Category Archives: Design

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism, Star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presequence, consequence, richness

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

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

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

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

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

Three important notes:

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

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

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

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

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

Design deterioration path

Autobiography, Design

For almost twenty years my friend Vanessa and I have laugh-cried together at how projects all go to hell in roughly the same way. We are Gen-X. Bitter truths are hilarious to us.

Design projects deteriorate in four stages:

  1. Make it awesome
  2. Make it better
  3. Make it suck less
  4. Make it stop

Ha, ha, ha and ha.

Today I realized something important and serious about this design deterioration path.

Each of these stages is a revelation of the kind of project the design team has been hired to do. Each step is a disappointing discovery of the true constraints and feasible goals of a project, initially overoptimistically presented as a design project, with the usual goals designers pursue, namely producing something useful, usable and desirable. To recap:

  • Useful: The design satisfies functional needs.
  • Usable: The design minimizes functional obstacles.
  • Desirable: The design is valuable beyond its function.

“Make it awesome” is the goal of a project where a team has been challenged with transcending mere function and is aspiring to design something special and differentiated. The goals is not only usable usefulness, but also desirability — felt meaning.

“Make it better” is the goal of a project where a team has been charged with producing good functionality. Desirability is a nice-to-have, but the main goal is usable usefulness.

“Make it suck less” is the goal of a project where a team has been tasked with fixing broken functionality. Desirability is out of the question. Usable-enough usefulness is the goal. This is no longer really a design project. It is mostly design-informed repair work.

“Make it stop” is the team’s realization that the damage is beyond what a design team, and probably any team, can address. The organization is incapable of allowing anyone to repair what they themselves make irreparable.

Kvetch

Autobiography, Design, Esoterism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have a genuinely original vision that I need to get out, but it is hard to communicate.

There’s a little for everyone to love, and a lot for everyone to reject, and much for people to claim as their own domain of knowledge, and therefore a domain to which I have no claim at all.

Mystics sneer at my philosophy. Philosophers sneer at my mysticism. Both sneer at my capitalist servitude, and servile capitalists sneer at my impractical interest in mystical and philosophical matters!

I can’t win!

And everything I know about is generally considered matters of opinion. We all have philosophies. We all have beliefs about religious beliefs. And “design thinkers” spilled the beans on design: Everyone designs! Everyone is a designer!

I am no longer interested in talking to people who know better than me on the things I know best.

I sit silently waiting to get back to writing.

I’ve stopped counting but surely I’m at the end of the third trimester.

St. N.:

Ideal selfishness. — Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!

This is what you deserve if you allow Nietzsche to convert you from Western Buddhism to a bizarro dysfit judeochristian esoteric Judaism.

Intuition, commonality and scalar being

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

In all three facets of my work — as a philosopher, esoterist and designer — intuition is central to what I do, not only in the content and goals of my work, but in how I approach the work and do the work.

By intuition, I mean something quite simple. To dumb it down to the simple essence, intuition means “without linguistic mediation”. Whenever we experience or know or do something without using words to explain it to ourselves or to direct ours actions, that is intuition.

We can have intuitive perceptions, intuitive responses, both with people (with others and ourselves), with things around us, intuitive understandings and with reality in general.

Intuitive perceptions and responses is the stuff of what Husserl called the lifeworld. We spontaneously effortlessly see-as and wordlessly deal with the things around us. We only reach for language if something resists our intuition, and we need to figure out what it is or how it works or what we ought to do.

It is almost the same with our social environment. Through what Garfinkel called ethnomethods, in social settings where we “belong”, we know how to spontaneously and wordlessly “read” other people’s symbolic actions, and to produce legible symbolic actions so we are understood. Here, too, we only resort to explicit language if things get awkward and an explanation is needed, or, in more extreme cases, demanded.

Finally, at the heart of it all, radiating to the furthest reaches, is our intuitive understanding of how particulars hang together within the universal. Prior to any explicit thought, we carry an intuited ontology within an intuited metaphysics. Or, if you prefer, we can say we have an intuited sense of everything, within which every thing is intuited, in intuited relation to everything and to every other thing. Some call this “worldview”, but the spectatorial overtones can mislead. I (perhaps confusingly) call this intuited ontology and metaphysics a faith. A faith is not what we believe, but that by which — by whom — we believe.

And all our activities, solitary and social, materially and symbolically shape the world we share. In our immediate environments, where we have ownership, we are able to shape it according to our own preferences. We have less and less influence at as scale increases. At smaller scales, we actively shape the material environment, often to make it more accessible to intuition. At larger scales we influence it only indirectly, if at all, and often what is outside of our control is also unintuitive, and, therefore in need of explanation. Here we use language to make as much sense of things as we can, to get it somehow to fit our faith — our intuitive sense of everything and things in general. This material shaping of our environment and of our general understanding of things we influence and cannot influence is what I call an enworldment.

As a designer, I am concerned with the shaping of environments. My goal is to shape them in such a way that they are readily intuited (with minimum need to figure them out), can be interacted with intuitively (with minimal need to verbally direct one’s actions) and most of all, intuited as valuable — as stabilizing and enriching one’s own enworldment.

As a philosopher, I am concerned with the shaping of symbols, primarily linguistic ones. But some of my most important symbols are visual or diagrammatic, and these help me extend the reach of my philosophical work. I have come to recognize that my philosophical work overlaps with the genre of hermeticism, in that it deploys words and diagrams and dense visual symbologies to say true things about reality beyond the scope of words. I’ve been talking a lot about objects held and valued in common, but one of our most important common objects are symbolic, linguistic and literary.

Finally, as an esoterist I am interested in what can be done with faiths. They are far from immutable. They can change in ways that can make life immeasurably and ineffable better… or worse. Think of this as soul hacking. There are many possible means for hacking souls, but my favorite means, and the one I am best at is hermetic philosophy. But design is also a powerful tool, because design shapes materials into media, and media convey and support (or block and undermine) faiths.

These three intuitive activities, initially separate concerns of compartmentalized parts of my self, over three decades have gradually converged and grown together into one complex multifaceted being. Three trees have intertwined into a lattice, and in their interilluminating density this shared set of ideas have gained reality and a palpable halo of significance. And I, as a person, have gained a sense of integrity, wholeness and reality. I am no longer spiritually fragmented, conflicted or of two or more minds on important matters.

I think, feel and act more wholeheartedly, because of my inward richness of common concerns.

I have enworded myself with enworldment.

It has been obvious to me for decades now that being is scalar, and that the individual person is only one of these beings.

Unfortunately, in this time, many of us have developed a great number of conceptual and linguistic habits, reinforced by scientistic metaphysics, to obscure and explain away the smaller and larger scales.

People who rely entirely on language for their thinking, and people whose thinking is purely instrumental (used to direct practical and social activity) will be entirely oblivious to this reality. People who depend upon ready-made words with ready-made definitions as their thought construction materials cannot think with the originality of those who articulate intuitions to develop new generative language. It is the difference between a person who enjoys constructing elaborate new things with LEGO blocks and the inventor of LEGO blocks. It is the difference between ingenuity and genius.

But if we take our intuition seriously, sub-individual and super-individual being is manifestly real. It is given even when we lack language-equipped concepts to receive it.

My first observation was of being at the smaller scale. I noticed that people became different in the company of different people. They used different words, behaved differently, exuded different energy. I intuited as different. I also notice some aspects of them were suppressed or marginalized. We see this when people fall in love. They can almost become strangers to us in their new intimacy with another.

I associated this with politics. For example, when the Germans invaded France in 1940, they met less resistance from the French Army than might have been expected. But this was not just weakness. Much of the French right felt more loyalty to the right wing spirit of the Nazis than they felt for their own republic. And when the Nazi successfully conquered Paris, they established the infamous right-wing Vichy government to govern southern France. For the Vichy French there was more solidarity across the right-wing parties than for the left and centrist French.

Similarly, across two people newly in love, spiritual factions within each can come together with such powerful affinity that it breaks the each person’s pre-love integrity, to create a new integrity between them. They become disordered and reordered, and both can estrange them from the people who had been important to them before they fell in love. This threat of estrangement and its reality is the substance of jealousy. Jealousy is the intuition of relationship-threatening psychic reorderings.

I already hinted at the larger scale beings with my Vichy France analogy. Nations are always uneasy alliances of ideological factions. Some nations have inward integrity. The factions might disagree on certain matters, but they hold other things about their nation in common, valuing them in different ways. People agreeing that they are valuable, even if what is valued differs. But if ideologies begin to value their own ideological ideas more than their nation, they may even become hostile to their nation for refusing to share their ideological loyalties. They might break faith with their own national tradition and betray it with dalliances with more like-minded foreign actors.

I first intuited this kind of ideological being as being (as opposed to simply agreeing on the same facts, preferable policies) — that is, as a shared living faith — during the charged time between 2001 and 2005 when a great many Americans discovered the intoxication of mass Standing United. Suddenly I head people adopting common language, concepts, lines of reasoning and attitudes that I’d never noticed before. I started feeling like something was speaking and acting through them, and I found it intensely and profoundly repellent. The same thing happened in 2020. People began to adopt new language, beliefs, concepts and behaviors en masse, which were not only different from before, but in direct conflict with the liberal values they used to espouse, seemingly sincerely. Now they were hardcore identitarians, who believed different categories of person should have different standing before the law, different social status, be awarded different privileges? and held to different norms. I had the same intuitive revulsion, but this time it was compounded with a sense of betrayal, because it was my liberal values they’d turned against. Their liberalism, it turns out, had been mere social conformism, not a principle of personal integrity. It seems that most people are like this. Most of us conform to a belief that integrity is important, but very few people have the integrity to resist if our tribe drifts into illiberalism, tolerance of evil or actual evil. This is normal, and this is why maintaining social order is so crucial. The majority of people, it seems, are potential extremists or supporters of extremism, because their primary mechanism of integrity is their social context, not a cultivated inner integrity. Many of the most spiritual-but-not-religious people who see religion as empty formalism (to put it in bigoted anti-Jewish language “pharisaism”) need religion far more than they can understand from within the debased faith they’ve accidentally drifted into on the currents of ideological conformity. Judaism, by the way, more than any other religion, precisely because of its formality, has emptied, fulfilled and refulfilled itself innumerable times, and has developed the richest set of symbolic forms diversely valued in common of any religion, very much including its brittle squabbling, splitting, warring offspring who believe they are the heirs of the covenant while dramatically demonstrating the opposite.

Of course, there are many scales of being between psychic factions within a person or across couples in love and ideological factions and nations. These are what interest me most, especially as a designer.

Organizations can have differing strengths of integrity. They can be integrated around common purpose, or they can be managed in siloes, or they can descend into departmental and factional wars. Organizations are beings composed of beings, belonging to larger scale beings.

To put it in the flakiest possible way, service design is in the egregore business. And design is their heir of alchemy.

I’ll just leave it there, to be rejected, neglected, forgotten or pondered.

+0(

Shit Theory Handbook notes

Design, Judaism, NOTA, Politics, Shit theory

Announcing a new shit: Horseshit.

Horseshit is whatever horrible shit the far left and the far right can find to agree on. It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.

With horseshit, we are now up to three kinds of shit, because there is also bullshit and chickenshit.

We are no longer limited to giving two shits about anything.

This post, which began as a rant appears to be developing into a textbook.

To catch everyone up, here’s some foundational Shit Theory, to help everyone keep their shit straight:

According to Shit Theory, “chickenshit” is tedious nonsense — all those formalities, procedures, reports, tedious busywork and general minutiae that ruins everyday existence — that seem like it ought to add up to something important but never does.

In contrast, “bullshit” is inspirational nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.

And now “horseshit”. Let us formulate a provisional technical definition.

“Horseshit” is malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question “who can we blame for this shitshow?” This question drives ignorant but urgently inquiring minds to extremes of left- and right-wing politics. But by some diabolical antimiracle these theories all converge in a negative common ground of suspicion and hate. And, 100% of the time, as if by cosmic law, smack in the middle of this common ground is always and inevitably The Jews.

Now, let us explore practical applications of Shit Theory.

The origins of the discipline were practical, which is why Shit Theory is not, like most theory, pure bullshit.

It was developed to diagnose and treat a common and deadly strain of shittiness found in most organizations. This shittiness is known as “corporate”.

Corporations are terrible at integrating meaning and practice. Integrating meaning and practice means committing to a difficult, qualitative, nonlinear and not-entirely-predictable process called “design”.

Design does not suit the kind of technocratic ndbf administrator who thrives in the upper half of glass towers. This type generally leans soulless, and is reliably numb and deaf to genuine meaning. They are more into efficiency, productivity, measuring things and evading blame. But their whole job is to make human resources produce maximum productivity. But for temperamental reasons, inspiring people to work together to achieve a common goal is out of the question. Their workaround is to coercively micromanage each isolated resource to construct some isolated bit of a complicated and entirely uninspiring system.

These bits, once built, can be bolted and hacked together to more or less function, or at least to check a box and evade blame for any larger scale systemic malfunction or dysfunction. The hacked-together lump is then sent off to creative, who try to repair, patch and sand the lump to inoffensiveness, before applying several coats of artificial charm to its surface. Then marketing pumps phony meaning onto it. Then the inoffensive, artificially charming, phony lumps are boxed up, loaded onto trucks and off it all goes for consumption.

Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.

And, unfortunately, so do most governmental agencies.

And so do non-governmental organizations (NGO), who are normally founded by ndbf technocratic administrators who are so amazing at corporateness they’ve become zillionaires whose egos have grown in inverse proportion to their infinitesimally shriveled souls.

They have big empty ideas about how their deep expertise in chickenshit, combined with the unlimited coercive power and scale of government could help produce bullshit of epic proportions and beneficence.

So the corporations and the government and the NGO zillionaires with great billowing bullshit ostentation, gather to have top-secret chickenshit meetings about the future of the entire world.

Of course, it is all bullshit that will result in nothing more than yet more chickenshit. But to those poor paranoids who don’t know jackshit about the realities of corporateness, it looks like some seriously sinister shit is probably going down.

Thus horseshit, in copious quantities.

I’ve been writing about bullshit and chickenshit for many years now, but I have never recorded the august ancestry of these two concepts.

My use of bullshit was inspired by Frankfurt’s famous essay:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I got the term chickenshit from Paul Fussell.

What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse-or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

So there we have it. Bullshit. Chickenshit. Horseshit.

Isn’t it funny, too, that the latest deluge of horseshit is a reaction to institutional bullshit and chickenshit?

If you can fight fire with fire, why not fight shit with even shittier shit? All this shit flinging, by the way, proves conclusively that we are descended from apes.

And this is probably our best theory why everyone has suddenly gone apeshit.

Apeshit is the frantic nonsense we start flinging when the world has gone to shit, and the material we have available around us is shit and more shit. So that is what we throw at each other.

And so here we are.

We are up bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit and apeshit creek without a paddle. No, it is worse. These creeks have risen into rivers, and the rivers have swelled into an ocean.

A shitflood is drowning the whole world.

And Shit Theory is the Ark to help us stay afloat of it.

Unsolicited advice to altruistic nihilists

Ethics, Polycentrism

Anyone who tells a child “You are not the center of the universe!” is arguing against the most immediate self-evident truth. Only an “adult” could fall for such a lie.

What we should be saying is “You are not the only center of the universe.”

When the child is a little older we can say “Polycenter yourself.” And “Center yourself around your own experiences, intuitions, understandings an?d purposes, but do so in affirmation of others doing the same. At minimum respect this reality, and to the greatest degree possible, love it.”

If we demand that children stop being self-centered and decenter themselves altogether? in the name of altruism, what we are really saying is “Abandon your own center and join me in this centerless abyss in which I abide.”

In this time and? culture this abandonment of center is what “adult” means. We don’t believe in our own cognition because it’s biased. We don’t trust our own moral judgments because our moral sense is unconsciously self-interested. But boy do we ever trust expert consensus. We trust it automatically and uncritically. We even believe the expert consensus that whoever conforms to these beliefs is a critical thinker, an individualist and an anti-totalitarian.

If someone ever commands you to “decenter yourself”, you should firmly refuse.

The appropriate reply is “I have polycentered myself. You should polycenter yourself.”

This advice to “polycenter yourself”, however, means something different from the exhortation to the self-centered child, who needs to know that other people, like themselves, are the centers of their respective universes.

This “polycenter yourself” means “The nowhere in which you abide, is not the center of the universe, nor of anything. I will not join you in your centerless abyss.”

It means “Recover your center. Then develop a capacity to inhabit a polycentered universe.”

Qualitatively, we are neither infinity, nor zero. Alchemically, we are like One, in that we are one; yet, we are not One. We are neither God nor nobody. We should all polycenter ourselves together.

What is richness?

Design, Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism, Shit theory

I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.

The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.

A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.

But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.

When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.

This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.

Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.

Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.

A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.

An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.

Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.

I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?

And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.

A story is not a tree.

A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.

Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.

Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.

Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.

When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.

The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.

It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct ??a?rtificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?

That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…

The gift-rooted organization

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Exnihilism

The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.

In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.

The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.

Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”

But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.

Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”

Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”

Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.

The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.

Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.

Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.

This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.

Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.

Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become charged with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.

But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.

But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.

Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.

To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.

Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.

Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.

This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.

If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.

We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.

Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.

Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.

The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.

That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.

This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.

But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.

(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)

But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?

Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.

Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.

Dang. Out of time.

To be continued.

A career in four-and-a-half presentations

Autobiography, Design, Shit theory

I’ve done four pivotal presentations in my career, and I’m getting the itch to update them all together to reflect my latest thinking.

The first presentation “Dialogue”, was from 2008. It was a dense summary my thinking up to that point on the importance of gestalts in design, and the power of dialogue to generate sharable gestalts, which I associated with brand.

Since this point, I’ve developed a theory of psychic multistability that understands gestalt shifts from one perceptual stability to another, and hermeneutic shifts from one conceptual stability to another to be the result of what I’m calling a gestell shift — a shift from one subjective state to another, which changes the spontaneous sense we make of things. And brands are stable gestells.

I did the second presentation “Spiral Process” in 2010, and it was also about the importance of gestalts in design, but this time taking a practical approach.

I started by laying out a theory-space based on two contrasting ways of approaching composite things: 1) a parts-first systems approach, and 2) a wholes-first gestalt approach.

Like the good consultant I am, I laid these approaches on a 2×2 matrix. Like the bad esoterist I am, of course I had to assign gestalts to the vertical axis and systems to the horizontal one.

I defined domains in each quarter. The quarter where there is no gestalt and only system was assigned to Engineering. The quarter where there is only gestalt and no system was assigned to Art. The quarter where there is neither system and  nor gestalt was labeled “perplexity”; had I assigned it to a domain, that domain would have been Philosophy, for here we truly “do not know how to move around.” Finally, the quarter where there is both gestalt and system was assigned to  Design. Design seeks systems that are taken together as gestalts.

Then I outlined a process for getting to both, which I contrasted to engineering processes and creative processes. The engineering process more or less curves straight into systematizing. After the system is finished, the team claps some style, value claims and “story” onto it in order to make people care about it. Art (creative) goes the other way. It starts with a nice bright blobby nebula of meaning, and then tries to build a system that more or less approximates and embodies it. The creative concept is fleshed out in features so it at least appears to deliver on its conceptual promise, and organized to provide some logical bone structure.

Design takes a much less direct route. It dives into perplexity and experiments there to find a gestalt that can be built out into a system that corresponds with the natural facets and articulations of that gestalt. This permits a team to systematize by the logic of a gestalt and produce design magic that is both meaningful and logically clear.

Since I made the “Spiral Process” presentation, I’ve improved the vocabulary. I continue to use the word conception for the process of instaurating and understanding a gestalt. But I now use the word “constructing” for the activity of building out a system, and “construing” for making sense of it.

I have also developed a more nuanced understanding of the experimental tacking process designers use to tentatively construct systems that might suggest a gestalt (or not) and to conceive possible gestalts and test them for feasibility. In design, construction and conception processes rapidly, informally alternate and are brought into dialogue together in iterative trials of multiple kinds.

The last two presentations are from my latest life in service design. The first, from 2019, wasn’t but should have been called “Service Design for UX researchers”. the second, from 2024, was called “Six Sensibilities of Service”.

“Service Design for UX researchers” was meant to clarify the relationship between service design research and UX research, but approached it by way of clarifying the precise relationship between the disciplines of service design and UX. In this presentation I described service design dimensionally.

One-dimensional design is design within one single service delivery channel. UX is a common example. Or industrial design. Or print design. Most design has been one-dimensional, single service channel touchpoint design (for example digital, in-person, voice, etc.. I pointed out, though, that a good single channel designer always makes a point of understanding other channel paths their user might take or need. This is part of the design context.

But in two-dimensional design the context becomes part of the design problem. Here is where omnichannel design, CX design  and experience design proper occurs. Here the designer takes full responsibility for all service delivery channels and shapes an end-to-end omnichannel experience for a user, customer, patient , employee, etc — whoever’s experience the team is focusing on improving. But in order to do a good job at this, the design team will need to understand the organization’s capabilities to deliver this experience, to ensure it is feasible.

In three-dimensional design, we have service design. In service design, an organization’s capabilities are no longer just constraining and enabling context but part of the design problem. Designers are now responsible for shaping the organization’s delivery of a customer’s experience (or the experience of whoever is receiving the service) in the “front stage” where they experience what is happening, and backstage where the service is supported but not directly experienced.

I explained that ultimately service design frames a whole system of interconnected problems. And it is these interconnected problems that UXers and other touchpoint designers. Service designers help UXers understand the full experientical service context in which their touchpoint will be experienced and will play a part in the customer’s journey, or the journey of the one delivering or supporting the experience.

Not be a damn braggart, but this made clear sense of a very unclear situation that many others had bungled and continue to bungle because they keep trying to flatten the space into domains of responsibility or overlapping toolsets, and other dead-end approaches to dividing up the work.

But this presentation also needs some updates. First it underplays the polycentric aspects of service design. It still privileges the recipient of the service over the people who deliver and support it. These latter service actors end up fading into the organizational capabilities, when in fact, service design tries to afford them the same importance and focus as the service recipient.

I also think it doesn’t need all the research content. That turned the presentation into a cognitive overload atrocity that no person could absorb in a single sitting. How do I know? This brings me to the fourth presentation

“Six Sensibilities of Service” was my final project for a course design course I took in 2024. One of the things this course taught me was that I was guilty of trying to teach too damn many things all at once in most of my presentations. I needed to simplify everything drastically.

“Six Sensibilities of Service” took as its point of departure the very goal of service design: good services. Many services are pretty terrible. I hypothesized that this is because many people faced with service problems misdiagnose them as other kinds of problems, and proceed to treat the wrong condition with the wrong methods. But by sensitizing ourselves to issues specific to services, we can better recognize when something is specifically a service problem that is best treated as such with a service design methodology.

As a gimmick, I warned everyone that if they cooperated with this lesson and acquired any of these six sensibilities, they would never stop noticing service problems, and that this would turn them bitter and crazy. I made them sign a form releasing me from liability if they were to suffer mental problems as a result of what I was about to teach them.

This presentation is more recent, and I think it still hold up pretty well. I’ve begun to think about pluricentricity as a separate issue from polycentricity (the former is first-person and experiential, the latter is third-person and behavioral, but I am not not sure this hair-splitting is worth the additional cognitive load. Something to ponder as I do the revisions.

I think I might see if I can revise these presentation and then record myself presenting them.

Oh, I forgot another presentation I made in between 2009 and 2019. It was basically a rude version of the “Spiral Process” presentation that called construction without concept “chickenshit” and and concept without construction “bullshit” and claimed that successful design is the shit. I presented this pottymouth material to a team at Coca-Cola in 2019, and I won’t pretend I’m not proud.

If I ever make a site dedicated to my design work, I think I will enable multiple languages and make it trilingual. The visitor can select the language of their choice: English, Esoteric and Pottymouth.

Actually, I am blurring things a little on the “Bullshit/Chickenshit” presentation. It did not map as cleanly to the conception and construction as I suggested. Bullshit was actually meaning without practice. Chickenshit was practice without meaning.

But it still roughly maps, because chickenshit is almost always construction of practices, done with little consideration for anything beyond process mechanics. Chickenshit is the mass of codification — policies, procedures, standard practices — for how things are to be done that accrete within organizations, especially ones without any real mission (that is, with a bullshit mission). Chickenshit is “executable code” of social engineering, performed mechanically, directed by verbalized directions, in conformity with specifications, with no need whatsoever for such nebulous woo-woo notions as inspiration or spontaneity.

Yet, chickenshit work tends to hollow people out and make them feel unnatural, then alienated, then dehumanized, then inhuman, and then, eventually altogether unreal living in unreality. So then social engineers identify a functional need for supplemental meaning. This meaning is manufactured and distributed for the sake of morale or marketing or brand perception or what have you.

So bullshit is prescribed and administered like a vitamin pill — a dose of humanoidal values to supplement a diet deficient in humanity. It is very similar to how we take a dose of art or religion or spirituality on weekends, evenings or vacations to revive us after dry stretches of grinding cranial labor — and perhaps it isn’t only similar.

Technicity — the foundational faith of all industrial ideologies, even supposedly opposing ones like “capitalism” and “marxism” — is the reflex of answering questions of meaning by asking ” what is it for?”. This pragmatic presequence of presuming a functionalist implicitly leading question behind Why, treats morale, meaning, value, love as something that has a motivating function in life, and which can be added onto something otherwise meaningless to give it market appeal or motivational oomph or other powers to control, motivate or manipulate human behaviors.

They assign Why to design and call that “desirability” and then assign designers the task of fabricating desirability and putting it onto their chickenshit so people will adopt it, or accept it or at least comply with it for some span of time.

Pluricentric design is understanding the driving Why within all people involved in an organization and serving it from start to finish, because the What and How of the world is supposed to serve Why — and not the reverse, despite all conceits of technicity. Right now bullshit-coated-chickenshit — also known as that species of cynical artificiality derided as “corporate” — is so ubiquitous in both the private and public sphere that it rarely occurs to organizations to compete on being palpably human. Perhaps someday, organizations might, by the logic of technicity, for technicic purposes, invest real effort into transcending technicity.

The central insight of my designerly life is a simple one. Design cannot be what it is, and designers cannot play their role inside the narrow functionalist, behavioralist, In-Order-To logic and practices of technicity. Design does not fit inside engineering. Design is not an engineering function. Engineering development processes cannot accommodate design practice. Design cannot conform to the norms of engineering and technicity-minded practices. Designers who try to force design into the constraint-jacket of technicity in the name of empathy (meeting our masters halfway), or because they have succumbed to values of being realistic and go hard-nosed, do not serve design but betray it.

The reverse is, in fact, true. Engineering is a part of design’s bigger picture. But if engineering, management and other technicity-oriented practices take their place within a Why-directed design practice, their work will also become more meaningful, “impactful”, memorable and valued.

To overstate it with maximum obnoxiousness, every C-Suite should build a penthouse onto the roof of its headquarters. The penthouse should be staffed with designers responsible for advising executives in matters of meaning — so things don’t immediately devolve back into the brutal power machinations of technicity. You want to be the Apple of your industry? This is the secret of Apple: Crown your glass tower with a D-Suite.

Design kapos

Autobiography, Design

My frustration with the field of design right now is that its doctrine and practices keep getting “replatformed” on inadequate faiths. It is this frustration that is dyspiring this endless stream of semi-schizophrenic design rants. I am so tired of my field getting ripped out from under me every decade or so, and I am sick of designers helping turn the wheel of this cyclical subversion.

As I’ve said a half-zillion times in myriad ways, a faith is not a magnitude of belief, but a particular configuration of Why and How that does the believing. It is qualitative first — intuiting, caring, seeking, noticing, perceiving, conceiving responding — and only from here is something understood and believed or disbelieved to some degree. Faith is a specific concave form a soul assumes, and that concavity is a capacity for receiving some experiential content and filtering what it cannot accommodate.

When I call something designerly, I indicate a particular faith which is behind design practice or theory or, better, praxis (a virtuous feedback loop of theory-guided practice, practice-informed theory). This faith wants a more palpably meaningful world — a world where we spontaneously experience things as intrinsically meaningful and valuable. There is not a trace of need to figure out the value or to justify it, and explanations dramatically fail to do it justice. We just like, desire, love, je ne sais quois, and respond with equal spontaneity, with minimal or no linguistic intercession.

Design seeks direct intuitive contact with reality and reality’s intrinsic goodness. Design works intuitively for the sake of an intuitable world.

But tragically, it is easy and common for one faith to appropriate the theories and practices developed by another. They take possession of their culture, symbols and style, and much more. They even sometimes claim to be a new and better version of the original that supersedes it! And then they compete for ownership and attempt to displace the originators of what they’ve assumed as their own.

When this happens, the theories and practices and lose their original purpose and meaning and are pressed into service of an alien faith, often against the old faith.

This in fact, is happening to design right now.

Adherents of technicity — that faith behind the maniacal drive to utilize resources to achieve objectives, which always themselves generate more resources utilized to achieve yet more objectives in an endless chain of In Order To’s — want to utilize design to acheive business objectives in order to, in order to, in order to… ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nihilo.

Designer professionals who accept a business-centric, ops-centric replatforming enter this technicity faith loop and, in participation, are gradually reshaped by it. Eventually, they become hard-nosed design consultants, who make a point of agreeing with nondesigners that all resources must serve business and only business. They agree, in the name of design, that design must fall in line. They become what an intensely angry, rude and slightly careericidal designer might call “design kapos”.

Design kapos still mouth humanisms, wear hipster uniforms, produce charming sketches and perform design theater for executive managerial audiences, but beneath the designwashed exterior, they now serve an entirely different Why. And the new Why gradually bends and twists How (“design tools and methods”) until the old Why is not only no longer served, but lost — altogether annihilated. The work feels soulless and empty because what used to make it alive, vital and meaningful has been evacuated and replaced. The discipline of design has been bodysnatched.

Of course, the world of language is ruled by the law of the jungle. Anarchy always favors the strong. So what design is or isn’t is an arbitrary matter of opinion in a world where some opinions are more equal than others. Never forget that in the world of technicity, the golden rule is: “he who has the gold makes the rules.” And he who makes the rules can define whatever they wish however they wish, and do so with increasing aggression.

Managerialism — unopposed, unopposable technicity taken to its natural extreme — wants a constructed totality with no reality beside or beyond it, where people believe what they are told over what they see, hear, smell, taste, touch or otherwise intuit. It wants a world where an alpha technocrat can decree that 1+1=3, and subjects see that and only that. It thrives on intuitive alienation and numbness of soul.

Design kapos sell their designerly souls for business acclaim and social prestige, and so their designless redefinitions of design carry more weight than those who have refused to make such deals. “Who are you to tell an important design personage such as myself what design is and is not. I have been coronated by the head-pats of the executive elite! I am the very embodiment of design.”

But arbitrary redifinitions and constructions aside, 1+1=2, designerliness is a real thing, and the word design still denotes it, even when that meaning is buried under a mass of technik bad faith, TLAs, dirt, filth and permafrost. Designerly design might (once again) go underground, and design kapos might dominate design for a time. But as long as a germ of design lives, there is hope. The soil will thaw, and the design kapos will pretend they were always designerly, and they will even believe their own story, and I suppose that will be okay.

Tacit vs pre-explicit

Autobiography, Design

Maybe I shouldn’t say things like this on my company slack:

…And this only counts the knowledge that could be documented in principle, but isn’t.

Even more lost — submerged in the oblivion of double-ignorance — is the kind of knowledge acquired only in apprenticeship — all that purely practical, entirely tacit know-how passed down from craftsperson to craftsperson.

Design craft is 75%+ intuition.

Wherever words are forced to intercede between hand and artifact, things get stilted and, dare I say it, corporate.

Or this:

AI not only privileges explicit knowledge. It filters out everything except explicit linguistic knowledge, and makes everything outside the wordworld seem nonexistent. If you can’t say it clearly, it is not real.

But as designers know better than most, it is precisely what cannot be said that is most real — and most interesting.

Or this:

Fun fact: The philosopher who coined the term “tacit knowledge” is the same one who coined the term “polycentric”.

Michael Polanyi is one of the philosophers I recommend to designers who want to learn enough about what designers do, to be able defend our practice against conditions that undermine our work and after a point, make design work impossible. He’ll arm you with words that will help you ineffectively but vigorously fight the obtrusion of words. Of course, nobody’ll bother understanding a word of it once they catch a whiff of philosophy and start automatically dismissing it as irrelevant. But you’ll at least have the satisfaction of speaking truth to power, albeit a deaf and numb one.

All this was in response to a pretty okay LinkedIn article “The Ground Remembers: Tacit Knowledge in the Age of AI”.

I say okay, although the author’s explanation of why we use cinnamon and cloves in apple pies exemplifies wordworld theorizing running amok. Really? The taste considerations were only a pleasant side-effect of the antibacterial function of spice chemicals? We keep using apple pie spices when baking apple pies primarily by force of habit? We follow apple pie recipes out of brainless conformist momentum?

Only a business consultant who’s gone intuitively numb from too many decades of peddling disruptive innovation could make such groundless claims without embarrassment. Ironically, the brainless momentum of conformity in the author’s own habitual application of constructionism and functionalism seems to illustrate his own point better than the baking of apple pies.

Coaxing bolts from the blue

Design, Shit theory

The main thing I’ve noticed working as a designer in project teams is the decisive difference between people who take nothingness at face value, and those who know better.

The people who take nothingness at face value are inferior collaborators because they kill possibility in the cradle. They “take absence of evidence as evidence of absence”. They mistake inconceivability as dead nonexistence. If such an inhospitable person points their eyeballs or minds at something, and nothing is perceived or conceived, to them it is pointless to engage. They cut it off, implicitly or explicitly, through a variety of tactics (* see note below), painfully familiar to anyone with a living designerly soul. They are invalidation tactics, meant to not only assert but demonstrate and enact impossibility, and to convince everyone involved that the incipient idea is not worth further consideration. In this way, they sap the enthusiasm, energy and hope required to invite the future into the present.

The best design collaborators, though, are vividly alive to the omnipresent possibility that something miraculous might irrupt into the world at any moment.

They adopt an attitude and receptive charge of imminent miracle. Kate Bush sung it well:

I just know that something good is gonna happen
I don’t know when…
But just saying it could even make it happen

Do not mistake this outburst for an optimistic prediction. These sung words are a speech act, that expresses, describes and invokes the conditions for coaxing the unconceived from nowhere into presence, ex nihilo. What is invoked is an acutely charged expectation that something shockingly new and good might shock us with its spontaneous appearance.

But the expectation is only a necessary condition. It is not in itself sufficient. The irruption ex nihilo emerges from efforts to summon it forth. Ideas are invited to consummation through participation in its development, emergence, strengthening and maturation.

But… If we deny this expectation, and refuse to cooperate and participate in its emergence, the idea’s worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes nowhere because we refuse to come along.

This awareness and attitude toward nothingness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Another insight into nothingness is crucial: the sober understanding that these miracles are cloaked with dread, and with this understanding a second attitude: courageous resolve to endure the dread, and press forward through the agony.

A delightful process will not yield delightful results. It will yield only frivolous and derivative drivel. It is the harrowing processes that produce brilliant breakthroughs of insight.

I once got into a surprisingly bitter fight over this matter. I had a philosophical friend who insisted that my tragic sense of creativity was passé. Maybe in his youth he had too much vulgar existentialism, with all its angsty melodrama and alienated brooding.

His claim — his doctrine, actually — was that we can generate novelty without any pain. We could frolic about in the world of ideas, and through pure play produce exciting new ideas with joyous profusion. His view was that it was much more blazingly and boldly original to reject the necessity of creative pain than to embrace it.

This pissed me off. Maybe it was because this vision of frivolous creativity reminds me of how nondesigners think design probably is or should be.

But annoyance became hostility, when I began to notice that whenever I tried to share with him one of my painfully won insights, he didn’t understand them. And he would sit and smirk, as my attempts to convey my insights failed to penetrate his skull. His own incomprehension and my frustration were amusing evidence that there was no point to my babble.

But then — eureka! My confusion had given him a new novel idea! Perhaps he would write it into the book he was writing.

And see? No angst. No suffering. Just floating playfully above, amused, detached, waiting for inspiration to alight.

And he would then proceed to paraphrase my own idea to me as his own, as if he himself conceived what he refused to be taught.

No wonder he believed that frolicking about in the playground of other people’s ideas was sufficient to stimulate original thought.

He couldn’t conceive the difference between kidnapping someone else’s insight and birthing his own.

Rejection of the radically unfamiliar, passive consumption of novelty won through distant ugly work — two facets of the same attitude toward approaching nothingness. Two strategies for avoiding the labor pain, strain, uncertainty and terror of giving birth to new being ex nihilo.

Note * — One common way to destroy possibility of radical newness is to interrupt. This kills the line of intuitive thought before it can gains flow, momentum, musicality. Chop the song into isolated notes, and interject each with soul-killing frustration, and the melody will stay dismembered and never come to life.

Or digress. Change the subject (“subject” in the most literal, egregoric sense). Or impose and reimpose an alien field of relevance upon the conversation. “What you are trying to say is irrelevant, and should therefore be snuffed out before it wastes more time.”

Or confront the fragile embryonic subject with some overpowering objection, and turn the nursery into an arena, where the infant must prove its right to eventual maturity by defeating gladiators and lions. Even if the infant survives the arena, the very deprivation of nurture and protection will turn the idea monstrous and ugly.

Pessimistically pick at the idea, and find innumerable reasons why it the idea can never come to anything. Destroy the ideas faith in itself until it is dispirited and ready to give up the geist.

In fearful organizations, another routine tactic is lethally effective. For the sake of efficiency or rigor, clap procedures, formalities and norms onto the collaboration. These misnorms afford credibility only to well-established, pre-comprehended ideas, Only sturdy, old, established, workaday idea-blocks are admitted, and the only innovation permitted is in permutations of stacking. One can build whatever out of the provided LEGO block set, but nothing on the order of inventing LEGO blocks could ever happen. However novel the stacking, the notion stacks never feel promising, only stalely sufficient. But it serves its true purpose, which is to check boxes that require checking, and make one’s colleagues more likely layoff targets than oneself. The output lacks all excitement, but never mind that. A marketing department will coat the quotidian with noncredible hype calculated to be adequate for making a fraction of a percent of a segment choose this option of that one. The experience of this bullshit coated chickenshit, is commonly known as “corporate”. It is the natural consequence of trying to add “desirability” at the end of an engineering process (often social engineering that mistakes itself for design because it considers “people”) that should have been designed starting from desirability.

It is commonplace — and by commonplace logic, it is the precisely the commonplace that determines all meaning — to call all vision-oriented planning design.

To design is to imagine a possibility with such specificity that specifications are produced that can serve as a plan. (“Design is the rendering of intent”, to use the poetically spare jargon of one typical design “thought leader”.) According to this definition of design, one designs a book or a service in the same sense as one designs a microchip or jet engine.

But we know, even when we can’t or won’t admit it, that design has a second, deeper meaning. And it is this meaning that gives design its mystique, and that is because design (in this second sense) it is rooted in the same soil as mysticism. Design in this sense taps into depths of human meaning, draws it to the surface and nourishes the world with strange new vivacity. There is something vividly alive, important and ineffable in a great design artifact — unprecedented, artificial (in the strict sense) but as natural as nature itself — enhanced, renewed, human.

If Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial” explored “rendering of intent” design, someone should write a followup: “Arts of the Second-Natural” to explore design that materially manifests meaning. The blurring of these two conceptions of design has made it far too effortless to lose the second, far more vulnerable design that serves an technocratic order that numbs and is numb to love, even of the minutest magnitude.

Designerly nothingness

Design, Exnihilism

Complaint litany of an alienated designer:

This work harnesses none of my essential energies, but saps my will by extracting and utilizing resources I lack.

This work refuses my essential services while demanding from me what I do not have to give and, in fact, need to receive from others.

This work does not move me forward in my personal project. Indeed, it does the reverse: In pulls me backwards, by enslaving me to the very forces I feel called to challenge and overcome.

Regarding these forces I believe should be overcome — these forces we are forced to serve when our work feels most forced — they belong to an enworldment which Heidegger called “technicity”.

Technicity is essentially the utilitarian instinct driven to extremes.

Technicity creates an interminable chain of “in order to”.

In technicity we are all chained to “in order to”, and become links in that chain, with no purpose except to serve someone else’s “in order to”, who, in turn serves another’s “in order to.”

At the heart of technicity is one monomaniacal question “What is it for?”

This is true not only of “What?” and “How?” questions — even, and especially, questions of love and value. So when technicity asks “Why?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” And when technicity asks “Who?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” This is where the nihilistic damage happens

Design is a different way to work. It approaches questions of value and relationship as outside the realm of use. It provides a terminus for the chain of “What is it for?” It is for the sake of itself. It is useless and I love it for no reason other than love. Je ne sais quoi. Even tiny mustard seed sized specks of irrational love bring desirability to life.

But under the iron reign of technicity, design is reduced to an alternate toolset for problem-solving. And that problem is, of course, “how do I do x, in order to do y, in order to do z, in order to…” with no “because I just love it” anywhere to be seen.

Design is far too expansive to fit inside the narrowness of technicity, in any of its contemporary forms.

Of course — obviously — it does not fit inside corporate capitalism.

But neither does design fit inside managerial Marxism, which is the only viable mutation of Marxism in a mature industrial or senile postindustrial world! Your revolution, once inspired by material dialectic, has expired by it. It has been exnihilated by the fundamental fact that we are situated inside a dialectic with no exterior. We are always at the conclusion of an endless journey we are only now beginning.*

And, most relevantly to you, neither does it fit inside a technocratic administrative state, or a mini-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged organization, or a macro-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged global economy), or — most importantly of all, a nano-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged individual soul).

Design, properly practiced, attaches uses (“usefulness”), qualities of use (“usability”), use for businesses (“viability”), uses of technology (“feasibility”) in service of something higher, which is beyond the grasp and even reach of techniques and technologies — something that bears no fruit except a totally useless “I love this.”

The technicity world shovels this quality into the inadequate lust-adjacent category “desirable.” Lust is erosless urge to possess, as opposed to love which is transcendent, erosful pursuit of belonging. “Lovable” is a better word than “desirable”.

Note: * Hegel, Marx, and all other pseudo-prophetic avatars of Prometheus — all those who foresee inevitable futures as if they preexist behind some temporal curtain — seem oblivious to the fact that there is only nothing there to see. There is only the boiling chrome of nothingness.

They miss the insidious subtlety of nothingness. As if nothingness would be so hamfisted as to hide itself beneath something we can see. They think nothingness would marked itself with something so blatant as a shadows?

No, no, no — the surface of nothingness is reflective. If we stare into it, all we see is our own self. And to an omniscient soul, everything and everyone beyond omniscience is nothingness… So they look out at the nothingness of another and see only who they are. Thus “accusation in a mirror”. If in that mercury pool, we see racism, hate, intent to annihilate, genocide! — something to fight to the death. The designated nobody, the persona non grata, bears the sins of the judge and jury. Rememver this whenever a radical bays for blood. Technicity sees its own sins everywhere it looks.

In Soviet Russia, abyss stare out from you.

It is all in our choice of nothingness. Whether we think it explicitly, or simply live it out intuitively, designers must choose, now and perpetually, the pregnant nothingness of exnihilism. The designer who looks out into the world and sees no option but to sell himself into indentured servitude in the factories and towers and nowheres of technicity, will remain a designer only in title.

Remembering the value of Desirability

Design, Pluricentrism

Two venn diagrams are often used by designers to explain what they do.

Each triads presents design as pursuing an overlap of three primary values.

The first, and most common, formulated by IDEO, is the view of a designed solution from an organization’s perspective. A successful design solution is viable, feasible and desirable:

  • Viable: the solution is advantageous to the organization
  • Feasible: the solution is something the organization can actualize
  • Desirable: the solution is something people want and will choose over other options

The second, invented by Liz Sanders, focuses on what makes people choose a solution. A successful design solution is useful, usable and desirable:

  • Useful: the solution fulfills objective, functional needs
  • Usable: the solution removes obstacles and interference from fulfilling needs
  • Desirable: the solution is something people want, apart from functional needs

Notice that Desirable occurs in both triads.

Also notice that Desirable denotes a different concept in both diagrams, a fact easily missed by folks who think verbally.

But fascinatingly, despite this difference, in both diagrams it is always the element of Desirable that drops out first.

And this is because in both diagrams Desirable addresses subjective responses of people to an organization’s offering. These subjective responses motivate objective behaviors, and it is these behaviors that make a design system flourish or fail.

Subjectivity is difficult for most of us to think. This is because we naturally think objectively about physical and conceptual objects. When we use objective thought to understand objects (like engineered objects and object-systems and business objectives, and objective measurements of objectively observed behaviors) the understanding we develop serves our purposes.

But subjectivity confuses objective thinkers because any subjective difference projects a different objectivity into the reality we share. Each of us, walking into the same room notices different things in the environment, and these cause us to make different sense of things. A socially competitive person might look for signifiers of wealth or refinement. A germaphobe might see cleanliness or filth. An artist might notice the aesthetics and symbolic features of a room, indicating a personality or culture. An engineer might see an interesting device or mechanism. My wife senses a field of emotional interconnections, dense with possible stories. A police officer might detect evidence of what has happened or might happen in the room. A preoccupied person might notice only what they are thinking about or what they might be missing on the phone in their pocket.

This is why equating reality and objectivity is not only naive but reductive and, where people are concerned, inadequate. To know a person objectively is to impose one’s own objectivity upon them and to miss precisely those things that motivate behaviors that are, in fact, life and death matters for any organization.

But getting at these multiple objectivities requires a different mentality than business-as-usual objectivity.

This is what designers are supposed to do. But the demands to think objectively, strategize objectively, communicate objectively, plan objectively — these can interfere or even block subjective understanding.

I remember years ago I worked on a technical CMS implementation of a site I had designed myself. I had done extensive research with all the user segments. I had developed a nuanced understanding of where their needs, emotional motivations, perspectives and language differed and converged. I had sensitized myself to how each related differently to the same organization, and interacted with it differently. And the minute I began implementing this design system in this technical platform and started ranging with its myriad features and constraints, all that subjective multi-objectivity went right out the window. To get this engineering work done, I had to attune myself to the logic of this system, and I crystallized into single-logical engineer.

I could not be both an engineer and a designer.

This is why designers should not be shoved into slash roles. Designers need to focus on desirability, supported by a team where others focus on viability and feasibility and project management. If they are forced to do more, the desirability work will be eclipsed. A UX-Ui designer will become only a UI designer. A Service Designer who must also shoulder the weight of process engineering and business strategist might do a lot of service consulting and journey management coaching, but they’ll forget what it is to design.

Subjective understanding is both important and fragile. It requires cultivation and protection.

It is hard to develop and very easy to lose. After a point, it is not only lost, but forgotten.

And once it is forgotten the reasons for cultivating it and protecting it and valuing it are lost.

It starts first with loss of Desirability as something independent from Usable and Desirable. “If this thing is both Useful and Desirable, doesn’t that make it Desirable?” This collapse reduces designed things to mere utility. They work well, but no personal attachment forms between the person and the functional thing or with the organization who provides it. It is a functional transaction.

The next loss is Desirable as something requiring the same level of effort and specialization as Viable or Feasible. It is all leveled down to touch-points with useful features that do not introduce pain-points. Objects and more objects, measured objectively, producing measurable outcomes. The Desirability work is primarily a matter of identifying which parts of which objects to implement first in order to achieve which objectives. It is all easy to talk about, argue about, measure and reward. But, again, it produces nothing anyone can care about.

This is what happens when design is marginalized or refused the conditions required to do design work.

First comes the slash roles. Then come the slashed jobs.

Side note (mainly to myself): a general theory of Desirability. Desirability is rooted in service.

We need to serve — and to have our services needed, valued and received with gratitude.

We all need to be needed.

But we need to be needed in specific ways — according to our essential service.

If someone extracts service from us that is not the service we need and want to give — especially if our essential service is refused, devalued or made impossible — instead of feeling fulfilled purpose we feel used and degraded.

To understand a person’s essential service and to provide them opportunities to provide this service to others who will value it — and at the same time provide that person with services that allow them to focus on their essential services — this taps sources of value, motivation, loyalty, hope, resilience and a myriad other passions. An organization rooted in this kind of value will have charisma, soul, energy and je ne sais quoi far beyond a corporation that relies only on dollars and fear to drive its gears.

Fertile overlap

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.

Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.

Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.

Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.

The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.

Lead… then gold!

Design, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

When a person loses their soul, the very soul who could intuit the loss is absent. All that is left is unreality feeling the unreality of unreality.

I’ve quite a bit on ethnomethods — those mostly intuitive behavioral conventions that permit us to participate in some particular social setting. To belong to a culture is to know how to produce and how to interpret a repertoire of meaningful behaviors. We learn how to understand other people’s behaviors and to make ourselves understood by them; then we adopt them as habits; then we internalize them and they become second-natural, and eventually we forget them entirely and they recede into nature.

Many ethnomethods are never explicated. We learn them mimetically — by direct intuitive mirroring. We just pick them up.

Very few people can deliver a lucid lecture on the ethnomethods they use. Nor can they be relied upon to talk about them, mainly because it would not occur to an interviewee to bring them up, since they operate outside of linguistic direction. Understanding ethnomethods — a sociological approach known as ethnomethodology — requires direct observation and experiment.

But also, and I am sure I am nowhere near the first to say this: language is ethnomethodic. Cultures adopt a shared active vocabulary. And they speak in certain ways about their shared world. This relationship between words, communicative behaviors, referenced realities and speech acts produce mental ethnomethods. Through ethnomethods, people adopt cognitive behavioral habits, and become “inwardly” likeminded through their outward conformity to the intricately inter-related heterogeneous outward norms.

Why do I bring this up? Several reasons:

  • Ethnomethods are the meaningful substructure of organizations, and organizations are the material service designers shape. When we do this shaping, ethomethods are a huge, elusive and difficult part of that shaping.
  • Scholars who have studied how designers work and teach new practitioners (like Nigel Cross and Donald Schon) have observed that design practice differs in distinctive ways from other professions. When these practices are taken up by communities and become a disciplinary field, and are intentionally transmitted through education, training and apprenticeship they become an ethnomethodic tradition. Cross invented an adjective for indicating belonging in the repertoire of behavioral, linguistic and cognitive ethnomethods: “designerly”.
  • Design practice has, since the pioneering design research work of Lucy Suchman, adopted ethnomethodic practice — but ironically has adopted and transmitted it purely ethnomethodically! Very few designers have any explicit knowledge of where our methods came from. Ethnomethodology is embedded in many of our methods, and when we use those methods we function ethomethodologically. If the ethnomethodological tools happen to cycle out of our work, the ethomethodological ethnomethods disappear with them. And designers, who are nine-nine parts technician, and maybe one part intellectual, are ill-equipped to notice.
  • Service design, as a field, has its own evolving set of ethnomethods. Of course, like all fields we have our methods (tools) and our methodologies (systematic use of tools), and when people ask us about how we work, these are what we talk about. But beneath all this is a layer of ethnomethods that guide how we do our work and even how we think about it. I suspect many service designers see themselves as more intellectual than other designers. It is partly because we are required to explain ourselves, our value and our methods to so many different stakeholders. And it does require a degree of articulateness beyond that required of other designers. But this is not intellectual articulateness, but, rather, a technical articulateness.
  • And, perversely, for this very reason, I think service design has lost almost all its designerly ethomethods. It started with “meeting business halfway” and learning the language of business in order to communicate the value of service design in meeting business goals. Then it became mastery of that language and fluency in speaking it, which means learning to think in it. Then it became immersion and active participation in business practices. Then it became learning new methods and approaches to managing journeys and products within journeys. Designers began meeting business halfway from the previous halfway point. And then halfway from that… then that… then that, until eventually, Zeno-paradoxically, our service design stopped being designerly at all.

And this brings me to the thesis I have been working and reworking, which I just summarized to one of the few service design intellectuals I know:

I’m coming to you with a growing suspicion about the field of service design that I think cannot be discussed by most practicing service designers.

I believe that the tacit philosophy that underlies and unconsciously shapes and animates service design practice has never been fully adequate to the problems service design is meant to address. The whole field has always stood on a shaky intellectual foundation, and this has weakened our disciplinary praxis.

But in the last several years, I think even that foundation has eroded away, until that now service design has devolved to total submission to that tacit philosophy that shapes and animates business management — a vulgar subspecies of what Heidegger called technik.

The intellectual foundation upon which service design was erected needs to be dug out and re-laid, so service design can bring design to the business world.

As it stands, service design offers nothing to business that is not new-and-improved business management consulting. And it is this non-designerly sameness that sets dull eyes aglow with recognition when service design gurus speak their language. Service design now sees eye-to-eye with business because it is no longer design, but utterly safe, unchallenging, non-disruptive business as usual. It is no more revolutionary than corporate progressivist activism, and just as phony.

Service design has gone native in the world of business. It has, in the process lost its soul and cannot even sense it.

A methodological note:

I’ve joked that brimstone is my fossil fuel, and that rage is my muse.

I’ve waxed bad-poetic about my daggerscalpel. Something bothers me dreadfully and gets me all murderously angry. I grab my dagger and lunge at it with full intent to kill. But as the weapon tip plunges toward the heart of the matter, it changes midair into a surgical instrument of healing. And now I know something that releases me from resentment.

Most recently I’ve spoken humorously about my philosopher’s stone as a bludgeon — I smash it into some leaden stupidity and watch it transmute into golden insight.

And so on.

Let me see if I can transmute all this ragey negativity into something beautiful.

Design is a very different way to enworld our world. It is not meant to replace other enworldments, but does retune them so we can all collaborate in harmonious difference to solve shared problems.

Design wants to solve these shared problems in some distinctive ways.

It wants to bring things into existence that people value, and which makes life in general more valuable. That is, it wants to offer things that people freely choose and want to have in their lives.

It wants these things to be beneficial to all involved. In the case of a service, the service should not only be beneficial to those who receive the service but also those who deliver that service on the front lines, or who support the service behind the scenes. The service offers opportunities to serve and to be served in ways that are meaningful and rewarding and make people thank their lucky stars that this service exists.

It wants this rewarding involvement to be true of its own services. Anyone who gets staffed to a service design project should immediately feel a palpable change for the better. Anyone who works as a service designer at a service design agency should feel this as well. They should feel that they are bringing a gift to their client. If they do not feel this in their hearts, the designer and the agency need to look into the design of their own service and get right with their craft.

It wants to do what all design does: make things that are useful, usable and desirable. Useful is the easy part. It is about what the design does for whoever uses it. Usable means we can use it intuitively, without massive cognitive effort. It means working with simple gestalts and purely intuitive interactions. And desirable means reinforcing a person’s values and overall sense of value. It means inviting relationship.

It wants to shape a reality that can be enworlded but shared in a variety of ways by a variety of participants. Each participant approaches the artifact in a different way, experiences it differently and responds to it, interacts with it, and changes it from their own point of participation. The single reality is actualized by the distributed agency of participants, each of whom experiences the reality in their own way. In Christopher Alexander’s words, a service is a semilattice experienced by a plurality of participants, not a tree-structure experienced in one way.

Design wants to create a world where a diverse range of people who might inhabit the same world very differently all feel at home and grateful to be here together.

This is why I design.