Category Archives: Design

Designing our world(s)

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Politics

Most of our personal being is bound up in wordless, intuitive participation. Our easiest words are part of our social participation. Explicit thought enters the scene mostly where intuitive participation fails.

We see this very vividly in the field of design. When we craft an artifact that really works, people take the artifact up into their intuitive social participation and act through it use it without fully perceiving it or thinking about it.

So, if explicit thought is primarily a response to intuition failure, why would we imagine it desirable, or even possible to dismantle a functioning organically developed system, and replace it with an explicitly thought out, manually constructed social order? This is like trying to grow a body from wound tissue and scars.

Here it is time to trot out the finest quote Yogi Berry never uttered, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” We imagine we can engineer a better world, until we are faced with the urgent need to actually do it.

God forbid we are ever faced with a dismantled, or otherwise destroyed social order. Then we will realize that most of the kinds of people who have strong political opinions do not even understand what a political problem essentially is, namely a problem of e pluribus unum — a problem of aligning a diverse plurality around a unified understanding and course of action.

Technocrats think politics is figuring out what ought to be done and then doing it. Dissent and resistance, to them, is an obstacle to political problem-solving. They may be top-notch policy engineers, but as politicians, they very literally do not know what they are doing.

Take it from a designer, if your job is to persuade and inspire and win broad-based assent — that requires serious, arduous learning.

You must learn how people experience their lives, what is on their minds, what is important to them, what disturbs them, what they fear and what they hope for. You must know what a person’s world is like. Where do they live? Where do they work? With what people do they interact everyday? What tools do they use? By what media is the wider world beyond their environment given? How is their time spent? Where do they have control of things? Where are things out of control? Where do they feel controlled? Where do they feel empowered and respected? Where do they feel oppressed and humiliated? What do they experience as beautiful and good? What do they experience and ugly and bad?

We could call this a “worldview”, and many people do, but it is more than a view, both literally and metaphorically. It is a kind of involvement and a participation. Some have called it “lifeworld”, but, at least to my ears, this seems too biological, too passively received, too uncreative. People shape and reshape their physical and social environments, and they shape and reshape their understandings of reality. Received learning can change understandings, but so can one’s own trials, errors and successes. And only some of the understandings are explicit. Many more understanding are entirely intuitive, habitual and tacit. These understandings live in our bodies and souls, and never concern our heads. By this understanding, selves are not body-shaped. Selves stream out into the world through tendrils of action, influence, perception, communication, concern and they weave together into complex and sometimes chaotic meshes of being. The word I like best to designate this inseparable person-context hybrid is “enworldment”.

Even in simple design problems, this never involves fewer than two enworldments. There is always an enworldment of the provider of a design and the enworldment of the recipient, and normally there are many more than two.

When we finally understand an enworldment we can speak into it with respect and generosity. We are better able to persuade and win assent. In fact, we can invite people to collaborate with us to actively shape whatever solution we seek to win assent for. This is politics.

When I talk with young designers about politics, I recommend that they stop thinking about politics in the way they were taught to think politically, and instead to approach politics as a designer.

I cannot emphasize this enough: if you find yourself slapping your forehead and asking “how can those people believe this?” Or if you find yourself exasperatedly exclaiming “I just don’t understand why those people feel this way…” or do this action, or care about this thing or that, or have this or that passionate aversion… Understand that you are confessing ignorance!

People who are very, very clever and who made high marks in school and who are accustomed to understanding things effortlessly it is easy to succumb to a foolishness that afflicts smart people: the fallacy of argument from incredulity, which assumes that what is beyond their comprehension is incomprehensible nonsense. Instead of seeking comprehension, it diagnoses why someone espouses nonsense or delusion.

Who in their right mind would ever consent to be led by people who disrespect them, refuse to hear them and understand them?

We must relearn how to learn! And we must relearn how to respect others. Our liberal democracy depends on it.

Figure-ground

Design, Metaphysics

I’m reading Fritz Perls. What he has to say about gestalts is mostly familiar but with some extremely interesting differences from how I’ve been thinking about them. The most interesting difference is in his use of figure-ground. For Perls, the field against which gestalt figures form is a function of the organism and environment together.

…the wholes of experience are definite unified structures. Contact, the work that results in assimilation and growth, is the forming of a figure of interest against a ground or context of the organism/ environment field. The figure (gestalt) in awareness is a clear, vivid perception, image, or insight; in motor behavior, it is the graceful energetic movement that has rhythm, follows through, etc. In either case, the need and energy of the organism and the likely possibilities of the environment are incorporated and unified in the figure.

The process of figure/background formation is a dynamic one in which the urgencies and resources of the field progressively lend their powers to the interest, brightness and force of the dominant figure. It is pointless, therefore, to attempt to deal with any psychological behavior out of its socio-cultural, biological, and physical context.

Any designer will find that last sentence resonant. It is also pointless to attempt to deal with any social behavior — and this is what designers are hired to do! — out of its socio-cultural, biological, and physical context.

I’m enjoying the idea of metaphysics as the ground against which the figure of life events happens. It changes the resonance of Voegelin’s famous expression “divine ground”. Figures that emerge from a ground of pregnant, infinite, inexhaustibly surprising nothingness might never emerge from a ground of matter, space and time.

Confession to an aspiring headshrink

Biography, Design

A friend of mine is training to be a Jungian psychologist. She’s practiced her therapeutic chops on me twice now, and she’s very talented. She’s sort of become my confessor. For the last week I’ve been reading Fritz Perls, and I was inspired by this to make a confession:

I think what makes design so painful now is what I used to love most about it. Design, at its best, renegotiates the social.

When the social was renegotiable, that was a real joy.

But for our younger generations, the social is now sacred turf, and nonnegotiable.

Society with the young is rigidly dogmatic, stilted, and phony, shot through with pious incuriosity, ethical fixations and taboos. Its that damn ideology in which every last one of them is indoctrinated. It is all they know. Anything outside it paralyzes their minds and seems to them just morally-suspicious nonsense.

All this makes it impossible to do the kind of design work that gives my life meaning. Morally-suspicious nonsense is where the inspiration is buried!

In times like these, it seems, no meaning is possible outside one-on-one dialogue.

And it seems dialogue may only be possible in a clinical setting.

Maybe I should just crawl off and be a psychologist.

Esoteric ranting at work

Biography, Design, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Religion

Since 2020, and expecially since October 7th, 2023, I have been feeling a level of betrayal and grief I’ve never experienced before. Something vast and horrible is happening, but those perpetrating it — as always — see themselves as saving the world.

I just had what I think is a pretty eloquent outburst on Slack, at least by Slack standards. It started as a conversation about brand and design materials, but immediately veered into dark depths. Obviously it is ridiculous to talk this way at work, but I do believe I have — and not for the first time — become careericidal and unconcerned with what happens to me.

Here’s the lightly edited and redacted transcript. I’m S, A is Arjun, P is Parc:

S: Brand is a phantom intentional object of an organization.

S: Everything we experience directly and indirectly causes an idea of some “thing” to congeal in people’s minds, with which we have some kind of relationship, now and potentially

S: The reason brand is so seductive and magical seeming is 1) they are ideas of something that transcends the person perceiving and conceiving it… but 2) the specific way we must think in order to make clear sense of brands is outside most people’s philosophical range

P: So the material of brand design is what? Ascribed meaning?

S: I love this question!

S: This is where it is so terribly important to be clear on (to use the popular formula) “when we talk about materials, what are we talking about”?

S: I’d say that intentional object — and ascribed meanings — is NOT the material of branding. It is an outcome of it.

S: The material is that which we directly shape in order to get to that meaning or intentional object

S: Intentional object is a phenomenological concept. Not sure if y’all are familiar with it, or not.

S: So, everything a person experiences has an object of that experience. When we see, there is what is seen: an object of sight. When we hear we hear a sound. Same with thought. We think thoughts, and the thoughts — the content — is the intentional object of the thinking.

S: To put it simply: there is no perception, conception, or experience that isn’t a perception, conception or experiece of something. That something is the intentional object.

S: People who finally “get” phenomenology sometimes report a deep disorientation, like a religious conversion. Husserl talks about this in his last book.

S: To actually inhabit life phenomenologically changes literally everything all at once.

S: People resist it.

A: I think there is overlap with Advaita.

S: It is the same

A: Oh then I am familiar. Swami Sarvapriyananda talked about when he was in ATL. I will share a good talk for others to hear an example from him.

S: That’s why I take religion so seriously.

S: Religious people understand the world phenomenologically.

S: So, to finish my TED talk here — our metaphysics is our ultimate intentional object — the object of all our experiences combined which gives us the world as we know it.

S: Common sense is our everyday life as the intentional object of our living.

S: Brands are the intentional object of an organization in the minds (and bodies) of those who encounter them.

S: And like all intentional objects, they don’t match what we experience when we inspect them close up. Nothing ever does.

S: Branding is an organization’s attempt to manage that intentional object.

S: Dig, daddy-o?

A: I think similar to what we were chatting about the other day. You can influence how a moment is experienced via the materials – but that still leaves open for debate things like touchpoints – there is both an absolute form and an experienced form. Are those materials?

S: If you examine your ideas of things, they will not bear much scrutiny at all. The more distant the phenomenon, the more we ourselves fill in gaps and try to make them into other, more familiar things

S: Reality and phenomenon are nowhere near alike. Knowing this as mere fact does zero to help us overcome it.

S: To think you are no longer naive realist because you’re aware of naive realism makes you an even worse naive realist. To think you have overcome bias because you are aware of some of your biases and corrected for them leaves your deepest biases unchecked.

S: To be able to empathize with others only where your own group says empathy is needed, and to feel free to diagnose and condemn wherever your own group claims that’s a good thing to do — that is not empathy at all, but exercise of an ideology.

S: I believe the only thing that will help the world come out of its tribal prejudices and hate is not imposing ideological prescriptions (which are themselves tribal) but to go radically phenomenological

A: I think similar to what we were chatting about the other day. You can influence how a moment is experienced via the materials – but that still leaves open for debate things like touchpoints – there is both an absolute form and an experienced form. Are those materials?

S: I know what you mean. But there is no absolute form. There are forms we all can align around more easily.

S: If we want to bring Advaita into it, we could frame this in terms of prakriti and purusha. In fact, I do. Prakriti and purusha are not really different in absolute terms. They are aspects of a single reality, unified beyond our usual conception of things. It is a relative dualism, not an absolute one. Am I getting this right? I’ve only read a few books on Advaita, by one author who was actually a Sufi.

S: And he was claiming a transcendent unity of all esoteric traditions, so that his sufism was an expression of the same inexpressible truth as advaita, taoism, kabbalah, christian mysticism, etc. He may have mangled or force-fit it

S: These universal “givens” of experience — those experiences we can assume to hold in common with all other people — those are what I tend to want to call materials.

S: Those things that we ourselves make of what we are given, our interpretations, our understandings, etc… those i want to separate from materials. Those are the experiential outcomes that we try, through materials, to inspire, induce, convey, etc.

S: Frankly, I only care about design because it is such a wonderful way to engage this kind of truth. When design does not put me in touch with it, I become bored, miserable and totally unmotivated.

S: So thanks for allowing me a few seconds of pleasure. They’re further and further apart all the time in this weird political climate of pervasive political and religious fundamentalism.

S: People confuse religion with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is what happens to religion when it falls under the control of people who cannot or will not understand phenomenologically. The blind lead the blind. Fundamentalism is not religion taken to extremes — it is extremism caused by an appropriation of religious symbols by people who confuse their own tribal beliefs for the Transcendent.

I bet your mother would know EXACTLY what I’m saying here and would agree with it.

S: Wisdom is awareness of what is unknown and unknowable and living in relation to it. But it takes time, horrible mistakes and pain to develop this awareness. It takes years and years, and up to that point, you are the smartest, most self-aware, most moral kind of person who ever existed. Afterwards, you’re none of these things, but at least you’re wiser. “Sadder and wiser.” They go together.

S: Please be sure to include that last bit in what you send to your mother.

Multistability

Biography, Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

All my interests concern psychic multistabilities — gestalts of perceptual, conceptual (hermeneutic), relational and behavioral kinds. My whole life is a story of successive stabilities, punctuated with perplexity, anxiety and chaos. Somewhere along the way it became a story of finding durable stability through understanding multistability.

Design is about forming multistable arrangements between persons and nonpersons — “hybrid systems’, as Latour called them. In a stable hybrid system, nonpersons become extensions of personal being and persons are able to participate in an order that transcends their awareness and understanding. This involves interplay between conceptual and perceptual gestalts — and with advances in service design, social gestalts, concerning personal and organizational behavioral.

Philosophy — or at least the kinds of philosophy I enjoy — concern the dissolution and reformation of stable cognitive systems. An understanding is skillfully taken apart (refuted), enough that that it no longer possesses the intuitive stability of a given truth. Thus, loosened (analyzed) the elements of a possible truth are freed for new arrangements.

These freed elements can be logically connected and built up into cognitive or social constructions and asserted as truth. These constructed truths are experiences as true by all who can construe them, that is, retrace the construction and show the soundness of the connections. We may now explicate truth — untangle or unfold it — or explain truth — lay it flat, two-dimensionally, or better, in a one-dimensional straight line of thought, so it can be followed. All this is construal of constructions. It’s analytic stuff, and, at least for me, a preliminary for something vastly more important, which is experimenting with of constructions to find and exploring conceptual multistabilities. A concept is a cognitive gestalt, and the capacity to perceive, conceive or participate in a gestalt affords us givens — given entities, given truths, given situations. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the more given-rich our experience of reality. To understand multistability from a first-person perspective, means to modalize stabilities. A mood is a modal stability — or lack of stability, in the angst of perplexity. Between continents of solid, stabile ground lie vast expanses of watery welter and waste…

Anyway — some folks maintain a very limited repertoire of conceptual capacities, and rely heavily on construal. My strategy is the opposite. I try to stabilize a dense conceptual system that affords intuitive givenness of those realities that concern me most in life. I am grateful that scientists and engineers of various kinds inhabit a world tuned to physics, or chemistry, or whatever enables them to perform feats of technological magic. But I cannot live a life in full contact with their givens. I live in a world of truth-mediated relationships, where groups of people try to conceptually and practically align on problems and solve them together. Daily, I witness firsthand how clashing conceptualizations induce anxiety, and how premature attempts to annihilate anxiety. discomfort, tension and conflict only suppress and pressurize perplexity and make it more explosive, while also obstructing progress and necessitating domination — ironically often by folks who believe they are protecting us from domination.

In other words, my philosophy of multistability is derived from my direct personal experiences with design multistability, and this philosophy helps me navigate stabilities and de-stabilities without losing my head — or at least not irrecoverably losing my head. I maintain a philosophical self above my practical self, and this transcending self acts as guardian angel over my hazardous pursuits.

Finally…

Religion — religion is the practice of maintaining one’s finite self within an infinitely multistable reality, in full skin-on-skin relation to its infinitude. The very infinitude of not only its quantitative extent in time and space (or whatever other dimensions physicists discover-invent-instaurate for us) is the least of it, because infinity is essentially qualitative. Infinity presents us with a limitless number of limitlessly countable things. Each time we re-stabilize, we notice new givens and we stop seeing relevance in old givens. We are inclined to focus on and count very different givens. Those who have destabilized once often feel elevated and awakened to truth. The scales of the old stability fall from their eyes. Now they know the true Truth. If they have power, they’ll set to work propagating and enforcing it, and no amount of argument can pop them out of their crusade — not even that they are latter-day crusaders. No, they are different, special and unique according to their own criteria, and in this, they are exactly the same as every crusader who ever lived, all of whom were benevolent, insightful and brave champions of whatever floats their boats. It is a tragicomedy of epic proportions that our most hopelessly naive and biased naive realists run around preaching against cognitive bias and naive realism, believing that this objective knowing about is a cure for an incurable subjective condition. I call this metanaivety. It is as old as religion itself. It is the fundamentalist dementia that commits the category mistake of treating subjectivity knowing as objective knowledge. God is not an existent nor nonexistent object, and until an intelligent fundamentalist overcomes the fundamentalist fetter, decency demands atheism.

To be religious is to know the stabilities are unending and that our relationships with one another within this infinitely multistable reality call for destabilization and restabilization, death and rebirth.

Religion is the practice of taking active responsibility for our choice of psychic stability, so we live in awareness of one another within God.

Half-knowns

Biography, Design, Philosophy

My way of understanding the world is a two-edged sword. On one hand, what I understand, I understand deeply, clearly and practically. But, on the other hand, that which I do not understand with depth, clarity and practicality, I am unable to deal with at all.

And since most of what goes on in the practical world ranges between one-quarter and three-quarters nonsense, much of what goes on around me leaves me baffled, anxious and paralyzed.

In these cases, my only hope is to investigate whatever reality it is that people are semi-comprehending and to uncover the kinds of intuitive meaning participants in these realities are making of it. These varying intuitive meanings are what animate (literally) the measurable behaviors that distant data-mongers scrupulously gather and unscrupulously interpret into that soup of industry wisdom, consisting tough objective facts floating in a germy broth of subjective nonsense.

Until I do design research and root what I know in actuality, I know pretty much nothing.

Most people I know consider something half-known known. They can say words and move their faces and bodies in ways that suggest they understand. I’d do this, too, if I had more talent for playacting. But I don’t, so I denigrate it.

I hate design literature

Design

Reading the writing of designers is almost always excruciatingly tedious and needlessly complicated.

It appears to occur to very few designers that they should design their concepts and then the communication of their concepts.

Also, I suspect the field is hobbled by its allegiance to the popular philosophy of professional class, which is alienated and alienating, and conceals both its meaning and vapidity under ungainly gowns of academic lingo.

My instinct is not to respond to design scholarship and professional writing, but rather to disregard it all and replace it with something simpler, more practical and attractive.

“Experimancy”

Design, Philosophy

Experimancy is a more alchemical expression for laboratory science: the divination of truth by inviting materials to speak to us in their own sign language.

This is how Bruno Latour taught me to see science, and design, and finally, all knowledge.

And I will say it again: If the practice of engineering helps us craft systems of nonpersonal algorithmic elements — elements whose behaviors can be controlled, which are understood as objects…

…the practice of design helps us craft what Latour called “hybrid systems” composed of both nonpersonal engineered subsystems and persons who must be persuaded to participate in the design system.

If we exclude the question of persuasion, we are engineering. If we include it, we are designing.

And if we engineer systems that involve persons — which most of the time is exactly what we do — we are failing to use the best methods for achieving our aims, or worse, using the wrong methods that drive us to failure.

Perhaps we just don’t think about the “people part”. It doesn’t occur to us to wonder whether people use our systems as intended. We fixate on the Thing.

Perhaps we assume others will behave like we will, either out of naivety (we assume we are all alike) or out of moralism (we assume we all ought to be like ourselves). They won’t. This is childish egocentricity.

Perhaps we think we understand the rules of human behavior. We think we’re masters of psychology or of design “best practices”, never mind the fact that for decades now design best practice have been to involve real people, not to discover “the best” design patterns. You can’t argue with an omniscient, because the less they know, the more they know better than you.

Perhaps we think we can just deprive people of choice. The two most popular strategies for that are monopoly — destroy all alternatives to what we engineer, so people have no choice but to cooperate in our designs — and tyranny, directly command people to cooperate how we wish.

A case for business philosophy

Design, Philosophy

I just found a post from a baker’s dozen years ago that does a good job of articulating my views on radical creativity, perplexity and philosophy. Confusingly, I called it “pro-lifer” probably a pun on being a lifer in the professional world. It is a bad title. But the post itself is good. I want to edit it and use some of it in this damn book I’ve been wanting to write. I’m trying again in April. So here it is in slightly edited form.

Sometimes, when we press ourselves to think through difficult problems, we come to a point where how we think imposes limits on what we can think.

A problem is recognized — felt — but when we try to think it out, we arrive at the edge of thinkability. We cannot resolve this problem with the intellectual moves that ordinarily work to resolve our problems.

If we pause and reflect, we might realize something disturbing: at this point what we most painfully lack is not an answer, but a clear question. We cannot even articulate the problem.

Our minds do not know what to do with such a situation. We don’t even know how to talk about this experience. We are completely oriented by metaphors of objects existing positively in a negative space that’s given: and this space is reality itself.

But here, the very space for the problem is lacking. Our minds boggle at this, just as it boggles when we try to contemplate what stands beyond the limits of space, or what occurs beyond the limits of time. It is literally inconceivable.

Such situations are not uncommon, even in the intellectual flatlands of business. It might be helpful to develop some vocabulary for such situations:

  • An inarticulate problem that remains inarticulate because it stands outside the current limits of thinkability is a perplexity.
  • When we intuit that something problematic might conceal a perplexity and if we attempt to comprehend it we might get sucked into a perplexity and trapped there we feel apprehension. We are tempted to hold the problem at arm’s length, or ignore it, or treat it as a more familiar problem that we do know how to think and respond to.
  • The distinctive, painful feeling we are caught inside a perplexity is anxiety. This feeling is always intensely uncomfortable, but when it is accepted as the birth pangs of genuinely new idea it becomes a far more acceptable part of the labor and delivery of innovations.
  • The limits of thinkability in a particular approach to a problem is an intellectual horizon.
  • Perplexities are resolvable by the peculiar and perpetually misunderstood activity known as philosophy.

*

What? Philosophy useful in business?

Ask a dozen people to list the ten most useless things any person can do, and philosophy will top the list. When an exasperated project manager exclaims “We don’t have time to philosophize!” nobody questions the wisdom of such practical thinking.

However, it is precisely here, when a group faces situations it does not know how to think out — where people become most anxious and most impatient and most inclined to just pick something and go with it — that philosophy is most useful and is in fact the very cornerstone of eventual success.

According to Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’” Is this not exactly when a company goes outside and hires someone to help it find its way out of a problem it doesn’t understand? When it doesn’t know its way about?

Yet, even consultancies — companies whose very purpose is to help other companies in this situation — are stuffed with anti-philosophical “pragmatists” whose life purpose is to simply get things done. Under the stress of anxiety such people reject the very thing that will bring them success. They stop thinking, stop listening and put their noses to the millstone.

This is how most of their projects go. Most of their projects turn out pretty unspectacular, but since they’ve never experienced a spectacular outcome, and because spectacular outcomes are uncommon, anyway, nobody blames them, nobody blames their client for their unspectacular, unlovable, unexceptional non-success, and nobody gets fired — so good enough. And emails go out calling the bunt a home run, and an assemblage of best practices an innovation, etc., etc. etc. and this is what makes corporations so damn corporate. They didn’t confront anxiety, and, so, realistically, this is the most that can be hoped for.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” — Wittgenstein

*

The reason few companies innovate is not that they lack intelligence or ingenuity or ideas — it’s that they are organizationally unprepared to face the perplexities and the anxiety intrinsic to innovation.

They misdiagnose the painful feelings of things going right as something going dreadfully wrong, and inadvertently abort the innovation process.

*

Most people, most of the time will try to make the absence of a clear question go away by making up things that resemble answers, that seem more or less related to what the question could be or ought to be. As long as the answer fits the standards of the culture to which it is addressed (that is, it has a truthy mouth-feel) and does not offend or impinge on anyone (inconsequentiality is the surest strategy for accomplishing this), it is generally accepted as an answer.

Learning service design backwards and forwards

Design

I’ve found two ways of helping people understand service design.

The first way, which I began developing almost two years ago and described on this blog late last year, is helping people learn to notice the kinds of problems service design is good at solving. I’m calling this “Six Sensibilities of Service Design”.

The second way is to show the typical final deliverables of a service design project. These deliverables comprise both comprehensive surveys of the service as a whole as well as specific itineraries documenting key paths through the service.

Surveys include:

  • Service flows — Service flows map all primary paths through a service, from one touchpoint to the next. Normally the perspective mapped is that of the receiver of the service, but ideally those delivering and supporting the service would also be mapped.
  • Value exchanges — Every service can be described as a value exchange between different participants (actors), each investing things of value (time, effort, money, information, etc.) in order to get something of value in return. This exchange is conducted in smaller installments that take place over a span of time, and each installment must motivate the next installment if the service is to progress toward its fulfillment.
  • Experience strategy — The experience strategy answers the question of “What should it be like to participate in this service?” One popular way to express the experience strategy is experience principles, a list of characteristics of the service that will experientially differentiate the service from its alternatives.

Itineraries include:

  • Service stories — Service stories convey an ideal service experience, usually, but not necessarily, from the perspective of the receiver of the service. Each experience story traces out one path through the service flow, and relates what one service actor (and other actors who appear in their story) experience along the way, investing and receiving value. These stories are the backbone of service design, because they put, in the most concrete and universally-relatable terms, what all development efforts across all disciplines are contributing to bring to actuality. Service design, unlike other disciplines, operationalizes omnichannel, multi-actor experiences, starting from the experience itself. Other approaches, if they consider experience at all, often do so after most operational work was done (normally with no consideration of experience) and with exclusive focus on “the customer” receiving the service.
  • Service blueprints — Service blueprints are outlines of operationalization of one service story. It outlines what happens in the “front stage” of the service, experienced by the receiver of the service, as well as processes that occur in the “back stage” to support the service.

In an ideal world, every possible itinerary in a service flow would be related as a service story and blueprinted. In reality, designers must prioritize paths, with the understanding that the work will continue in perpetuity.

I am aware this is incomplete and still pretty inadequate. Nobody unfamiliar with service design will understand service design from what I have just outlined. However, I believe once the outline is fleshed-out with more description and examples, it will be quite effective — especially if it is supplemented with “Six Sensibilities of Service Design”.

Once this foundation is established, the approaches of service design will make much more sense. That is my hole and aspiration, anyway.

Design is the supersystem

Design

This article is incomplete, and likely significantly incorrect. But I’m posting it, anyway, just to spur me to keep working on it. It is flawed but there is important truth in it. If you are an engineer, please pay especially close attention to my reckless claims about regression testing, because I suspect I may be speaking about obsolete ideas that I never adequately understood. Let’s fight.

Once you understand that design is concerned with the development of hybrid systems comprising both voluntary participants (humans) and automatic components (nonhumans), and that such systems are incomplete until the human participants are actually participating several truths become obvious:

  • The human participants must be taken as one of the essential parts of the system. Designers seek understanding of how human participants will behave within a system for exactly the same reason engineer seek understanding of how material or technological components will behave in an engineered system: To the degree a part of a system is poorly understood, it is likely to behave unpredictably and cause the system to perform poorly or fail.
  • When we view systems that people are eventually expected to use or to participate in, as already complete without the people using it — when we try to evaluate that as-yet humanless system, without including the users or participants, we are mistaking a mere part for the whole. Almost all engineered systems are mere subsystems of larger designed supersystems, and the superstystem is the proper unit of evaluation.
  • When we make changes to engineered systems, we are often making changes to the larger design system and how humans will participate in it. No competent engineer would dream of releasing a change to a system without performing regression testing, to ensure no unintended effects emerge from the system, but, because they misconceive design systems as mere engineered systems that will eventually be used by people, they fail to include usability testing in their protocols.

UXers and HCDers have always known it was foolish to speculate on how people will use or participate in a system. But few actually thought of people as voluntary participants in a supersystem that could be treated as a testable unit. Service design — our first human-nonhuman hybrid system development methodology — has made the advantages of this conception of design more obvious, but it was actually true from the start.

Annual disorientation

Biography, Design, Enworldment

Every year around this time I lose my curriculum. I pick up books and abandon them.

This year I’ve picked up and dropped several books about the formation of worldviews. I started at Worldview and Mind by Eugene Webb. Then I switched over to Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking. Then I spent a few days in Cassirer revivalist Sebastian Luft’s The Space of Culture. Now I am tentatively rereading Bruno Latour’s weird and semi-neglected magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence.

All this came after a half-year dive into hermeticist literature, focusing on Kabbalah and Tarot, and approached from my own heretically practical angle.

Susan has booked a mountain cabin for a week-long writing retreat in early spring. I’ve noticed that everything I am doing is now preparation for that week.

My project is the same as it has been for the last decade, and both the hermeticist and the worldview investigations are components of it, and, of course, design remains at the heart of it as well. The project is enworldment. If we are displeased with the world as we experience it, what do we have at our disposal to change our experience of the world — by materially changing the world, by changing own being-in-the-world, by changing our own social participation? My prescription is to approach things as a designer — always as a designer — and most of all when we think we should approach them as a political or “ethical” actor.

How to close the theory-practice gap

Design, Existentialism, Hermeticism, Philosophy

I have never once just thought up a truly new practice and then executed it afterwards.

Every new thing I’ve ever conceived emerged from intuitive, nonverbal doing — from groping in the dark, from muddling through, usually under conditions of considerable perplexity and stress.

Only after, if it worked, can I go back and reflect on what made it work, and produce a theory.

I’ve never seen things go the opposite direction.

As far as I know, the only way to close the theory-practice gap is to theorize from practice. And it is less like a closing of a gap than it is paving something substantial but rough and poorly lit.

There is only a gap if theory has been sketched into a vacuum. I don’t think those gaps ever close.

And trying to practice from theory leads to mechanical sterility. It leads to execution of memorized dance steps, or the recitation of syllables from an alien language.

Every important thing I’ve ever conceived has come came to me this way. And every important thing I’ve ever learned has come to me first as a new practical capacity, a new ability to perceive or respond first — tacit know-how — and only much later has it become something I can actually explain.

Maybe a Sartrean formula would be helpful: Practice precedes theory.

What emerges from practice-forged theory is praxis — articulate practice.

I am excited about design as an alternative mode of practical life.

It is a new living tradition, a way of working, self-consciously developed by many diverse practitioners, solving a vast and growing array of real-world problems in every conceivable material (matter, space, time, information, imagination, feeling), for (arguably) the last 60-so years.

It is a tradition that must be appropriated and internalized before it becomes productive in the head, hearts and hands of a participant.

It is the appropriate mode of practice for anyone who works in systems in which humans participate. If you think about it at any depth at all, this category embraces just about all human activity, most of all the governing of people at every scale.

Design is the way we should be approaching life together, but its methods and even more, its core sensibilities, its conceptive capacities, are still largely confined to specialists. In my own life, I’ve found that disciplining myself to behave as a designer has made intractable, incorrigible problems soluble.

Almost anything I do, I do better if I do it in a designerly way.

But what is this designerly way? It is not methods. It is what animates these methods. It is a faith.

More and more, I am realizing that the purpose of my life is to illuminate and activate the esoteric underpinnings of design practice.

Like all faiths, design has a visible outward form that can be looked at — an exoteric expression — and an inward, esoteric being that cannot be looked at, but rather is seen from.

The reason I have been so quiet lately is I am returning to the sophia perennis. I want to do for design what esoterists have done with traditional religions — illuminate their transcendent unity. To this end, I am focusing on the esoteric depths of my own faith, and studying Kabbalah.

But just to preemptively address on obvious and important objection:  I am not in the slightest interested in making design into a religion. I am just trying to invest our practical lives with religious energy. We cannot continue on with this vacuous, stressful, tedious slogging. Our oil-dependent economy depends even more on another rapidly depleting fuel source, will-power. Our will-power tanks have been sucked dry are emptied even of vapors.

We sit before our screens, commanding our hands to move and type out words, but they refuse to do what we say.

We need an alternative, renewable psychic energy source. But we cannot tap into this source as long as we continue to insist that all new sources conform to our current sacred theories of power. These theories possess us and will not release us until we pay the price of our redemption.

Six sensibilities of service

Design, Hermeticism

I’ve decided to experiment with making my course “Introduction to Service Design” an exercise in hermetics. I am going to re-title the course “Initiation Into Service Design”, and I am going to re-title the central module of the course “Six Sensibilities of Service”.

I’m using “hermetics” to mean applications of esoteric insights in the domain of mundane life — applied hermeticism. I’ve been working this way for decades, and have struggled for language to explain my approach to design and how it differs from the technique-driven approach of most professional designers.

The esoteric language, including the designation “hermetic”, however, is not for the public. It is just for me and my own clarity, and for the handful of weirdos who also respond to this kind of thing and find it clarifying, rather than mystifying. At this point, I do not plan to run around billing myself as a “hermetic designer”. My outward practice and language will and must stay compatible and cooperative with the exoteric practices and norms of the design industry and the business world to which it belongs.

This kind of skillful selective semi-concealment, by the way, is part and parcel of esoterism, which always remains in communion with the exoteric facets of its tradition — while serving it by investing it with life, or “vivifying” it, to use Valentin Tomberg’s words.

I’ve intuited this idea often, but I think it is time to say it explicitly: Design is a tradition equipped with exoteric theories and practices, rooted in esoteric understandings into which designers are initiated, or of which they are oblivious.

Merely learning the lingo, theory and methods of design does not fully equip a would-be practitioner to actually design. Nor does expertise in executing the techniques designers use. There is something else required if one hopes to “really know what they’re doing” as designers, or even “knowing where designers are coming from”.

The new goal of the course is to accelerate the acquision of this “something else”, which consists of activating a set of enceptions — what hermeticists call arcana — each a different capacity to perceive, recognize and interact with a certain species of given, without which the given is missed. The given is either not noticed, submerged in oblivion, or it is meaningless, or perplexing.

For the sake of sounding minimally sane, sober and non-exotic, I will call these enceptions “sensibilities”. After all, each is an ability to make sense of some particular species of given. Also, the word “sensibilities” is common in the world of art and design, and my use of it is, though novel, completely compatible with current usage. It is a very gentle repurposing of the word.

The six sensibilities are what one must activate and cultivate in oneself, in order to recognize, understand and resolve problems with services.

Think of the six sensibilities as parts of a mental hand — five fingers and a palm. All six are needed to grasp the complexity of any service as a simple whole. All six are needed to articulate this clear understanding of service and communicate it to others. All six are used to grip the tools of service design in shaping new services or reshaping existing ones. They are the background of any clear understanding, any effective communication or any skillful response to a service design problem.

These six sensibilities differentiate  inspired, insightful service designers who work naturally and intuitively from designers who work formulaically and mechanically with tools and techniques they understand mostly theoretically. Before the sensibilities are active, a designer is like an aspiring dancer who must recall and execute each step of the dance they are performing. After the sensibilities are developed, the dance moves the dancer’s body with spontaneous, musical grace.

But this course is not only — or even primarily — for designers. It is for people who might hire and/or collaborate with service designers. But why would they need a course? After all, don’t we hire professionals to spare us the need to become experts?

Here is why: One of the challenging peculiarities of service design is that an organization cannot hire service designers to do service design work for them. They must hire service designers to work with them.

Service design work changes the way organizations operate, and even how they organize themselves around the delivery of services.

Every design discipline works with a particular material, and with service design the material is the organization.

For service design to work, an organization itself must, and cannot avoid, participating directly in the service design process.

That participation requires a significant degree of understanding of service design, and that understanding is hollow, ineffective and overwhelming without the six sensibilities.

That is why this course is needed.

So what are the sensibilities and how do we activate them?

I will list the sensibilities, and offer a quick and barely adequate description for each one:

  • Temporal sensibility – Services are experienced in a series of Now points, each with a past and future. At each point in the experience, one remembers what happened before and tries to anticipate what comes next, and this shapes and colors what is happening in the present. When the service experience ends, it is remembered as a story with memorable ups and downs, and an overall impression of how it went. Designing an experience that unfolds over a significant duration of time requires a different mentality from designing an object experienced momentarily — it requires a temporal sensibility.
  • Omnichannel sensibility – Services happen across multiple touchpoints delivered through different service channels. A typical service zigzags across locations (home, car, store, service centers) and physical objects (computer, phone, product packaging, product interfaces) and virtual objects (websites, apps, messages, social media platforms). But they are perceived as part of something, and that is a service. Designing an experience that unfolds across multiple channels of a person’s free choosing requires a different mentality than designing an experience confined to a single channel — it requires an omnichannel sensibility.
  • Polycentric sensibility – Services are experienced by different actors playing different roles in the service, often interacting with one another. For instance in a retail scenario, a customer is an actor who receives the service, a cashier is an actor who helps delivers the service, while backstage in the stockroom another actor supports the service. Service design tries to make each actor’s experience a good one. Each actor is considered a different center of a common experience with multiple centers. Designing for multiple actors simultaneously requires a different mentality from designing for one actor at a time — it requires a polycentric sensibility.
  • Reciprocity sensibility – At every point in a service, in order for the service to unfold as intended, one or more actors must be motivated to participate in the service. The actor wishes to get some kind of value from their participation, and if they see no value they are unlikely to play their part. They invest something valuable — effort, time, information, money, comfort, etc. — in order to get something valuable in return. This is as true for those delivering and supporting services as those receiving them. And it becomes exponentially true when participation is voluntary and non-hierarchical, for instance when partners cooperate to provide jointly-delivered services to shared customers. To the degree that a service provides a win-win value exchange for all who participate in it at every point, the service will flourish. Wherever it does not, the service will be weak or even broken, and actors will opt out (refuse to buy; quit their job) or choose services with a value exchange (buy from a competitor; find a better job somewhere else). Designing win-wins for everyone who participates in a service requires a different mentality from designing around the needs of only one actor — it requires a reciprocity sensibility.
  • Operational sensibility – In the practical world, ideas are worthless unless they can be implemented and made real. Service design is radically practical, and to ensure ideas can work in practice enlists experts from throughout the organization to contribute their knowledge and disciplinary know-how, and to collaborate with other experts to push the boundaries of what is concretely possible. To guide collaboration among diverse experts each of whom has insights and knowledge required to ensure practicability of innovative ideas requires a different mentality from pie-in-the-sky “big idea” concepting — it requires an operational sensibility.
  • Staging sensibility – It is a truism that some of the best designs are invisible. But at the same time it is also true that some of the best designs are delightful and memorable. The best services are an orchestration of both. Services design pays close attention to what elements or moments of a service should be unobtrusive or even concealed backstage, and which elements should be brought frontstage to be experienced, appreciated or remembered. To coordinate a service that appears the right way at the right time and conceals what should not be noticed requires a different mentality from something designed to only be invisible or only to delight: it requires a staging sensibility.

In the course itself, I will introduce each sensibility with a more extensive description, provide some examples to be viewed through the lens of the sensibility and outline some criteria and earmarks to keep in mind when.

After we have been introduced to each sensibility individually, and learn to exercise the sensibility to detect the kind of service problem that sensibility perceives, we will use all six sensibilities together to assess real services and clearly communicate our assessment.

Redrawing the knitbone

Biography, Design, Philosophy, Religion

I’ve been playing around with the knitbone image again.

In case you’ve never been subjected to one of my rhapsodies on this topic, “knitbone” is a folk name for comfrey, a plant remarkable for the depth of its taproot.

A comfrey taproot can burrow a ten feet or more into the soil deep under the ground draws nutrients up to the surface.

Gardeners traditionally plant comfrey throughout their gardens. When comfrey drops its lush depth-nourished leaves into the soil, it fertilizes all the surrounding shallower-rooted plants.

The name “knitbone” comes from comfrey’s medicinal application. When pulverized and applied to a wound, it helps the body heal. It can help a bone knit itself back together.

I have emotional history with this plant. When Susan was pregnant with Zoe, we had an herb garden in our back yard. Our midwife was excited to learn that we were growing comfrey. She used it to make a knitbone poultice to help Susan recover from labor. We cared for this plant and received care from it.

Symbolically, knitbone attests to the nourishing power at the depths of understanding, and to the duty of those of us who work at the depths to bring what we find up to the light of everyday practicality.

Remedial phenomenology

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

For the last couple of months I have been re-grounding myself in Husserl’s phenomenology. The work I am interested in doing is phenomenological, but it is not, itself, phenomenology. By returning to Husserl, I hope to arrive at the point of departure for my project. I am interested in approaching philosophy as a design discipline, both in the form of the philosophy (writing, visuals, practices designed to impart a particular faith) and in its substance (the life afforded by adoption of the faith). To make matters weirder, the faith itself is designerly. Obviously, it is a synthesis of philosophy, design and religion that profoundly scrambles the current meanings of philosophy, design and religion.

Course outline: “What is service design?”

Biography, Design

I’ve been taking an online course on designing online courses. If that isn’t meta enough the online course I am learning to design is on design.

My course will be an introduction to service design, meant to introduce people who are contemplating or preparing to participate in a service design project how to think about and talk about service design, so they can feel comfortable with the idea of embarking on a service design project and participating in the process.

I’m putting the tentative outline of the course here, just in case anyone is interested:

Lesson 1: What is design?

  • What we mean by design
  • What we do not not mean by design (making functional things more appealing)
  • What we also do not mean by design (planning out an engineered thing)
  • Design produces dynamic systems of parts and participants
  • Successful design motivates participants to participate
  • Design is concerned with understanding and involving participants

Lesson 2: What is a service?

  • What we mean by service
  • What we do not mean by service (service as opposed to product)
  • Service design’s much broader conception of service
  • Some services don’t look like services
  • Service generates, exchanges and distributes value of myriad forms

Lesson 3: What is the value of design?

  • Quantitative value
  • Qualitative value
  • A business that fails to deliver qualitative value will not make money
  • Experience is about qualitative value
  • Design motivates participants to participate by offering good experience

Lesson 4: Good experiences in general

  • Good experience is useful, usable and desirable
  • Human-centered design (HCD) is a method for producing good experiences
  • Overview of HCD (universal methodology for producing good experiences)
  • Altitudes and granularity of experiences
  • Beyond touchpoints

Lesson 5: Good service experiences

  • Service experiences are a complex special case
  • Service experiences have six characteristics, all of which must be addressed in a good service experience.
  • 1. Services comprise multiple experiences occurring over a span of time
  • 2. Services comprise experiences occurring across multiple delivery channels
  • 3. Services comprise experiences interacting with other people
  • 4. Services comprise experiences of aligned and misaligned interests
  • 5. Services are experienced as partly exposed and partly concealed
  • 6. Services experience is the result of how the organization operates

Lesson 6: The six dimensions of service

  • Reflection on service experiences, good and bad
  • Introduction to six dimensions of service (6DS)
  • 1. Sequential
  • 2. Omnichannel
  • 3. Polycentric
  • 4. Aligned
  • 5. Semivisible
  • 6. Operationalized
  • Sorting good and bad experiences into the 6DS

Lesson 7: A typical service design project

  • Introduction: from current to future state
  • Understand internal perspectives
  • Understand current service delivery
  • Understand the current actor experiences
  • Identify and prioritize opportunities to improve current experiences
  • Envision alternative future experiences
  • Evaluate and revise alternative future experiences
  • Blueprint future service delivery
  • Plan phased development of future service

Lesson 8: Some core tools of service design

  • Introduction: current state, future state versions
  • Current state ecosystem map
  • Current state service blueprint
  • Current state experience map
  • Opportunity statements
  • Concept sheets
  • Future state experience (“story from the future”)
  • Future state moment architecture
  • Future state service blueprint
  • Future state evolution map

Lesson 9: What it is like to participate in a service design project

  • It is participatory
  • It is collaborative
  • It is multidisciplinary
  • It is radically democratic
  • It is anthropological
  • It demands empathy
  • It demands different modes of thinking
  • It will demand different ways of working
  • It changes everything

Lesson 10: How service design can help you

  • Apply six dimensions of service to your own service
  • Define a project