Category Archives: Design

Woo-woo

April 5, 2026Pluricentrismanomalogue

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

April 4, 2026Design, Enworldmentanomalogue

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

April 3, 2026Design, Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

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

April 1, 2026Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrismanomalogue

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

March 30, 2026Chord, Design, Letterpress, Philosophyanomalogue

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

March 27, 2026Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

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…

March 21, 2026Designanomalogue

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.

Anomie and misnorms

March 19, 2026Design, History, Politicsanomalogue

I poked around in Durkheim’s Suicide yesterday, to see what he had to say about anomie.

I do not want to discount the magnitude of his theoretical breakthrough, which was mere foreground to his deeper methodological breakthrough, but the theory does suffer a bit from retroactive obviousness. That is, his concept of anomie is more historically important than it is freshly relevant to the anomic situation we face today.

To summarize, Durkheim’s diagnosis of anomie is that, at the individual level, without external societal constraints human desires are unlimited and lacking form. Society, by imposing limits, gives us norms, goals, defined desires and milestones for assessing the progress of our lives. When society stops providing this structure, we lose our bearings, and we are lost in a horizonless chaos, where motion is just arbitrary difference without any reference point by which biographical progress can be experienced.

Though now, just in the process of writing this summary, it is starting to feel freshly relevant.

In the spirit of showing my work, I am changing the original thrust (which was to expand anomie beyond Durkheim’s conception) to seeing how much I can find within it.

For years, I have played with a term, “misnorm“. Think of misnormality as a cousin to anomie. A misnorm is more or less a social category mistake. We misunderstand the essential nature of some domain of activity, and misjudge the behaviors that sustain it. We have a false image of how things happen, and so, when things go as they should go and must go, we judge that things are going wrong. And if we are in a position to control the situation, we will force it into conformity with what we think should happen, thereby making things impossible.

(Misnorming happens to designers all the time, and most of my career has been spent battling them, in order to win conditions for good design work. Someone who expects design to work linearly, with steady progress toward a straight goal, without moments of confusion, doubt, conflict and intense anxiety, in complete and polished iterations does not know what design is. And if such person attempts to lead design projects, he literally does not know what he is doing. Such a person is likely to misrepresent design to his organization, or accept misrepresentations of design, and sets himself and his team up for a truly traumatic failure. Either the design team will insist on doing design the way design is done and fail to conform to the wrong expectations of the ignorant leader and his ignorant stakeholders. Or the design team will try to work under impossible conditions within impossible constraints and fail to deliver good design, which is, frankly the fate to which most designers are damned. Either way, the project will fail, and it will fail because, once again, the leader failed to win conditions where success is possible. No amount of demanding, or bullying, or bullshitting can change this fact. And, by the way, this failure is even more a failure of leadership as it is failure to understand design: such people also suffer from misnorms of leadership. They confuse leadership with tyranny.)

Misnorms cause us to compare the human condition to a fantasy norm, and to misjudge something normal and relatively good as something atrocious and deserving destruction, or, as today’s timid radicals put it: dismantled.

Today’s misnorms are fed by fictional images produced by our media — news, entertainment, and the blending of the two in the propagandistic missions of various political movements. This propaganda projects misnormal ideal positive images into the world, in comparison to which everything real is distorted as inadequate, and ideal negative images blamed for the inadequacies. And at the theoretical level, we have ideologies and weird theologies which purport to enlighten us to what’s really going on, but in fact dysilluminate the world with false clarity, which always “reveals” the world as hopelessly corrupt, irredeemable and irreparable, requiring nothing less than total ground-clearing and rebuilding from scratch. It is hard to avoid wondering if all this need for rebuilding from scratch doesn’t just serve as justification for sating an insatiable appetite for destruction.

And so a great many people wander around interpreting everyday, ordinary frustration as evidence of something extraordinarily bad, while misinterpreting disproportionately violent responses, and corrosive policies meant to correct nonexistent problems, as good and necessary. And it all makes conditions of normal life increasingly impossible. And it is very difficult to maintain, repair and improve something that is being undermined, bombarded, and demolished from within, so the critiques gain credibility through their own negative outcomes: the deterioration of what they critique.

And so, today, instead of experiencing lack of references, orientation and sense of progress, as with anomie, we have impossible and deeply phony references and perverse misorientations and rapid regressive velocity.

Anomie : misnorm :: nonunderstanding : misunderstanding

Tetragrammaton lesson

March 16, 2026Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Symbols and diagramsanomalogue

Two realms of truth, one above soul in the realm of absolute truth, the other below soul in the real of objective, relative truth — converge in the highest understanding.

Continue reading Tetragrammaton lesson →

Crossing design with Kabbalah

March 14, 2026Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Pluricentrismanomalogue

I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.

Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.

Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.

Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.

For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.

Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.

The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.

The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.

Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.

The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.

Haloed dread.

The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.

Continue reading Crossing design with Kabbalah →

Materialized magic

March 5, 2026Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Pluricentrism, Polycentrismanomalogue

A service is a collective, intelligent being.

A service exists polycentrically as a being with multiple agential centers whose interactions generate a new agential center who cannot be reduced to any one of its constituent centers.

Yet, at the same time, each of the constituent agential centers continues to experience and participate in the service, from its respective center. So services are also pluricentric.

The pluricentric experience motivates and directs various forms of participation in the service, which affects the polycentric being of the service as a whole, and ripples through the pluricentric experiences and responses of each participant.

A simple example to demonstrate how these terms complement: A marriage, like a service, is a polycentric collective being. The marriage has its own being, irreducible to the being of either spouse. However, the marriage is also pluricentrically given to each spouse. (And if the couple has a baby, the polycentric being of the family shifts its center to embrace its newest agential center, and this shift is experienced pluricentrically by each spouse. The marriage itself has changed, and effort is required to maintain its continuity.)

All people have experiences of polycentric and pluricentric being, but very few people can conceptualize it or navigate it as the kind of being it is. Many of us use vague romantic terms like vibes or spirit or feel or mood or culture to indicate an ethereal presence within a group, organization or region.

?Esoteric types believe they can interact directly with this kind of ethereal presence, bypassing its materiality. ? I believe this has drastically limited the effectiveness of the esoteric arts. But ignoring supraindividual polycentric being has also drastically limited the effectiveness of subject-blind social engineering — or at least its effectiveness in producing anything fit for human participation.?

I need to wrap up, so I will conclude with Kabbalistic abbreviation:

A good service lives across worlds:

Assiyah makes a service materially actual and effective.

Yetzirah makes a service alive and meaningful.

Beriah makes a service serve good.

Sense, common and uncommon

February 20, 2026Design, Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.

Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.

Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.

These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.

Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.

Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.

The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.

And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.

(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)

Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.

We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.

And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.

And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.

What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?

(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)

I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.

We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).

But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.

The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.

We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.

It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.

Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.

The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.

What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.

Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.

It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.

Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.

And design is how I put my religious life into practice.

Design! Jewish! Not religious!

Not to you. Not yet.

Fromness

February 19, 2026Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy, Religionanomalogue

When we obsessively look at things which are supposed to be seen from, we make one of our deepest category mistakes. We confuse subject with object.

The best tools are subject-object hybrids. In use, tools fuse with our subjectivity and extend our being beyond the frame of the body. They become transparent to us, like our own eyes, ears, hearts and hands.

We see through glasses. We write through pens. We transport our bodies through bicycles. We strike things across distances with bows and arrows. We summon sentences and images through software and digital devices. We envelop ourselves in clothing and buildings.

We attend to the world, interact with things and absorb ourselves in our activities through these tools, and when we do, tools are subject extensions.

But we can also turn our attention to them and take them as objects. Existentially, they evert into objects.

I believe gadget blogs destroyed the golden age of design. Design was something stared at, written about, chattered about, compared side-by-side, obsessed over — objectified like a woman.

As a designer, I love a tool that self-effaces into imperceptibility when we approach the world with it, but when we turn toward the tool, it reveals itself to us as beautiful and right.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tools belong to the subtle realm (Yetzirah) — part subject, part object, wholly both.

Philosophies are known-from.

Religions are lived-from.

They should be beautiful to experience.

But most importantly — experience should be beautiful from them.

They are not beliefs. They are faiths by which beliefs are believed.

When they become objects, they empty the entire world around them: everted sepulchers.

Public poesis

February 17, 2026Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophyanomalogue

Design is public poesis. It is social making that makes society.

Design struggles to maintain itself in a world that is 75% pure chickenshit and 75% pure bullshit.

Chickenshit is meaningless practice. Chickenshit is activity that claims importance, but not only never generates anything important, but actively obstructs purposeful action. Chickenshit encogs us, wears us down and forces us forward by sheer duty and fear.

Bullshit is impracticable meaning. Bullshit promises more than everything, but delivers less than nothing. By less than nothing I mean the disappointment, disillusionment and nihilistic cynicism that overdraws our hope when infinity is expected and zero happens.

Design is about practical meaning and meaningful practice.

I want to write a short plain book about design for designers, which will help us remember who we are when we are drowning in bullshit, being crushed and pecked apart by chickenshit. This book should help us resist it, withstand it and push back against it. And of course, negatively put, it should prevent us from going along with it, or — God forbid! — adopting any of it in our own work!

Against pure transaction

February 17, 2026Design, Ethics, Philosophyanomalogue

From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies,” a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.

There are several distinct senses of “gift” that lie behind these ideas, but common to each of them is the notion that a gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.

Thus we rightly speak of “talent” as a “gift,” for although a talent can be perfected through an effort of the will, no effort in the world can cause its initial appearance. Mozart, composing on the harpsichord at the age of four, had a gift.

We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him.

An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that “I,” the artist, did not make the work. “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” says D. H. Lawrence. Not all artists emphasize the “gift” phase of their creations to the degree that Lawrence does, but all artists feel it.

These two senses of gift refer only to the creation of the work — what we might call the inner life of art; but it is my assumption that we should extend this way of speaking to its outer life as well, to the work after it has left its maker’s hands. That art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — that work is received by us as a gift is received.

Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price. I went to see a landscape painter’s works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and colors I had not seen the day before. The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation. We feel fortunate, even redeemed. The daily commerce of our lives-sugar for sugar and salt for salt,” as the blues singers say—proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift revives the soul. When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.

If a work of art is the emanation of its maker’s gift and if it is received by its audience as a gift, then is it, too, a gift? I have framed the question to imply an affirmative answer, but I doubt we can be so categorical. Any object, any item of commerce, becomes one kind of property or another depending on how we use it. Even if a work of art contains the spirit of the artist’s gift, it does not follow that the work itself is a gift. It is what we make of it.

And yet, that said, it must be added that the way we treat a thing can sometimes change its nature. For example, religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. Such, at any rate, is my position. I do not maintain that art cannot be bought and sold; I do maintain that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising.

Another bit:

The classic work on gift exchange is Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don,” published in France in 1924. The nephew of Emile Durkheim, a Sanskrit scholar, a gifted linguist, and a historian of religions, Mauss belongs to that group of early sociologists whose work is firmly rooted in philosophy and history. His essay begins with the field reports of turn-of-the-century ethnographers (Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Elsdon Best, in particular), but goes on to cover the Roman laws of real estate, a Hindu epic, Germanic dowry customs, and much more. The essay has proved to hold several enduring insights. Mauss noticed, for one thing, that gift economies tend to be marked by three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate. He also pointed out that we should understand gift exchange to be a “total social phenomenon” — one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological, and whose meaning cannot, therefore, be adequately described from the point of view of any single discipline.

I think I disagree a little with Hyde (at least so far), on one point. I I think ordinary market economies include a significant component of gift exchange, and to the degree they exclude gift exchange they stop functioning.

Confusing market economies with zero-sum transactionism is a mistake.

In service design, we speak of value exchanges broadly, to include not only material and functional value, but also emotional and social value. Some of this value is explicit and calculated, but much of it is not. The part that is not calculated, but instead intuited and felt is an indeterminate surplus of an exchange, and that flows into the relationships that bind people together in a market, and gives commerce soul. This is the stuff of gratitude, loyalty and brand.

The minute the value of the intuited surplus is quantified, extracted, inventoried and calculated into pricing, it no longer flows into the relationship, and the relationship begins to starve. Quantified brand equity is theft of the brand relationship by one of the organization who tries to steal, exploit and betray what is not theirs. It is not only bad taste, it is bad faith.

The drive to calculate all value in order to maximize profit squeezes relationship out of the picture, destroys brand and generally de-souls markets.

Of course, we can — if we want to — have a purely transactional market ethos governed by an ethic of impersonality.

But we cannot have this impersonality without paying a price — a very high price.

And we might eventually discover that it is a price we cannot afford to pay.

Wimbledon hooligans

February 10, 2026Autobiography, Design, Fables, myths & parablesanomalogue

A horde of rioting football hooligans burst the gates of Wimbledon and flooded onto the courts, mid-match.

The officials instructed the players to play on.

“Yes, the game is more challenging with drunken louts milling about on the courts, vomiting on the grass, shredding guitar solos on snatched tennis rackets and hanging the players from the rafters by their tighty tennis whities. Quite challenging, indeed.

“But,” the officials reasoned, “many of these people have never experienced the great sport of tennis. If they see the game up close, played by the best players, perhaps they will be won over to tennis. Maybe they will become the most passionate tennis fans of all!”

So the tennis players did their best to play around the active and occasionally brutal interference of the hooligans, and tried to win the conditions required to play tennis by playing even better tennis, by the rules of tennis.

Ethics are the principles that sustain an ethos.

Loyal members of an ethos appeal to and honor these principles.

Ethics are not binding beyond the ethos, even for the most principled member. In fact, to meet an existential threat to an ethos with ethics is unethical.

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

The Medium

February 9, 2026Autobiography, Design, Philosophyanomalogue

I have connected design and gifts for a good while.

When I understand the core service design concept of value exchange in the clear light of gift exchange, so that it includes, but also transcends, transaction, and enters the domain of freely given gifts, service design gains importance and universality.

Let us define transaction as any exchange of goods that is purely functional and impersonal. Neither party has any reason to feel any bond of solidarity. All parties performs their respective functions precisely as specified, without deficit or surplus. A transaction leaves a sum of zero in the accounts ledger.

Exchange of gifts is qualitatively different. First, it is bad taste (for it indicates bad faith), to quantify or even sharply calculate the value of any gift exchange.

This is because, (second), gifts always, necessarily and essentially carry an indeterminate, intentionally obscure, surplus.

And that indeterminate surplus goes directly into a mysterious qualitative fund belonging to the relationship itself. The surplus fund of the relationship is felt in various ways by the members of the relationship. It might be felt as gratitude, love, respect, trust, wonder or awe. But it will be felt as some sort of voluntary solidarity.

A relationship is not only, or even primarily, a formal arrangement or social status.

If it is a real relationship, it has a being of its own that transcends the being of any of its members. It is that transcendent third being who “owns” the surplus of any gift exchange.

A person in a relationship who aspires to perfect fairness is a person seeking transaction rather than gift, and that person will be incapable of forming real transcendent relationships with others. They will suffocate inside their own isolated tit-for-tat ingratitude and stinginess.

This does not mean that gift-governed relationships should be unfair or unbalanced. What it means is that the standard for its balance is not calculation.

The standard is an intuition of whether the relationship feels “worth it” to all involved. And that “worth it” is signaled by a feeling of solidarity, connection, goodwill, loyalty, identity and most generally, love, which is what value is.

I had a wonderful talk yesterday morning with one of my oldest, dearest friends. She is working on her brand, and has been preparing a brief for a talented designer who is working on her visual brand identity. She had this brief in mind, as we spoke about how she serves her teams and helps them serve organizations.

We agreed that the kind of brands people care about and feel connected to are collective persons with independent being that transcends particular members. Living brands are egregores.

Egregore is another name for a collective person. They are collective beings in whom we participate, from whom the world is received as given in some particular way.

An engregore enworlds some patch of reality in some specific way, and carries with it explicitly stated beliefs about being, truth, action, morality and maybe even transcendence. Each has its (Nietzsche once asked if gods philosophize, and the answer is, of course, yes — but to varying degrees. Most gods are like people, spending most of their time spontaneously perceiving and acting, and only stopping to reflect and articulate when some bit of their enworldment breaks.

An organization that can only work by stacking up words and calculations and other constructed systems, who rejects the philosopher’s stone of transcendent being, who tracks its transactions in a pristinely balanced ledger, and organization that sells precisely as high as it possibly can a buys precisely as low as it possibly can in order to shunt all surplus into the pockets of anonymous shareholders — that organization might (or might not) have some kind of collective being — but if it does have personhood it will not have be one anyone can want. Whether soulless or mis-souled, the organization don a phony persona and try to run charisma moves on whoever gets involved in it. It will be corporate.

Egregores organize themselves by assembling persons who serve the organization as organs. The life of the organization is a distributed throughout its organs and their relationship, actualized in value exchanges and the givens they receive in common as an organizational common sense. An egregore in its transcendent being can be understood as a materialized faith that receives givens (qualitative and quantitative data), responds in particular ways and instaurates and evolves ethomethods for regulating its internal organ system.

All that.

Engregores form around my friend.

She draws together designers (“creatives”) of various kinds — each with a unique ideal value exchange — and brings them to collective life, exchanging their best gifts with one another, in order to gift clients with their best work. She is weirdly good at this.

Whenever she leaves an organization, people cry. They cry hard. They are grateful to her for giving them the rare opportunity to meet their deepest need in the practical world: the conditions needed to give their best gift.

But clients don’t see this value. The value is concealed as the indispensable subjective container of the objective value it contains and pours forth. The client sees only the objective outputs: the deliverables. Tangible things is all they are willing to pay for.

I told her this reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s cryptic aphorism: “The medium is the message.” Medium, as opposed to what? As opposed to the content conveyed by the medium. According to McLuhan engaging a medium changes the enworldment of a consumer far more than whatever the medium conveys in the foreground. You can watch hours of Howdie Doodie or Masterpiece Theater, and either will transform you into a TV viewer. In the early 20th Century the new medium of radio created a new kind of mass man, which could be molded into egregores of unprecedented size and aggression. Folks who doomscroll all day become doomscribes.

My own experience with a medium being the message was my encounter with Nietzsche. In order to make sense of the content of Nietzsche’s thought, I had to learn new ways of thinking it, and that way of thinking applied far beyond the scope of his books. It didn’t matter what facts he asserted. The message was the medium of thinking in a Nietzschean way, and that message changes literally everything. Pragmatically, what follows from my utterance of “everything” is different from what follows from yours. Everyone knows everything, but everythings vary in size.

This is when I brought up the branding classic, The Hero and the Outlaw. This book is about using Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey to find potent brand archetypes upon which, allegedly, living brands can be modeled.

The Medium is the message. A medium who channels talent and converges it in order to summon the perfect team for a design problem. Medium!

I suggested she look for something approximate to “The Medium” — the summoner of collective being.

I also suggested that the brand itself is not an archetype. The archetype is one organ in a brand’s organ system, not a representation of the whole brand. Brands are not spectatorial, they are participatory. And the brand invites a customer (or employee or partner) into the living brand as a fellow character in the drama.

Often the brand archetype is not even the hero of the story. Sometimes the customer plays the hero.

I used to be obsessed with branding.

Me being leftist

February 7, 2026Autobiography, Design, Ethics, Politicsanomalogue

A job offer should include not only salary and benefits but a service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing conditions conducive to effective, rewarding work.

This is especially important for “labor of love” professions, which are typically lower paying.

For such professions, the instrinsic reward of the work is more than half of the value exchange that makes the work feel worth it..

These professions often attract “empathy workers”.

Empathy workers are typically terrible at negotiating decent salaries. A person seeking a good faith win-win will fare poorly facing off against a bad faith opponent seeking a win-lose.

But tragically, empathy workers are also terrible at resisting unreasonable demands and pressures that cheat them out of the non-money half of their value exchange. They are, by nature, agreeable, flexible and accommodating. and this makes them the perpetual path of least resistance for workaday psychos looking to stampede and climb over and crush whatever is between them and the top of whatever hill they trying to be king of.

So empathy workers end up with lower salaries and depressingly impossible work conditions that burn them out and make them even less able to push back on the assholes who mercilessly squeeze, exploit and immiserate them.

Tricky life

February 6, 2026Autobiography, Chord, Design, Philosophyanomalogue

The Trickster persona maintains an ironic dual focus.

The second focus is the workaday foreground we all share with our peers and collaborators.

The first focus — the one that really matters to to the Trickster — is the uncanny background of all activity, the formless formational forces who move, shape and illuminate and obscure the unfolding of events for each person involved.

The Trickster moves in a world inhabited by mono-focused beings, who, lacking that second vision, lack parallax and, therefore, depth-vision. The one-eyed live in a flat world where everyone, even Tricksters, are flat.

Tricksters are tricky because they constantly try to remind the one-eyed that there is much more to life than matter-of-fact flatness. The Trickster winks, to remind people that they still have that first eye that they closed, perhaps to protect its first-eye innocence, one sad day at the dawn of youth.

When the Trickster winks, it is the second eye that closes. The first eye remains open, bathing the beheld in magical sight. If the beheld has any vestigial intuition vital enough to penetrate the workaday flatness, this hermetic winksight is experienced as the opposite of an evil-eye. Most of the time, though, it is experienced as inefficient creepiness.

And now, as always, I am recalling a Nietzsche quote — which always ripples out into a blessed recollection and re-membering of Nietzsche himself:

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ — said John Stuart Mill: as though it were necessary to beg for forbearance where one is accustomed to render them belief and almost worship! I say: let us be forbearing towards the two-eyed, great and small — for, such as we are, we shall never attain to anything higher than forbearance!

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ appears to refer to an essay by Mill on Bentham:

The truths which are not Bentham’s, which his philosophy takes no account of, are many and important; but his non-recognition of them does not put them out of existence; they are still with us, and it is a comparatively easy task that is reserved for us, to harmonize those truths with his. To reject his half of the truth because he overlooked the other half, would be to fall into his error without having his excuse. For our own part, we have a large tolerance for one-eyed men, provided their one eye is a penetrating one: if they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of inquiry. Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers: though whether these new thoughts drive out others as good, or are peacefully superadded to them, depends on whether these half-thinkers are or are not followed in the same track by complete thinkers.

Nietzsche had much more to say about one-eyed being. Here is where my wiki bears fruit. From Human All Too Human:

The cyclops of culture. — When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies — those which are called evil — are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.

Another quote is from from Assorted Opinions and Maxims. Please note the “true-but-not-true-enough” winking acknowledgement of the one-eyed by the two-eyed, which was performed by Mill toward Bentham:

Cult of culture. — To great spirits there has been joined the repellent all-too-human aspects of their nature, their blindnesses, deformities, extravagances, so that their mighty influence, that can easily grow all too mighty, shall be kept within bounds by the mistrust these qualities inspire. For the system of all that which humanity has need of for its continued existence is so comprehensive, and lays claim to so many and such varying forces, that humanity as a whole would have to pay heavily for any one-sided preference, whether it be science or the state or art or trade, to which these individuals would entice it. It has always been the greatest fatality for culture when men have been worshipped: in which sense one may even feel in accord with the Mosaic Law which forbids us to have other gods beside God. — Next to the cult of the genius and his force there must always be placed, as its complement and palliative, the cult of culture: which knows how to accord to the material, humble, base, misunderstood, weak, imperfect, one-sided, incomplete, untrue, merely apparent, indeed to the evil and dreadful, a proper degree of understanding and the admission that all this is necessary; for the harmonious endurance of all that is human, attained through astonishing labours and lucky accidents and as much the work of ants and cyclops as of genius, must not be lost to us again: how, then, could we dispense with the common, deep and often uncanny groundbass without which melody cannot be melody?

Here is an apparent Jew-eyed wink at Jesus. Blessed-but-not-blessed-enough?

A Christian friend of mine one quipped “Jesus converted you to Judaism.”

Yes, true. But whose Jesus?

In my early days as a Nietzschean-on-fire, I thought Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian. But that was only because Judaism was still too far out of reach for me. I lacked landmarks for situating my new self in this new landscape. “Christian” was the closest available match, but it was not close enough. <— wink wink wink. Judaism has depths that supercessionists desperately need to truncate with aggressive incuriosity. And pogroms, if necessary.

Misapotheotics, especially, experience Jewish winksight as burning. This is the true origin of hatred of Am Yisrael, whether it the animosity is religious, racial, social or political — or some new expression, like the newly fashionable antizionism, adopted en masse by every independent-minded, politically-active, self-aware, NYT-believing nyet. Another Nietzche zinger: “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –” Tell a million zeros they are independent thinkers, and they will all believe it in unison.

Another passage is from The Wanderer and his Shadow: and seems to affirm Mills’s forbearance of the one-eyed.

The democratization of Europe is irresistible: for whoever tries to halt it has to employ in that endeavour precisely the means which the democratic idea first placed in everyone’s hands and makes these means themselves more wieldy and effective: and those who oppose democracy most on principle (I mean the spirits of revolution) appear to exist merely to impel the various parties ever faster forwards along the democratic path through the fear they inspire. Yet one can in fact feel anxious for those who are working consciously and honestly for this future: there is something desolate and monotonous in their faces, and grey dust seems to have got even into their brain. Nonetheless, it is possible that posterity will one day laugh at this anxiety of ours and regard the democratic work of a succession of generations somewhat as we regard the building of stone dams and protective walls — as an activity that necessarily gets a lot of dust on clothes and faces and no doubt also unavoidably makes the workers a little purblind and stupid; but who would wish such a work undone on that account! The democratization of Europe is, it seems, a link in the chain of those tremendous prophylactic measures which are the conception of modern times and through which we separate ourselves from the Middle Ages. Only now is it the age of cyclopean building! We finally secure the foundations, so that the whole future can safely build upon them! We make it henceforth impossible for the fruitful fields of culture again to be destroyed overnight by wild and senseless torrents! We erect stone dams and protective walls against barbarians, against pestilences, against physical and spiritual enslavement! And all this coarsely and literally at first, but gradually in a higher and more spiritual sense, so that all the measures here indicated seem to be an inspired collective preparation for the supreme artist of horticulture, who will be able to apply himself to his real task only when these preparations have been fully carried out! — To be sure, given the great length of time which lies between means and end, and given the very great effort of mind and body, an effort spanning the centuries, needed even to create or procure each one of these means, we must not hold it too much against those who are working on the present-day if they loudly decree that the wall and the trellis are the end and final goal; since no one, indeed, can yet see the gardener or the fruit-trees for whose sake the trellis exists.

There is no contradiction between these two attitudes toward one-eyedness. It is a paradox of ironic two-eyedness. In fact, all paradox is the speaking of two views in one utterance — either a lower and higher perspective, like this one, or two lower ones dialectically subsumed in an implied higher perspective that sees them together, unified yet still differentiated.

Soelling it all out: Forbearance between one-eyed and two-eyed is not a mutual arrangement.

It goes one way. It is an unrequited and unrequiteable gift.

Let us not forget: “free gifts” injure.

And this is true even when a gift is stolen.

Supercessionism is mispotheotic ingratitude. It is not enough to steal the gift. The giver is a living insult for ever having what was stolen.

I have got to do something about this rage.

On to the next one-eyed passage. We are going in chronological order, by the way. This one if from the Gay Science:

Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things must be revealed! So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people’s experiences of living together — in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, businessmen, artists, artisans — have they found their thinkers? There is so much in them to think about! Everything that humans have viewed until now as the ‘conditions of their existence’ and all the reason, passion, and superstition that such a view involves — has this been researched exhaustively? To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate — that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral climates (‘why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and primary value-standard shine here — and another one there?’). Yet another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction — an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclops-buildings; but the time for that will come, too.

Now we see a call for a bifocally directed cyclopeanism.

This reads to me, not like a description of the future, but of the recent past. It reads like a description of Cold War academia, before the West lost its best frenemy and collapsed into lassitude, which then deteriorated into the casually suicidal nihilsm of our denatured, dispirited, anomic proclass.

The last quotation is from Beyond Good and Evil:

Pity in a man of knowledge seems almost ludicrous, like sensitive hands on a Cyclops.

I will conclude this quotation chord with an aphorism of my own,

Conflict divides the world into four halves.

Or two halves, if you are a cyclops.

Often in qualitative design research we will talk about how we thicken the What with insights into the Why.

The classic example we give is the difference between a blink and a wink. The former is a physical thin description. The latter adds thickness of the meaning behind the eye movement. Thickness is an attempt to say depth without all the spiritual and psychological pretensions.

The cyclops just wants the certainty of blink counts. And this counting necessary. But is not sufficient.

With this work I’m being forced to do, which occupies all my time and daytime headspace, it takes an entire morning to remember who I am.

Re + member. <— wink wink wink wink wink

Mission mistatement

February 5, 2026Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism, Pragmatismanomalogue

I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.

If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.

In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.

Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.

Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.

If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.

Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.

As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.

The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.

These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.

Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.

And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.

These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.

These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.

It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.

Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.

And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.

When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.

Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.

And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.

Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.

What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?

Faith.

Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.

Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies

The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.

Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.

A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.

Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.

That is our mission.

The world needs design so badly it rejects design.

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Category Archives: Design

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