Design develops actant systems. Polycentric design disciplines (including service design) are optimized to integrate multiple interacting human actants into the actant systems they develop. In contrast, monocentric design disciplines were optimized for a single human actant.
One exciting aspect of seeing design this way is purely etymological. Human actants in a design system are designated defined roles in the system. They are, as such designees. In design we designate roles both to people and to engineered sub-systems as actants within our systems. Cool!
I have an idea for a book I will never write. I may just steal Borges’s beautiful move: writing a short story that is a review of a nonexistent book, outlining its key ideas. Or maybe I’ll add a new meta-level of laziness and just outline the Borgesian short story I will never write.
This never-to-be-written short story will be a fictional review of the never-to-be-written book Designing Hat, which is, of course, an allusion to DeBono’s actually-written pop-biz classic Six Thinking Hats. In this book DeBono advises strategic hat changes to address various situations. My book, however recommends putting on your one designing hat and never taking it off whenever approaching any problem involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything.
This single move, I’ll argue, can clear up all kinds of hellish nonsense we all detest. It won’t solve everything — no method can — but it can dramatically improve our chances of making real progress. In the process, it can reduce everyday hostility and nihilism while increasing solidarity and goodwill.
In the grand tradition of inflating the importance of design, I will insist that design thinking is effective far beyond its usual applications. Since almost everything we do is a variation on “problems involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything”, the advice is more or less to superglue your designing hat onto your head.
Political problems, from the pettiest household squabbles to international crises, should be addressed as design problems. Even if we are not hands-on participants in shaping domestic or foreign policy, our conversations about these issues will improve if we approach them in a designerly manner. And meetings, too… Ninety-five percent of meetings could be vastly improved if approached as design collaborations.
The review will offer a succinct summary of each chapter, showing how adopting designerly attitudes and practices makes everything better:
Segment people in reference to a clear purpose
Go to the reality you want to change and observe it for yourself
Ask people to teach you about their lives
Fall in love with problems, not solutions (I think Marty Cagan coined this?)
Win alignment; never resort to coercion
Do not argue if you can prototype and test
Do not debate; compare options
Make smart tradeoffs
There are definitely more chapters, and I’ll keep adding them as they occur to me. Please comment if you have ideas for chapters.
This morning I am reflecting on the crucial difference between two words, clumsily translated into English as “repentance”, the Greek word metanoia (a transformation in how we think), and the Hebrew word t’shuvah (a turn to, or back to God).
Almost certainly, the word used by John the Baptist and Jesus in the Gospels was t’shuvah, which is actually (I think) closer in tone to the English word, even if it etymologically maps less perfectly. In t’shuvah, we are to turn back to God in every way — certainly in our thinking, but also in our feelings, and most of all in our behaviors. Or to put it Jewishly, in t’shuvah we turn with our whole being, heart, soul and strength. (Jesus did not invent this formula. This, and many other of his most famous utterances, referred to Torah and other Jewish scripture, and derived their authority from these references.) Metanoia, on the other hand, is more spirit-first — a change in thinking or worldview that effects a change in feeling and behavior.
I’m not a New Testament scholar, but I would be curious to hear if Paul’s works-versus-grace distinction was essentially a t’shuvah-versus-metanoia distinction.
The reason I am reflecting on this question today is I am realizing that in the book I am slowly developing, I have differentiated these two concepts, and placed them under different domains. (The three domains I explore are religion, philosophy and design.) I didn’t even realize until today that I was doing this!
I assign metanoia, not to the domain of religion, but to philosophy. I take it even further, even; I make a somewhat reckless normative claim that the essential purpose of philosophy ought to be metanoia.
I assign t’shuvah to the domain of religion. T’shuvah can involve engagement with thought, but it must engage with more than thought, and more likely will with behavior, and will always engage and change aspects of our own being outside our cognitive grasp.
(And, please, when I speak of engagement beyond thought, please do not modernize what I’m saying by shoehorning it into “the unconscious”, that iron lung of late modernity, which pumps artificial spirituality into unrespirating secular bodies. It is time to pull the plug. And I don’t mean making changes to our physical bodies. I care less than nothing about neurons or neural pathways or brain physiology. These ideas are valid in some contexts, but play no role in my thinking. People who must compulsively physicalize and psychologize and scientize ideas in order to make them compatible with their existing thinking will dislike what I have to say. I’m gunning precisely for their most sacred ideas, and they will not understand what I am saying until they undergo a metanoia that renders this scientizing unnecessary.)
The overlap between philosophy and religion consists of metanoia that effects t’shuvah, and t’shuvah that effects metanoia. Not all metanoia turns us to God. Most metanoia does not, though all metanoia experiences feel like “religious conversions” as moderns misconceive religion. Much metanoia turns us away from God’s infinitude, toward closed finite theory-systems, like Hegelianism or inverted Hegelianism (Marxism), or other closed theory-systems, such as Progressivism. These seal us off and insulate us all that exceeds the grasp of cognition.
I’ll tease one more tangentially important idea. Design (the third domain my book explores) is also concerned with material and social realities that exceed the grasp of cognition, and which can, through our thinking, feelings and behaviors, effectboth religious and non-religious metanoia — and/or t’shuvah.
Last week I threw a tantrum about segmentations. I was sick, and my mood was slightly overintense. I call it “vehement”, and it is bad for my writing. The idea I wrote about is important, and deserved better, so I want to try again.
I talked about a situation designers often face. To do our work effectively, we have to understand the people who will use the things we design.
But sometimes the people we’re designing for have diverging sets of requirements. Their needs might be different, or they might have different attitudes or behaviors or use what we are designing in different contexts. We find there is not one, but multiple ideal users, and if we design only for one user, the design is unlikely to work for the others.
(Don’t be distracted by the term “user”. This is an all-purpose term for a person for whom we design. The design field has been debating this term for decades, and I’m sick of this debate, this category of debate, and the kind of person who’s into this kind of debate, aka 15-years-ago me.)
Whenever we discover that we are designing not for one ideal user, but for multiple ideal users, we develop a design segmentation. Sometimes we will express the design segments as personas — representative fictional characters who help flesh out the segments and make them feel real to designers.
I will give a real life example. I was working for a telecom, helping them design a better billing system. But we discovered that, with respect to bill payment, customers fell into three categories. People who wanted to pay as little attention to their bill as possible and didn’t much care if something was weird on the bill if it wasn’t huge, people who were way into inspecting every bill line-by-line and disputing the crap out of anything that looked irregular by so much as a nickel, and people who were living paycheck to paycheck, juggling their bills and trying to orchestrate income and outflow of cash to keep their households afloat. These people wanted very different levels of detail in their bills, very different degrees of control and very different kinds of help if something goes wrong. We called these segments something like “Set-and-Forget”, “Bill Auditor” and “Paycheck-To-Paycheck”. A successful design solution would need to accommodate all three of these segments.
With this example in mind, imagine the frustration designers face when clients tell them they already have a segmentation, and that we will be required to use those.
Why?
They have already made the investment, and it is wasteful to redo the work.
We should build on what they’ve already done, so we can move things forward instead of going back to square one.
It is important to maintain consistency. It will confuse people if every project uses different segments.
Turf. “Marketing does segmentations and personas in this organization.”
Much of the time, marketing did the segmentation.
But marketing segments for marketing purposes, and often those purposes are different from ours and have no relevance to the design problem we are trying to solve.
Imagine, for example of our client had made us solve our billing problem with typical telecom marketing segments. I’m just going to make them up:
Wire-Cutters: customers who live on wireless networks and stream everything.
Cable-Connecteds: people who still need all their devices (TV, telephone, maybe computers) securely attached to a wall, via a cable, for some combination of entrenched habit and a perception of reliability.
Sports Fans: people who care only about their sports and who’ll gladly pay for cable TV in order to see all their games.
Imagine trying to use these segments to solve the design problem of accommodating different bill paying preferences. Telecom marketing segments tell you a lot about media consumption habits and attitudes and incredibly little about bill paying.
The lesson here is that segmentations of people are always relative to some specific purpose. Again:
Segmentations of people are always relative to some specific purpose.
Another way to state it is that any schema for dividing up sets of people is useful for asking certain kinds of questions, and useless for asking other kinds of questions.
This principle is not only true of marketing and design segmentations.
It is equally true of personality types. A personality typology is psychological segmentations that might (or might not) be useful for answering questions pertaining to commonalities and differences among groups of people.
Myers-Briggs and Enneagram enthusiasts can sometimes succumb to seeing their models as capturing the essence of personalities. But that essence says more about the essence of typologist than the essence of the people they type. I can say all this as someone who actually experienced this essentialist lapse, and obsessively viewed the entire human world as a complex play of Jungian personality functions. I know this way of thinking from the inside.
But now I will get to my deeper and more urgent point: This principle applies most of all to political identity.
It is all-too-easy to essentialize political identities. It is even easier when we are equipped with sociological theories that claim these identities are the outcome of cultural processes that generate personhood. We aren’t just segmenting populations, now, we are defining the very mechanisms that produce personhood. Identity penetrates into the essence of people, and the commonalities and differences that unite and divide us as political actors.
But as with personality types, this belief about says more about the essence of the identitarian than the essence of the people they identify as belonging to one identity or another. It tells us how they understand society, culture, politics and personhood — and it also tells us how they understand themselves in relation to others.
Consider the extreme case of a white supremacist, who will insist that their identity is that of a white person, their identification with being white is far more indicative of who they are as a person than their status as a white person can possibly say. Is the white supremacist aware of this meta-identity and its significance to who they are? Usually not. Their understanding of the world has psychic roots deeper than the content of their belief. Their beliefs, and indeed, their perceptions, their animating logic, their feelings grow up from this depth and bloom as racist beliefs about themselves and others. They compulsively project this schema onto their thoughts, experiences, memories, expectations. They are imprisoned within them. And they become neurotically incapable of segmenting people in other ways that might be more relevant to resolving practical problems,
Our white supremacist has succumbed to the same rigid limitations as the marketing department we discussed earlier, or the Enneagram fanatic who must know your type right away. They’ve lost track of the purpose of their segmentation, and essentialized it as a natural structure of society or of customers or of human beings in general.
And this is true of not only right-wing identitarianism.
It is exactly as true of left-wing identitarianism also known as “woke”, and what I prefer to call progressivism.
Progressivism has essentialized its segmentation to such a degree that it seems incapable of thinking politics in any other way. Not only is its identity-centered way of thinking politics fixed, but the segmentation it has been using is fixed.
This has caused progressivists to address a second-generation Mexican Catholic who loves America, who struggles to afford rent and food, for whom social roles like mother, father, sister and brother are central to their conception of the world as POC, with essentially the same concerns as a keffiyeh-wearing trans Latinx graduate student in the Queer Studies program at an elite university. These two people probably want diametrically different things.
And if someone takes a fresh look at the diverse citizens of this nation and tries segmenting it by economic class, social values and levels of patriotism they’ll probably have a more compelling value proposition — at least to our working class, traditionalist Catholic patriot. I think there’s more of them than genderqueer anti-Western progressivist graduate students.
That segmentation will also probably work better for policy design than — let’s face it — the marketing segmentation developed by the Democratic National Committee for use in designing and disseminating progressivist marketing messages. If a school or criminal justice system, or public health system only analyzes, measures and addresses performance of people according to the DNC marketing segmentation, they’ll certainly find differences among segments. But if they were to try other segmentations — for instance income level — the differences that emerged might be dramatically sharper. Poor lives matter?
And with respect to last week’s Democrat defeat, if progressivists insist on — or just default to — compulsively relying on the progressivist identity segmentation to account for the loss, they’ll generate a heaps of hypotheses on attitudes of each DNC marketing segments toward people from other DNC marketing segments, and the answers produced through this process will be just as wrongheaded and out of touch as the ideas that lost the Democrats this election.
It is time we recover our recognition that people are, first and foremost, people, and that our beliefs about them are less about them than they are about ourselves. We have lost this understanding and it is harming our humanity and our ability to deal effectively with the human world around us.
I think this is better than my last two attempts. Certainly I’m less sick and less vehement. I’ll probably have to try a few more times to get this out right.
By the way, my segmentation of people is around their faiths and the ideologies that express those faiths. I see progressivists as an identity that trumps all other identities. Same with post-liberal trads, QAnons. Conservatives, Jewish Conservatives, Libertarians and old school liberals. These segments are far more meaningful to me than the identity schemas projected by each of these segments. I suppose today I’d call myself a metaliberal.
Below is my first attempt to convert a 2019 talk I gave to a group of UX researchers into a blog post. I’m not sure if it’s working or not, but I’m going to publish it here to get feedback.
Service designers are asked all the time how what they do relates to what other designers, especially UX designers, do. My colleagues have been asked this question by clients, and it seems a new article on this question pops up every couple of months. Everyone has their own way of answering the question. My favorite way of explaining it has three parts.
I start by showing two tools service designers use that give a concrete indication of what makes us different.
Then I use a metaphor of dimensions to clarify how different design disciplines relate.
I finish by returning to the two service design tools, and make the relationship both clear and concrete.
Part one: Two key service design tools
To begin, I will show two tools service designers use.
The first service design tool is something we call a Moment Map. A moment map shows all the paths a person can take as they receive a service. Typically, a Moment Map begins with the recognition of a need and ends with the resolution of the need. A Moment Map can depict an existing service, but more often we use them to outline a proposed future service.
A Moment Map shows all the channel paths available to a person receiving the service. By “service channel” we mean the medium by which a service is delivered. A service that is delivered via an app or website can be said to take place in the digital service channel. If you call a call center, the service channel is telephone. If you get in the car and go to a retail space or service center, we might call that the retail space service channel.
Below is an example of a Moment Map.
Moment Map example
The second service design tool is the Service Blueprint. A Service Blueprint follows one customer’s journey through a service step by step, and at each step outlines how the service is delivered. The delivery is divided into a frontstage – what a customer experiences — and backstage, where processes, policies, people and technology platforms are identified. The process of blueprinting produces a list of touchpoints and capabilities DaVita required to deliver an experience like the one described in the journey.
Below is an example of a simple Service Blue Print.
Service Blueprint example
Keep these two service design tools in mind as we move through the second part of the discussion where we metaphor of dimensions to clarify the relationship between service design and other design disciplines.
Part two: Design spaces and their dimensions
To understand the relationship between service design and other design disciplines who collaborate with service designers, for example UX designers, it is helpful to think about it in terms of dimensions.
We’ll start with a single touchpoint.
If you recall your elementary school geometry, a point is zero dimensional. When we connect two points, that makes a line. In our model, a touchpoint or a series of touchpoints is an experience that unfolds in time in a single service channel.
So a zero-dimensional touchpoint or one-dimensional “touch-line” is a single channel experience.
The space of single-channel design
Single-channel design problems are well-understood. We have tried-and-true methods for solving them. We have existing team structures, with roles who are used to working together. Many books have been written explaining how to do single-channel design, and how to do it better. This is the kind of problem most designers, such as UX designers spend their time working on.
Most UX designers will tell you that there is more to their work, though, than just focusing on their service channel. To do a good job designing in any service channel it is important to understand the context. We must understand the person for whom we are designing. UXers call them “users”. They might be “customers”, or “patients”, or “employees”, etc. In service design, we like to call them “service actors” or just “actors”. We need to know who they are, what they are trying to do, and we need to understand their needs, attitudes, beliefs, and habits. This is something designers of all kinds always want to know about the people they design for.
We also need to know what they’re doing before they use the artifact we are designing, and what they’ll be doing after. And we also need to know what other touchpoints they’ll be interacting with.
Context of single-channel design
Back in my UX design days, people were always looking for a telephone number to call, just in case they “need to talk to a real person.” And we were always concerned with how people arrived at our digital touchpoints from other channels. What expectations were set?
While UX designers (and other single-channel designers) don’t have direct control over what happens before or after the experiences they are designing, or the experiences their users have in other channels, understanding this before-and-after cross-channel context helps designers create experiences that connect seamlessly and harmonize with the other experiences that make up a user’s overall experience with the brand.
But some design disciplines go beyond understanding, and actively shape the full end-to-end cross-channel experience, for example, omnichannel design, experience design, customer experience design and patient experience design. They look at the whole experience a person has engaging an organization as they zig-zag between channels to accomplish their goals, and ensure that the whole experience at every point is seamless and positive.
This is where design gains another dimension, and we can think of two-dimensional design, or design of touch-planes.
The space of omnichannel design
Omnichannel design problems are harder to solve than single-channel ones. Methods for solving these problems exist, but they are not as widely known, and are missing altogether in many organizations. Omnichannel design teams include many of the the same people found on UX projects, but many other collaborators with expertise in all service channels also need to be involved, and many of them will be new to design methods might feel uncomfortable. And documenting, updating and activating and managing the omnichannel experience is a capability many organizations are only beginning to develop. Journey Management systems like TheyDo can help companies mature their omnichannel experience management capabilities.
Notice that the first service design tool we saw, the Moment Map, is a visualization of the omnichannel customer experience.
But omnichannel design also has a context which must be understood in order to design effectively. An omnichannel experience is only the tip of an operational iceberg.
Context of omnichannel design
The experience is both enabled and constrained by a company’s capabilities. A company might not have capabilities to deliver a good experience in the channel of choice of a customer. For instance, a customer who “wants to talk to a real person” on the phone might be frustrated by a company that does not operate a call center.
It is is also enabled and constrained by people who deliver and support the experience. Wherever in the experience the motivations of those delivering and supporting the experience are aligned with those of the customer (or other person being service) the experience is likely to be a good experience, but where motivations are misaligned the experience will be marred by friction, frustration and obstacles.
When this operational context becomes part of the design problem itself, a third dimension of design opens. We start thinking about “touch-volumes”.
The space of service design
With this third dimension, we are now in the domain of service design. Service designers not only design the omnichannel experience for the service actor who receives the service. We also design the experience of all other service actors who deliver and support it. This means we must conduct research with all service actors and understand the goals, needs, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, in order to understand how to align interests and create positive interactions between actors that afford mutual benefit and a good experience.
We also design the capabilities and operations that support optimal service delivery. We want to remove friction and obstacles that might prevent the smooth, efficient and satisfactory delivery, and we want to strategically automate wherever possible to free actors to focus on the more demanding, rewarding or special parts of the service where a human touch enhances the experience.
Notice that the second service design tool we saw, the Service Blueprint, is a visualization of the third dimension, which describes the service delivery of a service.
Part 3: Bringing it together
Once we see how different design disciplines relate using the metaphor of dimensions, we can now look at the two key service design tools, and locate single-channel design projects within them.
What the service design work does is it shows how single-channel touchpoints connect in the context of the larger service. By doing service design, and understanding the omnichannel service experience customers might have, and blueprinting how the service will be delivered, which includes digital tools employees and partners might use to support service delivery, many different UX projects can be coordinated to play various parts in a larger service experience, and that larger service experience is an important context for that design work.
For a while now, I’ve been referring to service design as a polycentric design discipline. I picked up the term from Michael Polanyi. Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, also adopted the term and made it mainstream in the wonkier regions of nerddom.
Polanyi and Ostrom use the word polycentricity to describe social systems where agency is distributed throughout the system, not centralized or imposed from above.
I’ve been using the word in related, but distinctly different way. I use polycentric to describe design disciplines that design for multiple interacting people, all of whom are treated as I-centers of their own experience. I use it to contrast service design from older design disciplines that placed one person — a user, or customer, or employee, or patient or citizen, etc. — at the center of their design work, the person experiencing the designed artifact. Service design is polycentric, where older human-centered design (HCD) disciplines like UX design or industrial design are monocentric.
But what if we also thought of service design as polycentric in the same sense as Polanyi and Ostrom? From that perspective we could say that polycentric design establishes conditions where mutually beneficial social arrangements emerge, as spontaneously as possible, sustained by voluntary choice.
This is not just theoretically interesting. It has practical importance. With increasing frequency, my clients are coming to me with situations where they are trying to persuade partners who are outside their direct control to collaborate with them to deliver services to their customers in specific ways at a high standard of quality. Problems of this kind absolutely must be approached polycentrically.
This connects with something I’ve noticed many times in my three decades as a designer. Design thrives where people have choice and agency. Wherever people have choice and agency, we must abandon coercion and manipulation, and instead appeal to them as people who make free decisions based on their experience.
When the internet opened a broader range of choices to consumers and equipped them with more information to make smart choices, their agency increased, and this sparked a sort of design methods renaissance.
But now, due to a variety of factors, employees and non-employee partners also have more agency and more choices, and access to information required to choose options that works for them.
We are still not yet in an economy where all organizations need service design.
As long as an organization can command their employees and partners to behave however they want, a polycentric approach like service design is not necessary. The organization can just engineer rules and tools for service delivery, and everything will work like a well-oiled machine.
But if you are not in a position to boss your service delivery people around, either because they don’t work for you, or because they can choose to stop working for you if they don’t like being bossed around, service design is your best choice.
So, to summarize, when I say “polycentric design”, polycentric refers to two kinds of center: 1) experiential centers, and 2) agential centers.
For the last week, I have been closely and carefully reading a long, gnarly and crucially important passage from Buber’s I and Thou, in both the Smith and Kaufmann translations.
One benefit of understanding this book to be a prayer is that I am much more relaxed about getting through the book. The point of it is not to acquire information, but, rather, to allow it, invite it, entreat it to work on me. I have been taking my time and giving myself ample space to respond.
I want to share two key excerpts from this passage, each in both the Smith and Kauffman translations.
The first excerpt compares and contrasts Buber’s own Jewish faith with other forms of faith. He focuses on Buddhism, but Buddhism stands in for ascetic faiths in general.
This comparison is important, because Buber’s Judaism differs radically not only from conventional exoteric theisms, but from conventional esoterisms. It is a different religiosity that is often excluded from consideration. In my own experience, expressions of this faith — particularly practical ones — can trigger psychic allergies in both conventionally religious and “unconventionally” spiritual people.
Smith’s translation:
The Buddha describes as the goal the ‘cessation of pain,’ that is of becoming and passing away-release from the cycle of births.
‘Henceforth there is no return’ is the formula of the man who has freed himself from the appetite for living and thus from the necessity to become ever anew. We do not know if there is a return; we do not extend beyond this life the lines of this time-dimension in which we live, and do not seek to expose what will be disclosed to us in it own time and disposition. But if we did know that there is a return we would not seek to escape it, and we would long not indeed for gross being but for the power to speak, in each existence in its own way and language, the eternal I that passes away, and the eternal Thou that does not pass away.
We do not know if the Buddha actually leads to the goal of release from the necessity of returning. He certainly leads to a preliminary goal that concerns us — to the becoming one of the soul. But he leads thither not merely (as is necessary) apart from the ‘thicket of opinions,’ but also apart from the ‘illusion of forms’ — which for us is no illusion but rather the reliable world (and this in spite of all subjective paradoxes in observation connected with it for us). His way, too, then, involves disregard; thus when he speaks of our becoming aware of the events in our body he means almost the opposite of our physical insight with its certainty about the senses. Nor does he lead the united being further to that supreme saying of the Thou that is made possible for it. His innermost decision seems to rest on the extinction of the ability to say Thou.
Kaufmann’s translation of the same:
The goal was for the Buddha “the annulment of suffering,” which is to say, of becoming and passing away — the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. “Henceforth there is no recurrence” was to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. But if we did know that there was recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible.
Whether the Buddha leads men to the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly he leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. But he leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the “jungle of opinions,” but also away from the “deception of forms” — which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for is simply belong to it) the reliable world. His path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when he bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what he means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does he lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You.
In response to this, I wrote a margin note: “L’Chaim! Declaration of faith.”
The second excerpt pertains to what I have called “enworldment”.
Smith’s translation:
The beginning and the extinction of the world are not in me; but they are also not outside me; they cannot be said to be at all, they are a continuous happening, connected with and dependent on me, my life, my decision, my work, and my service. But they do depend not on whether I ‘affirm’ or ‘deny’ the world in my soul, but on how I cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world, to real life — and in real life the ways of very different attitudes of soul may intersect. But he who merely ‘experiences’ his attitude, merely consummates it in the soul, however thoughtfully, is without the world — and all the tricks, arts, ecstasies, enthusiasms, and mysteries that are in him do not even ripple the skin of the world. So long as a man is set free only in his Self he can do the world neither weal nor woe; he does not concern the world. Only he who believes in the world is given power to enter into dealings with it, and if he gives himself to this he cannot remain godless. If only we love the real world, that will not let itself be extinguished, really in its horror, if only we venture to surround it with the arms of our spirit, our hands will meet the hands which held it fast.
I know nothing of a ‘world’ and a life in the world’ that might separate a man from God. What is thus described is actually life with an alienated world of It, which experiences and uses. He who truly goes out to meet the world goes out also to God. Concentration and outgoing are necessary, both in truth, at once the one and the other, which is the One.
God comprises, but is not, the universe. So, too, God comprises, but is not, my Self.
Kaufmann’s translation of the same:
The origin of the world and the annulment of the world are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not — they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. But what it depends on is not whether I “affirm” or “negate” the world in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life — and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. But whoever merely has a living “experience” of his attitude and retains it in his soul may be as thoughtful as can be, he is worldless — and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasms, and mysteries that happen within him do not touch the world’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in his self, he cannot do any good or harm to the world; he does not concern it. Only he that believes in the world achieves contact with it; and if he commits himself he also cannot remain godless. Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms — and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.
I know nothing of a “world” and of “worldly life” that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-world, the life of experience and use.
Whoever goes forth in truth to the world, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful.
God embraces but is not the universe; just so, God embraces but is not my self.
This excerpt contains something close to a definition of enworldment, and notice that it includes an element of pluralism in affirming the weaving together of different attitudes of soul as intrinsic to actual life. Smith’s: “…how I cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world, to real life — and in real life the ways of very different attitudes of soul may intersect.” Kaufmann’s: “…how I let the attitude of my soul toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life — and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross.” This connects powerfully with my vocation of polycentric design.
Importantly, this endeavor involves embrace of dread: Smith says, “If only we love the real world, that will not let itself be extinguished, really in its horror, if only we venture to surround it with the arms of our spirit…” and Kaufmann says, “Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms…”
This is my first reading of I and Thou since Bruno Latour induced my “material turn” ?a little over a decade ago.
At the time of my initial Buber immersion, I preferred ?Buber’s essays (especially those in Between Man and Man) to I and Thou, which at points seemed someone obscure and poetic, especially when it extended the I-Thou relationship beyond interpersonal interactions.
This time around, having embraced both an “apeironic” materialism and a Jewish life, the whole book makes perfect sense, and I cannot imagine preferring any prose to this prayerful poetry.
In my “Six Sensibilities of Service” course, I’ve gone back and forth on naming one of the sensibilities. I’ve called the same sensibility both “Reciprocal” and “Mutual”.
Each has advantages and tradeoffs.
“Reciprocal” emphasizes the interactivity inherent to the sensibility. An interaction takes place where value is exchanged between participants in a service.
“Mutual” emphasizes sharedness — specifically, shared benefit. In a good service, an exchange is well-designed when it is of mutual benefit.
This sensibility is meant to represent an idea in Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) which has variously been called “value exchange” or “value-co-creation”. The former seems to favor “reciprocity”, where the latter seems to favor the latter, as the participants in the service collaborate to produce an event of mutual benefit to all involved.
I still don’t know which term I prefer. This is partly because this sensibility belongs to a larger system of sensibilities, which includes one called “Polycentricity”, which is a way to translate pluralism into designerly terms. Until recently, most designers who have defined their goals with a single subject in mind — a user, a customer, an employee. Even when they have designed to accommodate multiple personas, those personas were understood as isolated subjects of the experience. In service design multiple participants experience the service simultaneously, and experience one another within that service, each a center-point of their own experience. It is within this polycentricity that reciprocity and mutuality occurs or fails to some degree.
I was talking to my friend Blondeau about the oddball glory of the Brompton foldable bike, and I found myself saying something that seems worth keeping:
The belief in absolute perfection — perfection without compromise — is the death of design. Design is the art of relative perfection — perfection within constraints for some limited purpose.
I intended to link Brompton to my description of how foldable bikes design always involves stark tradeoffs, optimized to some purpose, and sacrificing other desirable qualities, and how this constraint, precisely, is what makes foldable bike design beautiful. Except, it turns out I never posted on this subject. So I will dig through old emails and texts and try to patch together a post I should have written years ago.
I guess I’ll start with an email I wrote Blondeau.
One word of warning: If you get a Brompton, you’ll never be able to do without one again, especially if you’re living nomadically. Any Brompton-less bike stable will feel incomplete.
What sold me on Brompton was looking at the design problem different foldables tried to solve. Each optimizes for some purpose.
Some are all about easy shipping of mostly-normal bikes from one location to another. Set up and breakdown requires significant effort. Once the bicycle arrives at a location, you set it up, and leave it set up. The design is optimized solely for providing a conventional cycling experience, and ease and speed of folding and unfolding is sacrificed.
Brompton is designed for multimodal transportation. It breaks down and sets up in about 1 minute. The folding-unfolding is assumed to happens one or more times in the course of a trip. You set out for a train station on the Brompton. There you fold it down and carry it onto the train. When you arrive at your stop you unfold the Brompton and ride it to your hotel. There you fold it down again and take it up to your room. If you are Eurailing around the continent and want cycling to be part of how you get around, you cannot beat Brompton. They make all the right tradeoffs for that style of getting around, and I love that.
If you just want to have a bike with you in Spain and maybe other places you visit having a normal bike that folds might be better. You’ll get a smoother, more refined ride.
Brompton is pure quirk.
Another design that made clear, decisive tradeoffs is the Mazda MX-5 Miata. The origin story of the Miata is one of clarity of vision and refusal to blur it in order to live up to the bland ideal of meeting the expectations of most people for most purposes. The product managers, designers and engineers behind that car sacrificed passenger and storage space and engine power for a very specific roadster driving experience. They knew exactly what the car was for, and what it was not for, and every decision was driven by that clarity.
Another beautiful story of tradeoffs was the development of the Palm Pilot. That team watched Sculley-era Apple try to brute-force design the first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), the Apple Newton. The device tried to be a handheld computer that could do anything. Consequently it did nothing well. It was too big, so it did not fit in a pocket. It tried to recognize natural handwriting, but failed comically most of the time. It supported syncing with computers, but the process was similar to a data backup procedure. Palm optimized its device for data lookup. It assumed most data would be entered on a computer and synced to the device. They devised a clumsy but reliable text entry scheme called Graffiti instead of relying on immature handwriting recognition technology. Best of all, the device was tiny and pocketable. And it came with a syncing cradle that supported one-button sync. The product took off, despite being vastly less advanced that the doomed Apple Newton.
If you read these two case stories, you’ll notice crude prototypes play a central role in refinement of the product, but also in building alignment around the vision, and enthusiasm for that vision.
Funny. I’ve been watching videos and listening to audiobooks by product management guru, Marty Cagan. I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed. What he describes as a revolution is stuff we’ve been doing for the last 30 years in UX and Human Centered Design.
But today I’m wondering if the problem is that designers try to do this work from a position of weakness. Maybe when we do this work from a position of strength, and take responsibility not only for the user experience, but also the feasibility and viability of the product (all power entails responsibility!), we are no longer just designers. We become product managers.
I wonder if that is the profession I should have pursued? I love tools. I love beautiful, clearly-conceived, faithfully executed products. But this difficult work cannot be done by charm, influence and lobbying alone. It requires power.
Hmm.
(Now I’m thinking about the app reviews I’ve written over the last decade. The majority of them are addressed to the product management — usually bad — of the app, not the features or the design. I get angriest at the product management philosophy behind wrongheaded design decisions.)
Below are two passages from Buber that can read as rebukes to the designerly faith. The first evokes UX, the second, service design.
1.
Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness.
Only now can the other basic word [I-It] be put together. For although the You of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I — an object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will become hence-forth — but as it were an It for itself, something previously unnoticed that was waiting for the new relational event.
Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each-other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object. Now, however, the detached I is transformed — reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one-dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects — and thus approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it, and joins with it to form the other basic word. The man who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity.
2.
He perceives the being that surrounds him, plain things and beings as things; he perceives what happens around him, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and processes that are bounded by other things and processes and capable of being measured against and compared with those others — an ordered world, a detached world. This world is somewhat reliable; it has density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands-right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure — and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take it for your “truth”; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody, it is prepared to be a common object for you; but you cannot encounter others in it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability preserves you; but if you were to die into it, then you would be buried in nothingness.
I will just let these two passages sit without comment for now.
My company hosts an event each year that we call Practice Week. It is a week set aside for reflection and learning, focused on the strange discipline known as service design. This year our team is dividing into “pods”, each focusing on some area of interest or importance to service design.
My pod’s subject is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Service Design.
According to Wikipedia, “KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.”
It is indisputable that KPIs are terribly important in business, and this is why we are learning about them, not because any of us are compelled by this subject. We confessed to one another that, for a variety reasons, we were suffering a lack of intrinsic interest. For us KPIs have been a necessary evil — a combination of 1) boring, 2) abstract and 3) morally suspect.
After sharing our reservations about KPIs, it occurred to us that maybe challenging these reservations directly might breathe some inspiration into our session.
We asked:
Are KPIs essentially boring, abstract and suspect — or do they just seem this way to us because of how we’ve approached them?
Might there be a way to approach them that makes them interesting, tangibly real and a valuable part of our service design practice?
In other words, is there a philosophical opportunity to reconceive KPIs in a way that helps service designers organically integrate KPIs into our praxis?
(Honestly, this reunderstanding of uninteresting and trivial matters as fascinating and worthy problems is a core skill for designers — or at least designers like me. If we choose to rely on work ethic and willpower to slog through work we find boring , we will inevitably produce uninspired, uninspiring designs that are good for little more than setting the stage for implementation. We will become what engineers think we are: a preliminary planning step on the way toward the real work of building. If we endure the boredom, we can certainly bullshit ourselves and others and playact enthusiasm, but our “positivity” performances will be even more boring and unconvincing than our work. We’ll contribute to transforming the world into meaningless, joyless bullshit. As someone with a feeble work ethic and poor acting skills, I’ve never had any choice but to resort to philosophy in order to find genuine interest in problems that initially strike me as irredeemably dull and pointless. I suppose I shouldn’t say things like this out loud, but imprudent candidness is a key spice in my flavorful practice.) …
…So moving toward framing this problem as a design brief, some questions emerge, pertaining to the three repellent characteristics of KPIs.
Can we change our understanding of KPIs interesting in a way that reveals KPIs as an interesting aspect of design work — an aspect we are intrinsically motivated to use?
Can we ground our understanding of KPIs in realities we intuit directly and concretely, and make an abstract “experience-distant” knowing more “experience-near“?
If we are able to intuitively understand KPIs and able to incorporate them into our practices, what possibilities of influence does this open to us? Might KPIs empower us to find more profound and demonstrable win-wins benefitting both an organization’s bottom line and the wider world?
But should they (and measurements in general) be as all-important as they currently are? And how reliable are they? Do KPIs produce unintended consequences, both in outcome and in the experience of work?
For many of us, Sapient’s “Information Architecture: Practice Definition and Process Framework” (universally known simply as “the IA Bible”) was the first time we had ever seen an exhaustive documentation of UX design methodology (except nobody was calling it “UX” quite yet). It was released in March 2000, and copies of it were coveted. I still have my copy.
Up until it came out I was swimming in techniques, and did not understand how any of it came together. I think the IA Directors understood it better, but according to this document, it was only after they gathered and combined their knowledge that anyone felt they had anything like a complete picture. I think this is a historic document, and I collect design books. If you know of a book that laid out the human-centered design process like this earlier than March 2000, please let me know.
Designers love diagrams. We tend to be visual thinkers. Where verbal thinkers feel they understand things when they find the right words to express a thought, designers feel they understand when they find the right shape. And so it is not surprising that designers understand their own work in diagrams.
If you ask a designer what they do, there’s a strong chance they’ll draw a Venn diagram. There is an equally strong chance one of the three overlapping circles will be labeled “Desirable”.
Perhaps the most popular one is the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad. My first exposure to it was the late 90s, but expressed in different language. A User Experience Architect used it to explain to me that our role was responsible for finding the overlap between 1) “User” (what users want and need), 2) “Technology” (what is technologically possible), 3) “Business” (what serves business goals), and 3) . At least according to one source, it was IDEO who developed and popularized the now ubiquitous Desirability-Viability-Feasibility model. What is Desirable, Viable and Feasible satisfies the needs of people, is good for the business, and can be developed and delivered easily enough that it is worthwhile to do.
Another version, which I believe predates the other by almost a decade is the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad. When designers focus on the benefits they provide to people — and this is our primary focus — we often speak of these benefits in terms of good experience. This triad clarifies what is meant by “good experience”.
A good experience has three qualities: It is 1) “Usefulness” (the design satisfies functional needs), 2) “Usability” (the design minimizes functional obstacles), and 3) “Desirability” (the design is valuable beyond its function).
Years ago, I became curious where this triad originated. It turns out it was conceived in 1992 by Liz Sanders, who is now known primarily for her work in participatory design. To the degree a design affords usefulness, usability and desirability, it will be valued by people and adopted.
So which of these two Venn diagrams is preferable? They seem to do similar things with a similar shape and with one overlapping word. Do we just choose the one we like better? Do we just choose the one that we think will resonate more with our audience?
I propose that these two triads complement each other. This becomes easier to see if we avoid using the word “Desirability” in two different ways. In the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility triad, Desirability is about people’s response to what is being designed. It asks if the design will actually be adopted. Let’s call it “Adoptability”.
And adoptability is the goal of good experience. Looking at the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad, they define what is adoptable. So the Usefulness-Usability-Desirability triad fits inside the Adoptability region of our new Adoptability-Viability-Feasibility triad.
Not one to stop while I’m ahead, I’ve decided to add yet more elements. I’ve been warned by trusted colleagues that I’m pushing it too far. I’m going to try anyway.
Years ago I heard someone, and I suspect it was Jared Spool, talk about design having two modes. 1) “Design the right thing.” 2) “Design the thing right.”
I see the first triad Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability as representing “Design the right thing.”
I see the second triad Usefulness-Usability-Desirability as representing “Design the thing right.”
So far so good?
Ok. But here’s where I got in trouble with my colleagues. While I was digging around the internet to confirm that Jared Spool was in fact the inventor of “Design the right thing.” / “Design the thing right.” I came upon an article that mapped these two statements to the famous Double Diamond of design thinking. And I got all excited about mapping the two triads to the diamonds to produce a Grand Unified “What Designers Do” Diagram.
I received two objections. The first objection points out that we are not only thinking about adoptability-feasibility-viability while defining our problem. We also think about usefulness, usability and desirability. And once we think about designing a thing right in the second diamond, we don’t stop worrying about feasibility and viability.
Honestly, none of this bothers me. In design, when we describe what we do, we exaggerate and sharpen definitions and separate things that are blurrier and messier and more intermingled in real practice. We’re just trying to help people conceptualize, and this makes it easier. It is roughly true. Good enough.
The second objection, however, might be fatal. But if it fails, it seems to be an interesting failure, so I’ll expose the idea with the objections and see what happens. If I can’t rescue it, maybe somebody else can.
The objection is this: While it is true that the first diamond is where we determine what the right thing is to design — and while it is also true that the right thing to design is adoptable, feasible, and viable — it is not necessarily true that the first diamond helps us determine what the right thing to design is by defining what is adoptable, feasible, and viable. Adoptability-Feasibility-Viability is more commonly used as a framework for evaluating concepts, and that is something that belongs in the second diamond.
But then, I’m thinking… Maybe designers should be thinking more about how we can bring feasibility and viability into that first diamond.
Perhaps we are overemphasizing Adoptability when framing our opportunities and design problems.
I don’t know the answer. But I do know from years of design practice that sometimes clearly framing a question is the key to better answers. So I’ll leave it open.
Here is why I’m reading Fritz Perls: The interlacing intellectual traditions that birthed gestalt psychology also birthed human-centered design. They are sibling traditions with much to learn from one another.
There is an issue, a problem; and there are opposing parties: the terms in which the problem is stated are taken from the policies, vested interests, and history of these parties, and these are considered to be the only possible approaches to the problem. The parties are not constituted from the reality of the problem (except in great revolutionary moments), but the problem is thought to be “real” only if stated in the accepted framework.
But in fact neither of the opposing policies spontaneously recommends itself as a real solution of the real problem; and one is therefore continually confronted with a choice of the “lesser of two evils.” Naturally such a choice does not excite enthusiasm or initiative. This is what is called being “realistic.”
The creative approach to a difficulty is just the opposite: it tries to advance the problem to a different level by discovering or inventing some new third approach that is essential to the issue and that spontaneously recommends itself. (This then would be the policy and the party.) Whenever the choice is merely and exclusively the “lesser evil,” without envisaging the truly satisfactory, it is likely that there is not a real conflict but the mask of a real conflict that no-one wants to envisage. Our social problems are usually posed to conceal the real conflicts and prevent the real solutions — for these might require grave risks and changes. If a man, however, spontaneously expresses his real irk, or simple common sense, and aims at a creative adjustment of the issue, he is called escapist, impractical, utopian, unrealistic. It is the accepted way of posing the problem, and not the problem, that is taken for the “reality.” We may observe this behavior in families, in politics, in the universities, in the professions. (So, afterwards, we notice how past eras, whose social forms we have outgrown, seem to have been so stupid in some respects. We now see that there was no reason why a spontaneous approach, or a little more common sense, could not easily have solved their problems, prevented a disastrous war, etc., etc. Except that, as history shows, whatever fresh approach was at that time suggested, was simply not “real.”)
Most of the reality of the Reality-principle consists of these social illusions, and it is maintained by self-conquest.
Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Existentialism — application, reflection, re-application, re-reflection — iterated until both practice and account of practice are internalized and made extensions of one’s own being — heart, soul and strength.
Designers should never “take off their designer hat.” Design is a better mode for doing everything a person can do — politics, friendship, marriage… and worship.
When I say “design” I do not mean what past generations of designers meant.
I certainly do not mean what design technocrats mean: envisioning a utopian world, and actualizing that utopia into a new, better reality. Design technocrats see themselves as revolutionary heroes with a vision, a plan, faith and courage to take action — cutting through all resistance to make things better for all. It encourages us to use all available power to treat those who question or resist our utopian plans as vicious (small-minded, unimaginative, greedy) and invalid, if not nonhuman — mere obstacles to overcome.
This kind of revolutionary technocratic attitude is narcissism, and anathema to design as I know and love it.
This vision of design neglects design’s very essence — the hard work that precedes the technical work — the hard work of going to the rough ground of reality, getting in touch with it, experiencing it, participating in it, learning from it and intuiting for ourselves what seems relevant and salient.
And we don’t do this work alone. We do it with others. Inevitably we find that we intuit reality differently, and these different intuitions produce different truths.
A crucial designerly faith: while these initial truths are true to some degree, they are never true enough. We collaborate with others to instaurate ever-better truths. The truths bring us closer to reality and they allow us to find agreement, or at least alignment, with other people.
This idea that we should just overwhelm other people with power because we, ourselves, know best — and those other people can be explained away into inhumanity — this makes us unreasonable, inhuman. It makes us into enemies who can only be met with violent force. People who cheerfully advocate revolution never imagine themselves subject to the revolutionary violence. Revolutionaries unconsciously assume the superior power they pretend to lack. Revolution is the fantasy of the privileged-in-denial.
Coming together on approaches to reform the real world: this is the part of design that matters most. If we do the work before the work — the political work — the engineering efforts we employ to effect the changes will create peaceful, second-natural improvements to our lives.
None of us knows better, least of all those who believe we know best. We only know best when we know together.
The introduction of human-centered methods to design did not just improve design methods. It didn’t simply improve the quality of design work.
The introduction of design research — the essence of human-centeredness — fundamentally transformed design.
It radically differentiated what engineers always meant by design from what designers mean by it — and what we all now implicitly mean when we speak of design.
A similar essential change might be in store for design as we move from design intended for solo use, centered on one person at a time to design meant to mediate interactions between multiple persons, each of whom is part of the other’s experience.
For years now I’ve experienced philosophy as a kind of design. I don’t mean that the theoretical concept occurred to me. I mean I noticed that I had already for some time been evaluating philosophies as designed artifacts. And I don’t only mean that I was assessing the objective content of the philosophies as well-designed or poorly-designed. More importantly, I was noticing how I responded to the world itself mediated by the philosophies I internalized as I read them. The medium of philosophy is its message, not the content of propositions or arguments. I treated the philosophy as an invisible mediation of my experience of life, which got worse or better, based on the deep design of the philosophy.
The job of the human centered designer is to help organizations reestablish contact with the reality of the people they serve.
And that contact produces truth that can be shared by participants in organizations — enabling them to (re)establish contact with their shared aspirations and each other as people.
In my field of human centered design, it is understood that before any group of people can collaborate effectively on anything, they must first align on the problem and then align on the solution.
What does this mean? Aligning on a problem means to share a conception of the problem — to think about it in roughly the same way. It is important to note here that until a problem is conceived, it is not even a problem — it is a troublesome situation.
And troublesome situations have the potential to be problematized in divergent ways implying diverging paths to a solutions. More often than not, groups confronting troublesome situations problematize the trouble in divergent ways, compounding the trouble, because now stubborn, troublesome people appear to block the way to a solution.
This happens for at least three big reasons.
Big Reason Number One is personality. Individual persons with different temperaments, sensibilities and capabilities understand and perceive the world differently in both subtle and dramatic ways, and notice different aspect of situations.
Big Reason Number Two is discipline. When people from different backgrounds confront a troublesome situation, they tend to notice very different features of the problem. Specifically, the notice symptoms of problems they specialize in solving. Different disciplines conceive problems in different and incompatible ways, and this is one factor that causes departmental strife in organizations.
Big Reason Number Three is the lived experience of incomplete information. Divergence of understanding is exacerbated by incomplete data. Given a smattering of facts, our habitual way of understandings (the combo of personality and expertise) fills in data gaps to complete the picture and perceive a gestalt truth. And we all have access to different smatterings and experience the smatterings in different sequences. Our early impressions condition our later ones. Being humans, a species with a need to form understandings, who prefer misunderstanding to an absence of understanding (perplexity), we immediately begin noticing whatever reinforces that sense, and tune out what threatens it. So the specific drib-and-drab sequence of data can play a role in shaping our impressions. The earliest dribs and drabs have “first mover advantage” in gestalt formation.
These three big reasons are not even exhaustive. It’s no wonder organizations are full divergent perspectives and controversy. (Contra– “against” + -versus “turned”). Generally, these circumstantial impressions and expert diagnoses of troublesome situations are not entirely wrong. Some are likely truer than others, but it is hard to determine which is truer than which. And it is somewhere between possible and likely that none are true enough for the purposes of solving the problem. As a matter of method, we designers assume none are right enough. (And if it does turn out that a preexisting truth turns out to be true enough, now we can support that truth with data and align the organization to it.)
Our job as design researchers is to go out and investigate real-life examples of the troublesome situation and expose ourselves to the profusion of data that only real life itself can offer. We see what emerges as important when we allow people to show us their situations and teach i\us how it seems to them.
This gives us a new, relevant conception of the problem rooted in the people we intend to serve with our design solutions.
Once an organization shares a common conception of the problem, they are better able to conceive solutions that they can align around.
And further evaluative research — getting feedback on prototypes of candidate solutions — allows teams to align around solutions that people consistently respond to favorably.
Aligned implementation teams can collaborate effectively on working out the solution in detail.
So, as I hope you can see, the designer’s task is largely a political one of cultivating alignment through collaborative research, modeling, ideation and craft.
I am unable to believe that this is not generally a better way to live.
When I am at my best, I conduct my life in a designerly way in accordance with my designerly faith.
Did I really never post this thought before? I’ve been saying it for years:
Rapport is the most important data we gather in research.
Rapport is attunement to the participant’s enworldment. We learn to speak with a participant fluently in their own context, understanding not only their vocabulary and the content of their speech, but also how that speech relates to their environment and activities. We get not only the parts but grasp how the parts interact as a system, and become organs within an organism within an organization. Until we understand these complex relations between part and whole all we have is a heap of facts that can be construed rightheadedly or wrongheadedly.
Researchers with strong objective inclinations like to believe that facts can speak for themselves. And they like to believe that the facts are best able to speak for themselves when we remove or neutralize subjectivity, usually by employing mechanistic procedures. In the absence of subjective interference, data can autonomously organize itself into patterns and themes.
I am a researcher with strong subjective inclinations, and I believe facts do not speak for themselves, at least not univocally. Our best bet is not to eliminate subjectivity from our analysis, but rather to bring the right subjectivity to the analysis. And that right subjectivity is the subjectivity that attuned itself to participants when rapport was achieved in the interview. When we analyze our data and then thematize it we build a body of knowledge that embodies this right subjectivity, and makes it more learnable by others.
(Esoteric side notes to take or leave: 1. Here we see how a personal subject is, like an academic subject, a specific form of objectivity. 2. We could say, with Marshall McLuhan that the medium, subjectivity acquired in rapport, is the message, even more than the factual content gathered in the research.)
When we approach design problems from this right subjectivity we find ourselves able to do things we couldn’t do before, back when we approached it naively, from our own everyday subjectivity. We now perceive the situation differently. We feel different emotions, values and weights in the situation, and sense different possibilities, opportunities and hopes. Our minds follow different logical paths through the shifted landscape. We produce different and more attuned ideas than we normally could, in greater intensity, force and volume.
I call this productive, shifted state precision inspiration.
Empathy is much more than simple feeling-with. (That is sympathy.) Empathy engages our entire being. For sure, it engages our hearts, but not just our hearts — not isolated, alienated, mindless hearts, divorced from our thinking and doing selves.
Empathy attunes us to the thoughts and actions of others and helps us see how feeling, thought and action converge as a situated, living person who might feel, think and act very differently from us… as different from us as a kidney is from a stomach or liver.
In an organism, the organs serve each other in different and complementary ways. Empathy is how we serve each other in different and complementary ways within organized groups.
The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World. — Black Elk
Another thing I am noticing about the ideas I gravitate to: they are never pure theory. I think I am repelled by pure theory.
The ideas I love are the theoretical components of praxis. They are thoughts informed by thoughtful practice — which are meant to guide further thoughtful practice.
Praxis is the virtuous cycle of thoughtful practice informing practical thought guiding thoughtful practice. This cycle produces thoughts that are part of participation in life instead of theory systems that compete with life and sometime eclipse or displace life.
The theoretical components of praxis are abstractions that emerge from concrete doing.
This links up with another important insight into how I work. I do very poorly with ungrounded abstractions. They are not merely empty or dry — they are not real enough for me to grasp and use. I have to experience the reality from which abstractions are abstracted.
We learn the theoretical components of praxis by participating in that praxis. The theoretical components put words to the truth that emerges in participation.
But the praxis of design research puts us in contact with the realities into which we intend to design. We begin the process in a state of alienation. We know things about the reality, but the knowledge is unrooted abstraction. Or we think we know about it, but we are wrong. Or the things we know are incomplete and exclude relevant insights required to design something consequential and helpful. Or there is lack of alignment in what different people know. Or or or. We “go to the rough ground” and learn from people who inhabit these places we think can be improved, and we see what emerges as important. We put words to these emergent realities and craft more useful truths — truths that help organizations maintain contact with reality.
My design praxis is actually a metapraxis of designing specialized praxes optimized for particular situations.
It is really annoying that I can’t just adopt other people’s groundless abstractions. It is a real intellectual limitation — stupidity, if you prefer — and I find it intensely painful when I crash into it.
But it is not without positive tradeoffs. This limitation bolsters my ideological immune system. I’m not as easily taken by ungrounded abstraction-systems.
I’m both too smart and too dumb to buy into popular ideologies.
When we use the euphemism “differently abled” this is what we mean. I am intellectually differently abled.
I just have to accept this and do something with it. Or rather, continue doing what I do, with less shame.
Some closely connected thoughts that speak directly to my own current concerns.
From Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections:
The motivations of my work, which culminates in a philosophy of history, are simple. They arise from the political situation.
Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language — meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies. Hence, the community of language that he himself wants to use in order to criticize the users of ideological language must first be discovered and, if necessary, established.
The peculiar situation just characterized is not the fate of the philosopher for the first time in history. More than once in history, language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it no longer can be used for expressing the truth of existence.
This was the situation, for instance, of Sir Francis Bacon when he wrote his Novum Organum. Bacon classified the unanalyzed topics current in his time as “idols”: the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, the idols of pseudo theoretical speculation. In resistance to the dominance of idols — i.e., of language symbols that have lost their contact with reality — one has to rediscover the experiences of reality as well as the language that will adequately express them. The situation today is not very different.
Voegelin wrote these words in 1973. They are probably always true to some degree. But I find them more true today than any other moment in my life. More and more of my peers are “representatives of the dominant ideologies” and this makes it impossible to share a community of language with them. Their worlds are stocked with ideological objects that eclipse and replace rather than articulate what is given.
This bit is especially relevant: “In resistance to the dominance of idols — i.e., of language symbols that have lost their contact with reality — one has to rediscover the experiences of reality as well as the language that will adequately express them.”
This concern for maintaining contact with reality, resonates powerfully with the book I am currently reading, Fritz Perls’s classic Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality.
…All contact is creative and dynamic. It cannot be routine, stereotyped, or merely conservative because it must cope with the novel, for only the novel is nourishing. … On the other hand, contact cannot passively accept or merely adjust to the novelty, because the novelty must be assimilated. All contact is creative adjustment of the organism and environment. Aware response in the field (as both orientation and manipulation) is the agency of growth in the field. Growth is the function of the contact-boundary in the organism/environment field; it is by means of creative adjustment, change, and growth that the complicated organic unities live on in the larger unity of the field.
We may then define: psychology is the study of creative adjustments. Its theme is the ever-renewed transition between novelty and routine, resulting in assimilation and growth.
Correspondingly, abnormal psychology is the study of the interruption, inhibition, or other accidents in the course of creative adjustment. We shall, for instance, consider anxiety, the pervasive factor in neurosis, as the result of the interruption of the excitement of creative growth (with accompanying breathlessness); and we shall analyze the various neurotic “characters” as stereotyped patterns limiting the flexible process of creatively addressing the novel. Further, since the real is progressively given in contact, in the creative adjustment of organism and environment, when this is inhibited by the neurotic, his world is “out of touch” and therefore progressively hallucinatory, projected, blacked out, or otherwise unreal.
Creativity and adjustment are polar, they are mutually necessary. Spontaneity is the seizing on, and glowing and growing with, what is interesting and nourishing in the environment. (Unfortunately, the “adjustment” of much psychotherapy, the “conformity to the reality-principle,” is the swallowing of a stereotype.)
and
But just as in our culture as a whole there has grown up a symbolic culture devoid of contact or affect, isolated from animal satisfaction and spontaneous social invention, so in each self, when the growth of the original interpersonal relations has been disturbed and the conflicts not fought through but pacified in a premature truce incorporating alien standards, there is formed a “verbalizing” personality, a speech that is insensitive, prosy, affectless, monotonous, stereotyped in content, inflexible in rhetorical attitude, mechanical in syntax, meaningless. This is the reaction to or identification with an accepted alien and unassimilated speech. And if we concentrate awareness on these “mere” habits of speech, we meet extraordinary evasions, making of alibis, and finally acute anxiety — much more than the protestations and apologies accompanying the revealing of important “moral” lapses. For to call attention to speech (or to clothes) is indeed a personal affront.
But the difficulty is that, disgusted with the customary empty symbolizing and verbalizing, recent philosophers of language set up astringent norms of speech that are even more stereotyped and affectless; and some psychotherapists give up in despair and try to by-pass speaking altogether, as if only inner silence and non-verbal behavior were potentially healthy. But the contrary of neurotic verbalizing is various and creative speech; it is neither scientific semantics nor silence; it is poetry.
It seems to me that Voegelin and Perls are largely concerned with the same phenomena at different scales: the tendency for language to create objects of thought that purport to represent real objects (gestalts that we spontaneously experience as given in contact with the world around us) but which somehow become substitutes for reality and cause the thinking subject to lose contact with reality.
This concern, of course, is at the heart of design research as I understand it. Our job as researchers is not only to help organizations gather data they lack. It is to help organizations recover fuller contact with reality beyond their own walls.
Most large organizations squint out at the world through data peepholes, custom-drilled to perceive what they assume is relevant. From this data, they construct abstract models and theories about what is going on. The numbers and models and theories become the objects of preoccupation for these organizations — far more real than what they are meant to represent. When organizations find they are unable to use these abstract objects to produce the numbers they are commanded to produce, occasionally someone within the organization is wise enough to suggest leaving the building and making contact with the reality behind the abstractions. And generally, we find that the abstractions themselves need reworking. This abstraction design is foundational to all other design, and this is the part of the work I love. If I am required to design without this preliminary, I am deprived of ground upon which to build — or even stand.
