuse them with designerly sensibilities.

The tragedy in this case, however, is that here design has flown too close to the sun, or rather, taken the elevator too close to the sun, up in the top floors of the glass tower where the executives hold court.

Up here, some key parts of the service design skillset are indispensable.

All except the design part. The design part is not only useless, it is a liability.

All those specialized methods human centered designers learn in order to be service designers are retained. But the heart of the discipline — design — is checked at the boardroom door.

All service, no design.

This is a tragedy because the radical promise of design is collaborative decision-making. It involves everyone exercising empathy, together. It is exercised mutually, by all involved. It is not exercised in order to spare executives the burden of thinking outside their own narrow focus, as der Veer suggests.

Empathy is not, cannot and should not be done asymmetrically for someone else, who is not expected to reciprocate. That is not empathy. That is submission.

Nobody should be exempted from the challenge of relating as a human to other humans — least of all the most powerful people whose duty it is to lead.

The whole point of design is to humanize the world. When, in the name of empathy we spare the most powerful people in the world the duty to lead empathically, design has betrayed both itself and the world.

Journey management is not a design discipline.

It is a strain of management consulting that systematically organizes customer data to inform business strategy decisions. In this time, in these conditions, journey management is a necessary and important improvement on older, more piecemeal ways of understanding customers.

Service designers might be able to transition to journey management, but they cannot make this transition as service designers. At best, they will harness their vestigial design skills in service of their new managerial function.

For service designers — and all designers — effective collaboration with journey managers will be an essential skill. It will expand design’s sphere of effectiveness.

But make no mistake: if journey managers “win a seat at the table” this is no more a win for design than when product managers won their seat. These “offering management” disciplines add new organizational layers between design and leadership, and rather than representing design, they push design further from power.