Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.
Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.
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When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.
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Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.
In his instant-classic The Lean Startup, Eric Ries restores some crucial components of the Scientific Method to innovation processes, long-neglected by “scientific” management. Among his most important restorations is the the experimental practices that are the heart of scientific discovery. This is enormously important: without experiment, the creative dimension of science is lost and “scientific rigor” of quantification becomes an expensive, time-consuming and intrinsically conservative hindrance to doing anything unprecedented.
However, I do not believe that Ries has restored the entirety of the Scientific Method, and for the sake of setting up an unimpeded engineering-dominated process, has omitted or de-emphasized key non-engineering components that improve outcomes and shorten timelines. Here is a partial list of omissions:
I’m going to read as much as I can about Scientific Method and develop this thought further and support it with some research. But I’ve been sitting on this idea too long, and I wanted to at least sketch it out.
Qualitative methods help you:
Quantitative methods help you:
These methods thread together:
It would be lovely if I could get these methods to interleave more elegantly. This is how they seem to me to line up, though.
It’s mine: I saw the opportunity.
It’s mine: It was my idea.
It’s mine: I articulated the idea.
It’s mine: I championed the idea.
It’s mine: I translated the idea.
It’s mine: I laid the plans.
It’s mine: I made the case.
It’s mine: I formed the team.
It’s mine: I motivated the team.
It’s mine: I aligned the team.
It’s mine: I coordinated the team.
It’s mine: I fleshed out the idea.
It’s mine: I built it and made it real.
It’s mine: I made it profitable.
It’s mine: I funded it.
It’s mine: I told the world about it.
It’s mine: I made people care about it.
It’s mine: I keep it going everyday.
It’s mine: I improve it.
It’s mine: I find ways to grow it.
It’s mine: I discovered it first.
It’s mine: I use it.
It’s mine: I pay for it.
It’s mine: I rely on it.
It’s mine: It was made for people like me.
It’s mine: It was made by people like me.
It’s mine: It’s part of my life.
It’s mine: It’s part of who I am.
Ideas for innovation come from many sources.
This is not even close to a complete list. Most people prefer one or another source and sometimes would have their organization cultivate only one or a few sources instead of as many as possible. But why? Perhaps because most organizations already have many ideas and are looking for ways to narrow the list.
But really, what is needed is a way to evaluate ideas and select the best ones. And the majority of organizations rely on one method, which could be called “table-thinking” — people sitting behind desks and tables, presenting, debating and deciding things about distant situations they at best partially understand and largely misunderstand.
What kind of truth do you know? That depends on what kind of reality you inhabit and what kind of life you are trying to lead.
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A truth relates a knower to some part of reality and allows that knower to participate in that reality in some capacity to some degree.
Two truths can conflict in the same way that two good user interface design approaches can be incompatible with one another. And this is barely metaphorical: truth is a person’s interface with a local bit of reality.
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A choice of truth can be between truth and falseness: Does it represent accurately, or does it distort or obscure? But a choice of truth can also be between effective and ineffective: Can the truth be used to do what needs doing, or does it lead to paralysis or mistakes? And finally, choice can be between valuable and valueless: Does this truth lead to something good and beautiful, or something depressing and repellent?
Truth is a mixture — and sometimes a designed system — of factuality, actuality and importance.
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We can design truth, and we are allowed to, but what we design can succeed or fail at what it aims to be and do and mean. Is this relativism? Absolutely — but it is neither purely subjective, nor arbitrary.
(This is what my book The Ten-Thousand Everythings is about.)
If something is lacking in an organization, the deficit rarely persists from simple unavailability of whatever is missing. More often the deficit is actively maintained, either from a direct allergy or an indirect displacement.
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People and organizations selectively include and exclude people, ideas, practices — this is how they preserve themselves as the being they are.
When something is introduced that cannot be simply subsumed or appended to what already is there — if a new entity requires deep change of political structure, of conceptual framing, of habits — the organization will repel that thing as a threat to its existence.
This is why organizational change is so hard. Organizations want to persist — to survive and grow and thrive in its own way, just like every individual biological organism wants to survive and grow and thrive.
And this is also how it is with individual souls. A soul knows in a wordlessly certain way that deep change is death. A soul can detect even the faintest trace of deep change in an idea.
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A soul can find many ways to excuse itself. We lead very busy lives. The more important I am, the busier I am, and the more brusque I am permitted to be. The important man is allowed more and more to fend off anything new. This is why the weak get smarter and the powerful become more… conservative.
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Of course, deep change is also ground-clearing for rebirth, but it is impossible to believe in such things: only faith suffices.
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If you think you know something that another person needs to know, please understand: there is probably a good reason this person does not yet know.
If you think you have a talent or skill some other organization needs but does not have, please understand: there is probably a good reason this organization does not have this capability.
And if you have discovered a disruptive insight, do not be fooled into believing that people will be grateful for it. Do not be fooled into thinking that it is mere aversion to risk that makes people resist. Do not be fooled by any functionalist explanation: the aversion is instinctive fear of death: dread.
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A bit from the book I am writing, The Ten-Thousand Everythings:
We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.
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Do you know it when you are confronting the dread of a truly new thing?
Do you know your way across the intolerable span?
Can you want to cross it?
For all I know the innovation consultants are right that anybody can innovate.
But I will insist on adding one stipulation: anyone who really wants to can innovate.
“Really wants to” means wanting everything that goes with innovation — non-linearity, doubt, anxiety, ambiguity and profound disorientation.
Wanting all the conditions of innovation might be something not that many people can want, despite wanting to have the output.
Overcoming mistrust is very expensive.
I tell my clients that research designed to overcome skepticism can cost three to five times as much as research designed simply to inform.
To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.
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“Reason? Why?”
Because it is reasonable.
“But that’s circular.”
It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.
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Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.
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Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.
Reality is radically heterogeneous: it is made out of materials, people, ideas, imagination, interactions, feelings, roles, habits, perspectives… whatever interacts to make a situation what it is — that is real.
Design works with heterogeneous materials in heterogeneous situations. Whatever reality is there, no matter what it is, it is considered part of a system to be modified.
Design accepts the entirety of reality as its medium and material.
We have to be who we are to be a participant in any relationship.
When it comes to relationships selflessness is as destructive as selfishness.
It is entirely a matter of knowing how to situate first-person-singular — I — within first-person-plural — We — and to allow a second person singular — You — to do the same.
This goes for relationship between people, but also for relationships between people and things.
To be selfless in creation — to set yourself aside to do what is called for — is to make trash. It is crucial to invest yourself in the things you make.
To be selfish in creation — to fail craft by not listen to the material — is to offend nature, including human nature, and gives artifice a bad name.
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When we do design research we are not collecting bits of data that will speak for itself later if we suppress our subjectivity. Not only is this approach naive, it is unnatural, alienating and highly conducive to creating the projection it seeks to prevent.
To be good researchers we have to be there, in situ, listening, letting the present reality speak for itself while it is present, letting it teach us while it is there with us able to tutor us. We have to struggling to understand and to become fluent and articulate by seeing how the reality articulates itself. And we have to be changed by what we learn, from baffled outsider to fluent participant. It is our fluency that will guide our introduction of new elements into the situation, not the data we record, chop up into individual sentences, then categorize into labeled heaps.
What does the learning look like? Like a student struggling to understand, trying out different ways to grasp the material, making mistakes, accepting correction, trying again. Frustration, then light bulbs go off. Ideas erupt spontaneously. This is also what science looks like, not like white-coated gods standing above reality like objective eyes-in-the-sky.
To learn is a humble activity.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
To design — to “de-” apart + “-sign” t0 seal or mark…
— to set a thing apart and and assign it a significance…
— to define the boundaries of some reality, to extract it from the surrounding chaos and to let its reality stand in the foreground against a background, and to let it be for itself and for us…
— to separate parts within a whole, give them joints, in such a way that a sequential encounter of part-by-part allows the whole to emerge spontaneously like the meaning of a sentence emerges word-by-word without need of grammatical analysis — that is, to articulate in every sense of the word…
— to invite things to participate in human life, to embrace their inhumanity by allowing them to speak in the conversation of craft, to learn the full truth of their existence so they collaborate with us to embody a significance…
— to designify, assign designificance, apart and special.
It is good to design, and this is a good time to be a designer.
)O+
For expertise the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out the answer to this problem.” Expertise lacks the answer, but what the question is and how it will produce an answer is not in question.
For philosophy the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out how to think about this problem.” Philosophy lacks not only an answer, but the way to ask and answer a possible question. How to ask and answer and what the answer is are found together.
Wittgenstein’s formulation is elegant: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”
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Any explorer in a new land will not know his way about. His skill is not in already knowing the landscape. His skill is navigating unmapped territory and finding his way about. He will emerge with a map. He will not try to draw it before he has explored it.
We should be suspicious of any explorer who claims to already have a map and to know his way around unexplored territory. Either he’s taking you somewhere that has already been settled, or he doesn’t know his way about “I don’t know my way about” and is likely to get you lost in the wilderness.
Innovation needs philosophy.
Here is Nietzsche’s advice to readers who want to interpret the fuller meaning of his work:
“It is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work’, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers…”
This is actually good advice for any hermeneutic activity, whether it is understanding a written work, a person, a situation… If you misunderstand your job as gathering lots and lots of facts as hastily as possible to assemble into some sort of representation of the sum of the writer/person/situation’s scattered opinions, you’ll end up with something quite different than if you take the time to reflect, form hypotheses, test them, and interact understandingly with whatever it is you are interpreting.
All our efforts in the existential analytic serve the one aim of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of Being in general. To work out this question, we need to delimit that very phenomenon in which something like Being becomes accessible — the phenomenon of the understanding of Being. But this phenomenon is one that belongs to Dasein’s state of Being. Only after this entity has been Interpreted in a way which is sufficiently primordial, can we have a conception of the understanding of Being, which is included in its very state of Being; only on this basis can we formulate the question of the Being which is understood in this understanding, and the question of what such understanding ‘presupposes’.
It seems to me that this might constitute a general framework for approaching any kind of soft-systems quandary and converting it into an explicit question or problem.
Then you answer the question. In my world the question is a design problem posed as compactly as possible in a brief, the answer is a design, and the truth standard is whether the design works as intended.
The main difference between conceiving design as the design of an experience (as opposed to the design of an artifact) is that with experience design the design problem is conceived phenomenologically.
What is aimed for is not an object of some particular characteristic, but rather a specific relationship between a person and an object.
It is becoming clearer by the day that this phenomenological approach to design problems is also a powerfully productive way to approach branding.
Instead of thinking primarily of the object of the experience design being one artifact such as a CPAP mask or a web site, the “object” of the experience becomes the organization who provides the artifact and services, all of which together are experienced by a person as the brand.
Taking an experience design approach does not eliminate or even diminish the problems traditionally associated with the craft of design or engineering. It simply places them in a new, larger context. The designed offerings (whether products or services) still must have very specific characteristics to integrate with and reinforce the overarching brand experience, and designers will work to imbue their designs with these characteristic. And, as always, engineering is of central importance in actualizing the designs in concrete form so they function as intended. But the engineering is done within the context of creating some entity with designed characteristics, and the design in turn is done within the context of a brand experience of some specific quality. The problems nest.
Three developments on the horizon that interest me:
Designand |’dezig-nand|
noun
A person for whom a design is created.
plural: designands