The job of the human centered designer is to help organizations reestablish contact with the reality of the people they serve.
And that contact produces truth that can be shared by participants in organizations — enabling them to (re)establish contact with their shared aspirations and each other as people.
In my field of human centered design, it is understood that before any group of people can collaborate effectively on anything, they must first align on the problem and then align on the solution.
What does this mean? Aligning on a problem means to share a conception of the problem — to think about it in roughly the same way. It is important to note here that until a problem is conceived, it is not even a problem — it is a troublesome situation.
And troublesome situations have the potential to be problematized in divergent ways implying diverging paths to a solutions. More often than not, groups confronting troublesome situations problematize the trouble in divergent ways, compounding the trouble, because now stubborn, troublesome people appear to block the way to a solution.
This happens for at least three big reasons.
Big Reason Number One is personality. Individual persons with different temperaments, sensibilities and capabilities understand and perceive the world differently in both subtle and dramatic ways, and notice different aspect of situations.
Big Reason Number Two is discipline. When people from different backgrounds confront a troublesome situation, they tend to notice very different features of the problem. Specifically, the notice symptoms of problems they specialize in solving. Different disciplines conceive problems in different and incompatible ways, and this is one factor that causes departmental strife in organizations.
Big Reason Number Three is the lived experience of incomplete information. Divergence of understanding is exacerbated by incomplete data. Given a smattering of facts, our habitual way of understandings (the combo of personality and expertise) fills in data gaps to complete the picture and perceive a gestalt truth. And we all have access to different smatterings and experience the smatterings in different sequences. Our early impressions condition our later ones. Being humans, a species with a need to form understandings, who prefer misunderstanding to an absence of understanding (perplexity), we immediately begin noticing whatever reinforces that sense, and tune out what threatens it. So the specific drib-and-drab sequence of data can play a role in shaping our impressions. The earliest dribs and drabs have “first mover advantage” in gestalt formation.
These three big reasons are not even exhaustive. It’s no wonder organizations are full divergent perspectives and controversy. (Contra– “against” + -versus “turned”). Generally, these circumstantial impressions and expert diagnoses of troublesome situations are not entirely wrong. Some are likely truer than others, but it is hard to determine which is truer than which. And it is somewhere between possible and likely that none are true enough for the purposes of solving the problem. As a matter of method, we designers assume none are right enough. (And if it does turn out that a preexisting truth turns out to be true enough, now we can support that truth with data and align the organization to it.)
Our job as design researchers is to go out and investigate real-life examples of the troublesome situation and expose ourselves to the profusion of data that only real life itself can offer. We see what emerges as important when we allow people to show us their situations and teach i\us how it seems to them.
This gives us a new, relevant conception of the problem rooted in the people we intend to serve with our design solutions.
Once an organization shares a common conception of the problem, they are better able to conceive solutions that they can align around.
And further evaluative research — getting feedback on prototypes of candidate solutions — allows teams to align around solutions that people consistently respond to favorably.
Aligned implementation teams can collaborate effectively on working out the solution in detail.
So, as I hope you can see, the designer’s task is largely a political one of cultivating alignment through collaborative research, modeling, ideation and craft.
I am unable to believe that this is not generally a better way to live.
When I am at my best, I conduct my life in a designerly way in accordance with my designerly faith.
Did I really never post this thought before? I’ve been saying it for years:
Rapport is the most important data we gather in research.
Rapport is attunement to the participant’s enworldment. We learn to speak with a participant fluently in their own context, understanding not only their vocabulary and the content of their speech, but also how that speech relates to their environment and activities. We get not only the parts but grasp how the parts interact as a system, and become organs within an organism within an organization. Until we understand these complex relations between part and whole all we have is a heap of facts that can be construed rightheadedly or wrongheadedly.
Researchers with strong objective inclinations like to believe that facts can speak for themselves. And they like to believe that the facts are best able to speak for themselves when we remove or neutralize subjectivity, usually by employing mechanistic procedures. In the absence of subjective interference, data can autonomously organize itself into patterns and themes.
I am a researcher with strong subjective inclinations, and I believe facts do not speak for themselves, at least not univocally. Our best bet is not to eliminate subjectivity from our analysis, but rather to bring the right subjectivity to the analysis. And that right subjectivity is the subjectivity that attuned itself to participants when rapport was achieved in the interview. When we analyze our data and then thematize it we build a body of knowledge that embodies this right subjectivity, and makes it more learnable by others.
(Esoteric side notes to take or leave: 1. Here we see how a personal subject is, like an academic subject, a specific form of objectivity. 2. We could say, with Marshall McLuhan that the medium, subjectivity acquired in rapport, is the message, even more than the factual content gathered in the research.)
When we approach design problems from this right subjectivity we find ourselves able to do things we couldn’t do before, back when we approached it naively, from our own everyday subjectivity. We now perceive the situation differently. We feel different emotions, values and weights in the situation, and sense different possibilities, opportunities and hopes. Our minds follow different logical paths through the shifted landscape. We produce different and more attuned ideas than we normally could, in greater intensity, force and volume.
I call this productive, shifted state precision inspiration.
Empathy is much more than simple feeling-with. (That is sympathy.) Empathy engages our entire being. For sure, it engages our hearts, but not just our hearts — not isolated, alienated, mindless hearts, divorced from our thinking and doing selves.
Empathy attunes us to the thoughts and actions of others and helps us see how feeling, thought and action converge as a situated, living person who might feel, think and act very differently from us… as different from us as a kidney is from a stomach or liver.
In an organism, the organs serve each other in different and complementary ways. Empathy is how we serve each other in different and complementary ways within organized groups.
The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World. — Black Elk
Another thing I am noticing about the ideas I gravitate to: they are never pure theory. I think I am repelled by pure theory.
The ideas I love are the theoretical components of praxis. They are thoughts informed by thoughtful practice — which are meant to guide further thoughtful practice.
Praxis is the virtuous cycle of thoughtful practice informing practical thought guiding thoughtful practice. This cycle produces thoughts that are part of participation in life instead of theory systems that compete with life and sometime eclipse or displace life.
The theoretical components of praxis are abstractions that emerge from concrete doing.
This links up with another important insight into how I work. I do very poorly with ungrounded abstractions. They are not merely empty or dry — they are not real enough for me to grasp and use. I have to experience the reality from which abstractions are abstracted.
We learn the theoretical components of praxis by participating in that praxis. The theoretical components put words to the truth that emerges in participation.
But the praxis of design research puts us in contact with the realities into which we intend to design. We begin the process in a state of alienation. We know things about the reality, but the knowledge is unrooted abstraction. Or we think we know about it, but we are wrong. Or the things we know are incomplete and exclude relevant insights required to design something consequential and helpful. Or there is lack of alignment in what different people know. Or or or. We “go to the rough ground” and learn from people who inhabit these places we think can be improved, and we see what emerges as important. We put words to these emergent realities and craft more useful truths — truths that help organizations maintain contact with reality.
My design praxis is actually a metapraxis of designing specialized praxes optimized for particular situations.
It is really annoying that I can’t just adopt other people’s groundless abstractions. It is a real intellectual limitation — stupidity, if you prefer — and I find it intensely painful when I crash into it.
But it is not without positive tradeoffs. This limitation bolsters my ideological immune system. I’m not as easily taken by ungrounded abstraction-systems.
I’m both too smart and too dumb to buy into popular ideologies.
When we use the euphemism “differently abled” this is what we mean. I am intellectually differently abled.
I just have to accept this and do something with it. Or rather, continue doing what I do, with less shame.
Some closely connected thoughts that speak directly to my own current concerns.
From Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections:
The motivations of my work, which culminates in a philosophy of history, are simple. They arise from the political situation.
Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language — meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies. Hence, the community of language that he himself wants to use in order to criticize the users of ideological language must first be discovered and, if necessary, established.
The peculiar situation just characterized is not the fate of the philosopher for the first time in history. More than once in history, language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it no longer can be used for expressing the truth of existence.
This was the situation, for instance, of Sir Francis Bacon when he wrote his Novum Organum. Bacon classified the unanalyzed topics current in his time as “idols”: the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, the idols of pseudo theoretical speculation. In resistance to the dominance of idols — i.e., of language symbols that have lost their contact with reality — one has to rediscover the experiences of reality as well as the language that will adequately express them. The situation today is not very different.
Voegelin wrote these words in 1973. They are probably always true to some degree. But I find them more true today than any other moment in my life. More and more of my peers are “representatives of the dominant ideologies” and this makes it impossible to share a community of language with them. Their worlds are stocked with ideological objects that eclipse and replace rather than articulate what is given.
This bit is especially relevant: “In resistance to the dominance of idols — i.e., of language symbols that have lost their contact with reality — one has to rediscover the experiences of reality as well as the language that will adequately express them.”
This concern for maintaining contact with reality, resonates powerfully with the book I am currently reading, Fritz Perls’s classic Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality.
…All contact is creative and dynamic. It cannot be routine, stereotyped, or merely conservative because it must cope with the novel, for only the novel is nourishing. … On the other hand, contact cannot passively accept or merely adjust to the novelty, because the novelty must be assimilated. All contact is creative adjustment of the organism and environment. Aware response in the field (as both orientation and manipulation) is the agency of growth in the field. Growth is the function of the contact-boundary in the organism/environment field; it is by means of creative adjustment, change, and growth that the complicated organic unities live on in the larger unity of the field.
We may then define: psychology is the study of creative adjustments. Its theme is the ever-renewed transition between novelty and routine, resulting in assimilation and growth.
Correspondingly, abnormal psychology is the study of the interruption, inhibition, or other accidents in the course of creative adjustment. We shall, for instance, consider anxiety, the pervasive factor in neurosis, as the result of the interruption of the excitement of creative growth (with accompanying breathlessness); and we shall analyze the various neurotic “characters” as stereotyped patterns limiting the flexible process of creatively addressing the novel. Further, since the real is progressively given in contact, in the creative adjustment of organism and environment, when this is inhibited by the neurotic, his world is “out of touch” and therefore progressively hallucinatory, projected, blacked out, or otherwise unreal.
Creativity and adjustment are polar, they are mutually necessary. Spontaneity is the seizing on, and glowing and growing with, what is interesting and nourishing in the environment. (Unfortunately, the “adjustment” of much psychotherapy, the “conformity to the reality-principle,” is the swallowing of a stereotype.)
and
But just as in our culture as a whole there has grown up a symbolic culture devoid of contact or affect, isolated from animal satisfaction and spontaneous social invention, so in each self, when the growth of the original interpersonal relations has been disturbed and the conflicts not fought through but pacified in a premature truce incorporating alien standards, there is formed a “verbalizing” personality, a speech that is insensitive, prosy, affectless, monotonous, stereotyped in content, inflexible in rhetorical attitude, mechanical in syntax, meaningless. This is the reaction to or identification with an accepted alien and unassimilated speech. And if we concentrate awareness on these “mere” habits of speech, we meet extraordinary evasions, making of alibis, and finally acute anxiety — much more than the protestations and apologies accompanying the revealing of important “moral” lapses. For to call attention to speech (or to clothes) is indeed a personal affront.
But the difficulty is that, disgusted with the customary empty symbolizing and verbalizing, recent philosophers of language set up astringent norms of speech that are even more stereotyped and affectless; and some psychotherapists give up in despair and try to by-pass speaking altogether, as if only inner silence and non-verbal behavior were potentially healthy. But the contrary of neurotic verbalizing is various and creative speech; it is neither scientific semantics nor silence; it is poetry.
It seems to me that Voegelin and Perls are largely concerned with the same phenomena at different scales: the tendency for language to create objects of thought that purport to represent real objects (gestalts that we spontaneously experience as given in contact with the world around us) but which somehow become substitutes for reality and cause the thinking subject to lose contact with reality.
This concern, of course, is at the heart of design research as I understand it. Our job as researchers is not only to help organizations gather data they lack. It is to help organizations recover fuller contact with reality beyond their own walls.
Most large organizations squint out at the world through data peepholes, custom-drilled to perceive what they assume is relevant. From this data, they construct abstract models and theories about what is going on. The numbers and models and theories become the objects of preoccupation for these organizations — far more real than what they are meant to represent. When organizations find they are unable to use these abstract objects to produce the numbers they are commanded to produce, occasionally someone within the organization is wise enough to suggest leaving the building and making contact with the reality behind the abstractions. And generally, we find that the abstractions themselves need reworking. This abstraction design is foundational to all other design, and this is the part of the work I love. If I am required to design without this preliminary, I am deprived of ground upon which to build — or even stand.
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.
Reality is radically polysemic. Much more is given than can be taken in.
The givens of media arrive abstracted from reality. They afford far fewer interpretations. Mediated truth is a shadow of reality.
To form new common sense we must return to reality. Squabbling over incommensurable abstractions only leads to common nonsense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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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
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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.
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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.
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:
Itineraries include:
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.
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:
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.
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.