The hyper-accellerated software release cycles of the 2010s will be seen as the analogue of the hyper-miniaturized mobile phone designs of the early 2000s: a dubious goal pursued to an absurd extreme.
Category Archives: Design
“The many faces of research”
I just realized I never re-posted my October 2010 article summarizing James Spradley’s incredibly cool way of defining different types of research — by the role of the participant vis a vis the researcher.
Here’s the text:
Anyone who has ever commissioned, designed, conducted research will find these common but thorny questions all too familiar:
- “What is this research going to give us that we can’t get from analytics and iterative design?”
- “Don’t you need to ask all your interviewees the same set of questions so you can compare their answers?”
- “Can you quantify these findings?”
- And with qualitative research, the dreaded: “That’s an awfully small sample. Are these findings statistically significant?”
These questions can be difficult to answer clearly, succinctly and definitively. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have some kind of framework or model to help people understand how the various kinds of research (especially qualitative and quantitative fit together) to provide an organization what it needs to effectively engage and serve their customers?
James Spradley in The Ethnographic Interview provides such a framework. His approach is the identification of four different roles a research participant can play, each with a different relationship between researcher and participant and each producing a different kind of finding:
- Informant – In ethnography, a participant is related to as an informant. Informants are “engaged by the ethnographer to speak in their own language or dialect”, providing “a model for the ethnographer to imitate” so that “the ethnographer can learn to use the native language in the way informants do.” The informant is related to as a teacher. What is learned is how the participant conceptualizes and verbalizes his experience. Informants give the researcher not answers to fixed predetermined questions, but the questions themselves. Informants help define what the researcher needs to learn in subsequent research. (Examples of research techniques with informants: unstructured and semi-structured interviews, diary studies, open card sorting, collaborative design exercises.)
- Subject – Subjects are participants in social science research, upon whom hypotheses are tested. “Investigators are not primarily interested in discovering the cultural knowledge of the subjects; they seek to confirm or disconfirm a specific hypothesis by studying the subject’s responses. Work with subjects begins with preconceived ideas; work with informants begins with a naive ignorance. Subjects do not define what it is important for the investigator to find out; informants do.” (Examples of research techniques with subjects: usability testing, split testing, concept testing.)
- Respondent – A respondent is any person who responds to a survey questionnaire or to queries presented by an investigator. “Survey research with respondents almost always employs the language of the social scientist. The questions arise out of the social scientist’s culture. Ethnographic research, on the other hand, depends more fully on the language of the informant. The questions arise out of the informant’s culture.” (Examples of research techniques with respondents: surveys, questionaires, structured interviews, closed card sorting.)
- Actor – “An actor is someone who becomes the object of observation in a natural setting.” As with subjects and respondents, when participants are related to as actors, the terms of the description of the actor’s behaviors are those of the researcher, not of the participant. It should be noted, however, that in ethnographic research (and also in contextual inquiry, participants are interviewed as they are observed, which means the participant is still understood primarily as an informant. The actor-informant teaches the researcher through showing and explaining in his own terms the significance of his actions, which allows the researcher to give (to use Clifford Geertz’s term) “thickness” to his descriptions of what he observes. (Examples of research techniques with actors: site analytics, business intelligence analysis, silent observation.)
Over the course of a research program, research participants may at various times be regarded as subjects, actors or respondents — but if the goal is to know what really motivates the participants, to understand how to engage them at an emotional level, and to cultivate an enduring relationship with them, it makes a lot of sense to begin by relating to research participants as informants, beginning with unstructured or semi-structured interviews.
By starting with an informant relationship with research participants researchers can develop a better idea of what matters to the participants, how they conceptualize and speak about these things, and most importantly how this motivates observable behavior. These insights (that is, findings that illuminate the inner life of participants) can focus subsequent research on the most relevant and impactful questions. It also improves the execution of the research by helping researchers use language that’s natural and understandable to participants, earning greater trust and cooperation, and minimizing misunderstandings. And in analysis researchers and planners will mine more valid insights from the data, since they understand the motives, thought process and language behind the responses and behaviors of the respondents, actors and subjects. And the insights will be accurate because they rely far more on fact than (often unconscious) assumptions.
The other types of research can then report in more quantifiable terms, using much larger samples, how many subjects or actors perform certain behaviors or how many respondents give one answer or another to certain questions on a survey or questionnaire — and these actions and responses will now carry much more meaning because now the researchers have subjective insights to complement the objective data.
Two more points worth making: 1) I haven’t mentioned segmentation in this article, but anywhere where I mention learning about research participants, I am talking about learning about segments of participants (defined by goals, needs, attitudes and behaviors), and understanding the similarities and differences among them. 2) Generally, it is in the role of informant that research participants provide findings that drive design and creative. Informants inspire empathy and creative approaches. Subjects, respondents and actors tend to yield information useful in making strategy decisions. Using the full range of qualitative and quantitative research methods together intelligently can enable strategists and designers to work together more effectively to harness the full power of experience design.
By understanding research better — recognizing the difference between research that produces subjective insights and research that produces objective data, by not mistaking them for rival methods for producing the same kinds of findings, and by understanding how they can be used together to gain a holistic picture of one’s customers that is far more than the sum of the facts — an organization becomes more capable of understanding its customers without sacrificing their individuality to empty statistics.
Dialogue: art-work, design-work, artisan-work
S:
My view is that art is made without reference to the receiver.
It is entirely ego-centric.
It is thrown out into the world and if someone understands and desires it, it’s a miracle.
Design is made with reference to others — which is why real design is human-centered design.
I want my art self-centered and my design human-centered!
J:
I wouldn’t say, “miracle.”
What would commissioned work be? Artisan work?
S:
Depends on the benefactor
If the benefactor sees the artist’s vision and identifies with it (through that “miraculous” congeniality), it’s still art…
…but if the benefactor doesn’t know how to let the artist do the art, or the artist doesn’t know how to defend the art from the benefactor’s attempts to control the art, it becomes artisan work.
and here’s a new thought…
If a client doesn’t know how to let a designer do human-centered design or the designer doesn’t know how to defend the design from the client’s desire to control the design — what gets done is artisan work.
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Update May 21, 2017:
3 types of participants in a creation:
- The producer – the party producing a work.
- The sponsor – the party funding the production of a work.
- The consumer – the party enjoying the benefit of a work.
3 categories of production:
- Art-work – In art-work, the producer produces work guided primarily by the producer’s own judgment, with less concern for the personal standards of sponsor or consumers. The artist produces as if for himself as consumer, and the work is chosen or accepted by the sponsor, almost as if intercepted, as an artifact manifesting the artist’s personal judgment. In art, the producer (artist) has final judgment.
- Design-work – In design-work, the producer produces work guided primarily by the consumer’s judgment, with deliberate deemphasis on the personal standards of producer or sponsor. The active judgment in design is empathic judgment: quality of judgment is ability to overcome personal judgment in order to judge by the consumer’s standards. The one using has final judgment. In design, the user (consumer) has final judgment.
- Craft-work – In craft-work, the producer produces work guided by the sponsor’s judgment, with deliberate deemphasis on the personal standards of producer or consumer (assuming the consumer is not the sponsor). The craftsperson produces for a sponsor to the satisfaction of the sponsor. In craftwork, the sponsor (the one paying for the work) has final judgment.
Much pain in production arises from ambiguity or disagreement over the category of production. A sponsor believes what he is commissioning is primarily craftwork, being produced to his own personal satisfaction, when the producer thinks what is commissioned is either design or art. (A sponsor who lacks pluralistic awareness, due to autistic, narcissistic or naive realist tendencies, will not understand the difference between craft-work and anything else. It will simply become a control issue or clash of wills.) Or a producer is hired to work as a designer, but sees himself as the final judge of the work. (This is inevitable when the producer lacks pluralistic awareness).
Of course, most work is a hybrid of all three, located in the middle regions of a three-axis gamut stretched between art-work, design-work and artisan-work — but even minor disagreements in the balance point can generate strain.
Pluritarian Pluriversalism
To someone born into an autistic universe controlled by a single set of strictly logical natural laws, the experience of empathy and the subsequent revelation of an empathic pluriverse redefines the meaning of miracle, and of transcendence, and of religion.
Before, miracles were exceptions to the laws of nature. After, miracles are the irruption of something in the midst of nothingness: other minds, each with a world of its own — each with the power to change the meaning of one’s own world.
Before, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond the finite objective world. After, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond myriad finite objective worlds, each rooted in the elastic mind of a subject.
Before, religion was the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers. After, religion was still the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers, but the change in conceptions of transcendence and miracle means that it is the individual and the individual’s world that is transcended, and this means the route to transcendence is not around the world and one’s neighbors, but through them and their worlds. The activity of loving, respecting and learning from one’s neighbors is intrinsic to loving, respecting and learning from the infinite God who cannot be confined to any one world, however vast.
Myriad worship practices are needed to worship myriad aspects of an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly meaningful God. By this understanding, empathy is worship.
Design Thinking by committee
Combining the core insight of Design Thinking — “everything is design” — with the truism that “design by committee produces mediocrity”, it begins to appear that the widespread (mis)use of meetings to shape collective action might be one of the great engines of contemporary collective frustration. Much of our lives are mired in mediocrity because everything that matters most — our institutions, our processes, our approaches to solving big problems — end up essentially designed by committee.
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In distinguishing design problems from other kinds of problems, my rule of thumb is this: if a problem involves interactions between free people and things of any kind (objects, services, communications, screens, ideas) that problem should be viewed as a design problem, approached with design methods, developed as a design system, and evaluated as a design. In this light, all kinds of things that seem to be management, strategy, engineering, marketing, etc. problems are seen as varieties of design problems.
What design thinking does is fully acknowledge the “people part of the problem” as central to its resolution and focusing its efforts on getting that part right. And the only way to do this is to include the very people who will, through their free choice (or rejection), make the resolution a success (or failure) as partners in the development of the solution.
Failing this, it will be necessary to handle the people part of the problem by 1) speculating on it, 2) ignoring it, or 3) eliminating it.
1) Speculation means remembering/assuming/guessing on the needs and wants, conceptions and perceptions, attitudes and tastes — in short, the practical worldview — of the people involved in the people part of the problem. We human beings are much worse at this than we think, especially when we don’t regularly put our visionary clairvoyance to the test. It is not uncommon in the design world to hear design researchers cheerfully admit to an inability to predict how people will behave, where others in the room make bold predictions based on their own gut-level knowledge of how people are. (It pays to remember why the Oracle at Delphi identified Socrates as the wisest man in Greece!) People research teaches respect for the elusiveness of other people’s worldviews.
2) Ignoring the people part of problems means pulling the engineering parts of the problem (the sub-problems that are made up of creating systems of unfree, rule-governed elements) out of context and solving those in the hope that the people part will take care of itself (or that “marketing’s got that covered” or that the system can be tweaked after it is finished until people like it enough to accept it.) Fact is, a great many engineers choose a career in engineering because they prefer interacting with objects more than interacting with subjects, and they will tend to prefer solutions to problems that allow them to spend most of their time in the company of objects or teams of like-minded people building object-systems. And that is fine, as long as someone has their eye on the people part and provides context for the engineering problems that contribute to the solution.
3) Eliminating the people part of the problem sounds ominous and it ought to: it amounts to turning freely choosing people into unfreely complying people. It means destroying alternative choices through anticompetitive practices (like those employed by Microsoft in the 90s or Apple’s recent supply chain manipulations) or by finding ways to bypass choice and control behaviors directly either through coercion (legislation) or psychological manipulation (like behavioral economics. The purpose of this is to make people into engineerable elements, that is unfree, rule-governed, controllable, predictable elements of a profitable system. It was this mentality that predominated in 20th Century social engineering projects, which unfairly discredited the very concept of deliberate societal self-determination for a great many US citizens. Social engineering is a hellish totalitarian notion. Social design, however, is deeply liberal-democratic, and the future of liberal democracy depends on it.
But — getting back to the original thread — this means we must learn to see design problems wherever they occur — especially when they seem to be something other than design. It means also that we must adjust our response to them to allow the right mindset and methods. As Marty Neumeier pointed out, we cannot “decide our way through them, we must design our way through them.” Which, again, means meetings are the wrong format for shaping solutions. (Unless, like some Design Management people, you believe the right workshop techniques transforms committees into design teams. I remain skeptical. I’ve seen workshops produce much more kumbaya than eureka. Workshops are more productive than most meetings, but what is produced should not be confused with design. Workshops are better-designed meetings, not meetings that produce better design.)
Once again, I’m going to trot out Le Carre’s famous quote: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. No matter how many post-it notes, white board markers and ice-breaking games you try to add to it, a meeting is a meeting is a meeting. To design effectively we must rethink why we meet, how we meet, what we can expect from meeting, what thinking can only be done in non-meeting contexts.
Meetings are an effective tool, but like all tools, meetings have their proper uses and places where another tool might be better.
Design and trade-offs
For non-designers (and immature designers) the toughest part of design is trying on different trade-offs.
The reason it is so tough is this: while most people can shift between ideas with relative ease, it is harder to shift between conceptions — different logics of coherence and meaning that invest ideas with different significance.
Harder still is to allow new conceptions to animate perceptions. Old conceptions cling and highlight features of perception that would remain inconspicuous to fresh eyes. And each shift in design direction adds new relevancies without removing the old ones, so the problem becomes more insoluble with each iteration.
It is like memory: it is easier to learn on command than to forget. The old ideas, once seen, become hard to unsee. The old concepts, once learned become impossible to unlearn. Perception becomes almost cubistic — too many simultaneous perspectives are viewed at once.
Pluralistic play — the ability to flit between logics — to try on different conceptions and perceptions — this takes years of practice, and the practice can only start once a person has discovered the dimension of mind that multiplies the universe into innumerable overlapping everythings.
Universal Design Praxis
I find the term Design Thinking inadequate.
First, the term Design Thinking belongs to IDEO. As far as I know, they made the term up, they use it for marketing and it remains closely associated with them. It is uncomfortably too many things at once: a semi-grassroots movement, a (vague) methodology, a bag of tricks, a style, an approach to problem-solving and a trademark.
But second, thinking is only one part of what goes on with Design Thinking. And in fact in Design Thinking thinking is demoted from its usual exalted position. In most situations in most organizations, making and doing activities are preceded by lengthy talking, making of cases, adducing of evidence, modeling, deciding, planning, and other activities of the head. But with Design Thinking, making and doing become more equal partners with thinking in determining what will be thought and done and made. Hands and feet enter the picture and work alongside the head (and heart) to shape what transpires.
For this reason, I am inclined to characterize this way of working more as a practice than a way of thinking.
Even practice fails to go far enough, though, because a practice can still position a practitioner outside of what is being worked on. With design problems one struggles inside them, rather than working on them or puzzling over them. Anyone who has gone through the wringer of a deep design problem can tell you: design immerses, involves, challenges and changes people at an unnervingly fundamental level. This is why talk around design, design thinking and related movements like UX and service design can get a little breathless and zealous and quasi-religious: because it does stimulate — even forces — unexpected and profound self-transformations. Because of this — because the practice of doing/making/thinking iteratively feeds back into and self-modifies the doing/making/thinking and perceiving process, and the practitioners involved in it, it should be called a design praxis.
And since the active domain of design praxis is all systems involving both subjective free-willed, choice-making entities (a.k.a. people) and objective entities — and such systems are ubiquitous — it might even be called Universal Design Praxis. According to this perspective, most problems are actually design problems. When we limit design to traditionally define design areas (graphic, product, digital, architectural, interior, fashion, and so on) we misdiagnose problems as engineering, marketing, management, economic, etc. problems — and usually end up factoring out the crucial element of free-will, and wind up treating people as beings to manipulate, control or coerce.
There is a moral/political dimension to design praxis: it works to engage human beings as free and appeals to free choice, and this also contributes to the whole movement’s quasi-religiosity
So here are the core principles of Universal Design Praxis:
- Any development of systems comprising both objective and subjective (free-willed) components is best approached as a design problem. (This encompasses the vast bulk of human activity.)
- Design problems are resolved through iterative cycles of first-hand immersion, collaborative reflection, collaborative making, testing, revision, etc. Whatever the specific techniques used, they are used with this thrust in this basic framework: go to reality to learn, to make, to relearn, to remake…
- Design praxis changes the practitioner as the problem moves toward resolution — the practioner self-transforms into someone capable of seeing a solution that initially was invisible.
- Design praxis involves reflective collaboration — multiple people working directly with realities (as opposed to speculating or recalling or applying expertise). Abstractions are derived afresh from direct exposure to reality (the reality of people, things, actions, institutions, places — whatever contributes to making a situation what it is).
- Design praxis assumes, affirms, appeals to, and amplifies free-will.
Goliath vs Pebble
I’m going to get really concrete for a change, and talk about the apparent design philosophies and approaches of Apple Watch vs Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel.
Disclosure: I have a very strong preference for Pebble, I predict they are going to eat Apple’s lunch, and I hope they do eat Apple’s lunch. I hope it happens because I see in these competing products competing ideals of good design producing two very different products. The case study will ripple through the design industry, and if things work out like I hope, it will have a corrective effect.
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When designers do what people think they do — and concern themselves primarily with aesthetics or thrilling novel features — instead of doing their job and thinking about the design experientially — that is, in terms of people and how they think and act and feel in order to unconceive and reconceive problems — they make stuff people love to talk about and obsess over, but which under-perform for users, which translates into immediate or eventual under-performing in the market.
Compared to Apple Watch, Pebble Time is inferior sculpture, but infinitely superior design.
And every time I look at either,
Gorging ouroboros
Every philosophy is a philosophy of some kind of life.
For too many generations philosophers have philosophized about philosophizing to philosophers philosophizing about philosophizing.
This has turned philosophy into something exasperatingly inapplicable to anything important to anyone except a professional academic philosopher.
My belief (or self-interested prejudice) is that being a philosopher who philosophizes a life of human-centered design is a great privilege at this time in our culture.
Human-centered design lives at the intersection of many of our most problematic oppositions: theory-vs-practice, objectivity-vs-subjective, intuitive-vs-methodical, individual-vs-collective, revolution-vs-evolution, symbolic-vs-real, narrative-vs-fact, qualitative-vs-quantitative, holism-vs-atomism, coercion-vs-persuasion, technology-vs-humanities, natural-vs-artificial . . . , etc.
My philosophy feeds on the live problems and anxious perplexities that seize groups of diverse people when they collaborate to improve the lives of other people by changing social situations — physically, practically, symbolically and emotionally — and in this effort become so desperate to succeed that they are willing to stake or sacrifice their own cozy worldviews for the sake of sharing understandings with others.
I am convinced that philosophy can (and will soon) regain its relevance. It just needs a diet of something other than its own self-gorged self.
Overcoming empathy
A disempathic world view: “We may be accused of lacking empathy, but this supposed deficiency is actually an efficiency, not only because there are convenient statistical workarounds, but because the very object of empathy is entirely useless. People can and should be understood in terms of observable behaviors and attributes. Any invisible “agent” slipped under these observable realities is at best too vague or messy to manage, and in all likelihood superfluous or nonexistent.”
You can’t argumentatively disprove a philosophy of this kind — certainly not in its own terms. With respect to mere argumentation, it is not a matter for disproof; it is a matter for disapproval. But disapproval is not objective. It is subjective, and therefore not admissible as a valid argument to a mind who excludes all but objective criteria. Arguments about arguments will ensue, but objective minds are unable to grasp how this kind of argument is even possible, and therefore it also does not exist. So let’s not.
Luckily, we are not limited to mere argumentation. We are not Medieval Scholastics who must gather around the council table to establish theological truth through logical connections of doctrinal assertions.
We are children of the Enlightenment, and we know that we are not chained to the council table and books and figures and dogmas and arguments. We are able — and obligated! — to stand up and exit the room with all its shadowy abstract depictions Truth — and walk out into the sunlight of reality to see how our truths perform when we test their fitness in helping us live effectively.
This is where design thinking and social scientific method become gloriously useful. Both take subjectivity as real and testable. This sounds abstract until you realize that the fates of businesses and organizations of all kinds hang on subjectivity.
On fighting well
I’ve been married for 23 years, exactly half of my life. I have two daughters. At times they have asked my wife and me how we’ve pulled it off. My answer has been: don’t try to avoid fights; learn to fight well. Not only is avoiding fights impossible — fighting may very well be the point of marriage.
My design career began around the same time. And in many ways it has followed a parallel path — especially with respect to fighting. That’s not surprising really. Marriage and design are all about human relationships, and a key part of relationships is fighting.
But learning to fight well has been a long process, and part of the process was revising the very goal of fighting. I will relate the process as it played out with design, but if you reflect the lessons are more general. In fact the lessons are universal.
Early in my design career I believed fighting was an obstacle doing my design work. I had worked hard to develop good design skills and judgment and I was hired to exercise them — so get out of my way and let me work. Fighting well meant taking a stand and defending Good Design. Who knew what Good Design was? “Trust me!”
These fights were no fun, mainly because they were not winnable. The customer is always right.
So, a little later in my career, I came to see fighting as a fact of design work. Learning to fight well was a basic job requirement. It wasn’t enough to design something good, you had to convince others it was good, or it would be shot down. Fighting well meant learning to articulate reasons: why a proposed plan is the best one, why a particular design approach is likely to produce superior results, why a particular design ought to be approved. Fights became civil arguments. “Trust my arguments!”
But in the end, no matter how rational people were, decisions often came down to speculations — especially speculations on other people and their likely perceptions and responses and all the consequences that follow. And, it turns out, people are passionate about their beliefs about other people, rooted as they are in fundamental conceptions of human nature and reality itself… So often competing justifications would end up clashing and become once again, disputes about whose judgement was better.
Usability testing — when you could get the client to buy it — changed everything. Usability did not end fighting, but it dramatically changed the character of fights. Speculations were now presented as guesses, not as precious convictions to defend against doubters, enemies of progress or taste, etc. Fighting well meant allowing reality to play referee. Testing was what settled disagreements. “Trust the process!”
But in the last decade or so, I arrived where I am now. I started noticing something new — a new kind of fighting that happens, not despite research, but because of it. (This is due largely to a shift to research methods designed to drive innovation, as opposed to research designed to remove usability flaws.)
Here’s what I noticed. This kind of research was most valuable to teams not when it helps us learn new things, but when it helps us unlearn old things we thought we knew. When a team is stripped of the concepts that help it make sense of and navigate a problem space and it does not have any ready concepts to replace it, the result is a state of perplexity and a distictive existential pain. This pain makes people fight. They are intensely anxious to eliminate the perplexity. Anything that makes the escape from perplexity more difficult must be removed or suppressed, and unfortunately, this is other people and their incompatible ideas. But if you fight through this pain, and stay focused and faithful to your problem and the individuals on your team, something good always happens.
It reminds me of birth classes my wife and I took with our first pregancy. We were taught “Labor is what the term implies: hard work.” If you stay with the process and see the labor for what it really is — not the symptoms of something going wrong, but what naturally happens when things are going right — you can labor through the discomfort and give birth.
So this is where I am now: Fighting well means laboring through the birth of a truly new idea. “Trust the labor pains of creativity!”
I have found that when I am in the throes of conflict with teammates this idea helps me stay in the right idea-birthing state of mind.
And when you labor this way, design becomes more than a process for making ideas and things. It makes relationships.
Gewollt
Gewollt – Ge’-volt (adj.)
- deliberate, intentional, intended
- (piece of art) contrived, awkward, cheesy
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Gewollt occurs when art, which is supposed to be the exhibition of concrete, tacit qualities, is produced by explicit and general categories.
Nietzsche said it well: “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.”
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Corporateness is a species of gewollt — the effect of production by predominantly explicit processes. This form of activity is effective for engineering processes, but as soon as it is applied to anything meant to seem human, anything produce by it will have hollow and soulless ring to it.
What makes a design compelling are concrete, tacit qualities that make it into the design — the capturing of something impossible to convey with language — the je ne sais quoi of the design that makes it irreplaceable by anything other than itself.
It is the art in design that makes it inexplicably resonant and desirable beyond its function and convenience.
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Artists have an advantage. The work of artists takes place between the individual and the material.
With designers things are more complicated. Designers are usually working in teams, and the work is for others. The only way to infuse a design with art without allowing the design to become the personal expression of the designer and to devolve into art is to allow the designers to directly experience the people for whom they are designing, and their environments, their activities, their language — their world. Tacit empathy that cannot be conveyed through explicit findings reports are key.
The design of research approaches must not be understood solely in terms of data gathering activities, but rather the production of encounters between designer and worlds.
The Republic of Reality
represent |repri-zent|
verb [with obj.]
- be entitled or appointed to act or speak for (someone), especially in an official capacity.
- constitute; amount to.
- depict (a particular subject) in a picture or other work of art
- formal state or point out (something) clearly
“Now that we are no longer fooled by these maneuvers, we see spokesmen, whoever they may be, speaking on behalf of other actors, whatever they may be. We see them throwing their ranks of allies, some reluctant, some bellicose, into battle one after the other.” – Bruno Latour
If knowledge is representative, this sense of representation (4) should not be too closely equated with (3) depicting or (2) constituting. It is better to emphasize its affinity with (1) acting or speaking on behalf of a reality.
Knowledge represents reality by being its spokesman in deliberation, conveying the considerations relevant to that reality, and negotiating for where that reality will figure into whatever is being discussed. If a representative speaks well for a reality, the reality will cooperate and reinforce his claim of representing his constituency. If he misrepresents a reality, the reality will undermine and discredit his representation by refusing to cooperate as the representative promised it would.
Again: our knowledge does not depict reality or make little idea-models that correspond to a reality — with our knowledge we politically represent a reality and conveys what it does and will do with respect to a problem. We are standing in for a reality and representing it in its absence.
Of course, it pays to confer with any reality we are seeking to represent, and be good students of that reality so we can represent it ever more faithfully. When we are representing people we may have conversations with them. Or we may immerse in their lives, interact and participate so we can get first-hand first-person knowledge of what is going on. If we are representing non-human things we might have to watch, form hypotheses, interact, experiment, revise — again, so we can be taught by the reality how to represent it.
And, as Latour never tires of pointing out, every social situation is a heterogeneous collection of human and non-human actors.
Since design is nearly always intervening in some social situation in order to change it, what design researchers really do in the field is confer with the full social reality in order to understand it and fully represent it. And once hypothetical solutions are found, design researchers return to the social situation to confer with it about how it might react to them. Good designers are like good politicians — always shaking hands, knocking on doors, staying in touch, winning support.
Deliberation and experiment
The fewer participants you include in a deliberative process, the simpler the process can be. A solitary mind, thinking alone about personal experiences can come to a resolution pretty quickly most of the time.
Each person you include complicates the deliberative process exponentially. Now there is a wider range of experiences, thinking styles, values, emphases and goals that must be considered and satisfied.
When you start including non-human actors in the deliberative process, which means adding experimentation to the mix — now you have something incredibly complex. If the group is trying to understand non-human actors, we now have something like a scientific community. If the question is broadened to include both humans and non-humans combined, we have something a lot more complicated: a society.
And if you try to include all humans and all non-humans, you are now in the realm of the impossible. But it is probably a worthy impossibility.
Douche Theory 2×2 Model (R)
I plan to use this diagram to help me explain different approaches to design strategy.
Human-centered design helps Douche organizations become Keepers.
Design as gift (edit for 10ke)
Design is like gift-giving. How?
When one person gives another person a perfect gift, the gift is valuable in three ways:
- The gift itself is intrinsically valuable to the one receiving it. The giftis good to have in one’s life, because it makes life easier, more pleasant or more meaningful.
- The gift contributes to the receiver’s own self-understanding and identity. The gift becomes symbolic of the receiver’s own relationship to the world — an example what they experience as good, which can signify the recipient’s ideals in concrete form, in ways that explicit language often cannot.
- The perfection of the gift is evidence that the giver cares about and understands who the receiver is. The successful giving of a perfect gift demonstrates that the giver was moved to reflect on what the receiver will value and consequently has real insight into who they are as an individual and what they are all about.
Great design experiences are similar to gifts. When a design is successful the beneficiary of the design gets something valuable, sees tangible proof they are valued and understood, and experiences an intensification or expansion of their sense of self.
Design and democracy
(Here we go again, with another iteration of my engineering vs. designing theme.)
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Design begins with trying to please. This naturally progresses to trying to understand better how to please, and later, trying to cultivate the best possible relationship — that is, a reciprocal one.
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In situations where people are empowered and have choices, leaders naturally begin to rely on design approaches to persuade people to voluntarily participate in their systems.
In situations where people are disempowered and have few or no choices, leaders naturally begin to rely on engineering approaches to force people to comply to rules of their systems.
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To engineer is to create systems of involuntary components.
To design is to create systems of voluntary and involuntary components.
To the degree the system relies on compulsion alone, it is engineered.
To the degree the system depends on volition, it is designed.
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If the success of your system depends on people behaving in some particular way, two basic approaches are available:
- Engineer it: purge the system of volitional variability so the entire mechanism functions like a well-oiled machine — reliably, predictably, repeatedly. Compel people to participate in the system with the behaviors required to support it. Make it their only viable choice. Remove choices, impose rules that support the system’s requirements.
- Design it. Build volition into the system. Persuade people to voluntarily participate in the system in ways that support it by making it their best choice. Provide new options, understand participants’ requirements, desires, attitudes, aspirations, unconscious hopes.
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If someone tries to engineer you into a system, it might be that they have not yet fully developed an intersubjective consciousness (that is, they are on the autism spectrum).
Or they may think you lack choices, and are forcing you to do what they want simply because they can and there’s little you can do about it.
Or they may have not yet realized that many 20th Century management practices naturally produce autistic institutions, and that things can be otherwise. And that competition requires them to be. That their survival depends on it.
Philosophy design
For the last several weeks I have been trying very hard to care about Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In general, though, (with some exceptions) I have found its problems and approaches to resolving problems too tedious, too inapplicable and too dry to keep me engaged. It is cognitively, practically and aesthetically irrelevant to me.
Or to put it in UX language, for me, the experience is not useful, usable or desirable. I am not the user of this stuff.
I suspect the user of analytic philosophy is other professional philosophers who want to philosophize to other professional philosophers.
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Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the UNIX of philosophies.
My project is to design a Macintosh philosophy. (A well-designed thing to be used by people who don’t want to be forced to tinker with technicalities, unless they want to. And perhaps a thing that appeals especially to designers looking for tools to help them design better.)
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Philosophy is a kind of design. It is a mind-reality interface.
Every philosophy permits us to render some aspects of reality intelligible, while confusing or obscuring others; supports us in some practical activities and while muddling others; helps us intensify the feeling of value of some things while devaluing others. In other words, a philosophy makes our life experience as a whole useful, usable and desirable. But like with every design, tradeoffs are necessary, and where to make these tradeoffs is a function of the user and the use context. We can be conscious about it and make these tradeoffs intentionally — or we can be like bad clients and persist in trying to have it all.
And as with all good designs, philosophies disappear.
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Even bad interfaces disappear, leaving only frustration, alienation, friction, dissipation, confusion.
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We would laugh at an argument over whether iOS or Android is truer. Maybe it is time we laugh at philosophical arguments the same way. Let other people sit around and debate whose philosophy does the best job of representing the truth. I will do an experience assessment.
Intuition
Intuition is a brilliant adviser but a violent judge.
Hermeneutical/rhetorical bow
This is a redrawing of a diagram I played with in 2009. It is meant to show the relationship of making and understanding and how it weaves between thinking top-down in wholes, and then bottom-up in terms of parts. It was originally inspired by learning (from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism) that the hermeneutical circle was based on a model from rhetoric theory.
