Sometimes, what’s needed is not more detailed answers but a completely different question.

The objective world can be one of two things, depending on how the concept of objectivity is used:

It can be the factual common ground upon which understanding of other people and of the world can be built.

Or it can be the truth about reality, which, once known, makes further discussion of opinion unnecessary.

To misunderstand, to refuse to understand something deemed irrelevant, and to treat something as impossible to understand — all three excuse us from understanding.

*

When we understand something someone tells us, what is understood appears to be the subject matter of the speech. In fact, much of the substance of the understanding is the speaking subject, and the subject matter is the medium that makes this intersubjective understanding possible.

*

When a person seems hostile to reality, this indicates hostility toward alien minds: minds who make themselves known through new understandings of reality.

Re-summarization of an old idea:

Both pre-artifact and post-artifact research turns up two kinds of findings: facts and insights.

Fact is observational data, the reporting of attributes and behaviors, from the perspective of the observer, without anthropological thickness. The interpretation is left to the intuition of the observer.

Insights, on the other hand, uncover the perspective of those being researched, and yield new modes of interpretation, new fields of relevance and significance: new ways to understand what otherwise appears self-evident.

Most UX professionals call all pre-artifact research “generative” but the generative value of pre-artifact research lies in the insights it turns up, not the facts it gathers. The facts are valuable, and do guide the design, but the facts themselves do not inspire innovation. The factual dimension of pre-artifact research is better characterized as “informative” research. And likewise, post-artifact research, known as “evaluative” tends to focus on the suitability of the artifact — a sort of QA process. But post-artifact research is also a test of a team’s understanding of its users. Every tested artifact is a hypothesis: “If I understand you, this design will make sense to you, be valuable to you, speak to what you care about, and resonate with you.”

Both are needed, but due to the ontic (objective, thingly) orientation of the average non-philosophical mind which predominate in most business settings, only the factual is recognized. “Insight” tends to be dismissed as “bullshit,” “fluff,” and the like, or it is reduced to synonymity with mere fact.

And for this very reason a lot of what has been passed off as “generative” research has in fact been nothing but informative research, which is experienced by designers as “dry”, and which has done nothing to inspire innovation.

This does much to explain the current trend of dismissing generative research as passe. Nonetheless, to anyone experienced in doing or consuming real generative research this whole meme is nothing more than the opining of the ignorant to one another. People never show their blindness quite as starkly as when they parade their cynicism and tell “the Emperor wears no clothes” stories.

One last passage from Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future:

The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world — the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history — has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.

Mere competence cannot surpass mediocrity, no matter how perfectly it achieves its goals.

This is because mediocrity conceives of excellence in negative terms: as an absence of flaws.

Excellence, however, is a positive matter, and it consists in the presence of something valuable.

*

The frank display of flaws can be a way to flaunt excellence.

The excellent, despite being deeply problematic or grossly distorted, is always preferable to those things about which nothing bad nor good can be said.

*

Many romantic relationships persist unhappily for the sole reason that nobody produce a flaw sufficiently terrible to justify it.

Thwarted fault-finding produces even deeper contempt than successful fault-finding.

*

Mere competence results from seeing only the commonplace, commonsense questions.

The questions are barely even noticed. Usually they are simply taken to be self-evident — implied by reality itself.

All effort is put into re-answering the questions a little better than last time. With each recitation, the answer is tweaked, refined, polished, paraphrased, flavored or garnished a little differently — but the answer is substantially the same, which is why it finds easy recognition.

*

Innovation doesn’t come from inventing better answers; it comes from discovering better questions.

Few people seem to know how to discover new questions, and this has much to do with the aversion most people have to the conditions necessary for finding them. People go about things in ways that actively prevent new questions from arising. Everything presupposes the validity of the old questions, and reinforces re-asking and expert re-telling.

We don’t actually love the old questions and we’re not really that enamored with the answers we produce. We only like the predictability of it all.

But is it that we hate new questions? Actually, no. As a matter of fact, once a new question is posed clearly, people love it. The essence of inspiration is feeling the existence of a new question.

What people really hate is the space between the old and new question — the space called “perplexity”, that condition where we are deeply bothered and disoriented by a something we can’t really point to or explain. We cannot even orient ourselves enough to ask a question.

This is the space Wittgenstein claimed for philosophy: “A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.'”

*

How do we enter perplexity? By conversing with others and allowing them to teach us how their understanding differs from our own. What they teach us is how to ask different questions than we’d ordinarily think to ask. But before we can hear the questions they are asking –usually tacitly asking — we to quiet our own questions. (Interrogations are only good for getting answers out of people.)

How do we avoid perplexity? By not allowing the other to speak. Instead we observe their behaviors, look for patterns, impose different conditions and look for changes. We may feel puzzled by the behaviors we see, but we can answer this puzzlement by trying out one answer after another until one turns out good enough, like a child trying to hit upon the correct multiple choice answer to a math problem without really understanding the material.

*

It appears that generative research has gone out of style. There’s a widespread belief that assembling a frankenstein of best practices parts and subsequently using analytics to detect and correcting all the flaws will somehow produce the same results, but more cheaply and reliably — and less harrowingly.

But, here’s the question: Can anyone produce even one example where tweaking transformed something boring into something compelling?

And then consider how many times you’ve watched something compelling tweaked to mediocrity.

In general, people’s interest in one another is practical and behavioral. The minimum knowledge required to elicit desired behaviors and to prevent undesired behaviors from occurring is about all people want.

If we feel we have to understand a person’s experiences to accomplish this, we will make the effort, but otherwise, we will avoid these kinds of questions, because understanding experiences requires a kind of involvement in the other’s perspective resembling immersion in literature, where one’s own worldview is temporarily suspended and replaced with another. And sometimes we don’t come back, fully. Something of the literary world stays with in our own, and we see things differently. An understander stands a good chance of being permanently and sometimes profoundly changed by such modes of understanding.

What most people prefer is the kind of relationship scientists have toward matter. The behaviors of objects are observed in various conditions from a distance, and the knowledge is factual: when this happens, this follows. The matter doesn’t explain itself to the observer: the observer does all the explaining. Whatever intentional “thickness” is added to the behaviors is taken from the observer’s own stock of motives. This kind of objective knowledge doesn’t change us or how we see the world; it changes only our opinions about the things we observe.

For a brief moment, the business world felt it needed to understand other people as speaking subjects as opposed to behaving objects. And for a brief moment it appeared that business itself could be changed through the experience of this very new kind of understanding. But now analytics has developed to such a degree that businesses can return back to their comfort zone of objectivity, and tweak human behaviors through tweaking designs, until they elicit the desired behaviors.

Quantitative research methods (as valuable as they are) can never replace interviews and ethnographic research. Despite what many UXers think, the essential difference between ethnographic research and other forms of qualitative research is not  merely that it observes behavior in context, but rather, as Spradley notes in The Ethnographic Interview, that in ethnographic research the person being researched plays a role in the research quite different from that of other methods: the role of informant (as opposed to subject, respondent, actor, etc.). An informant doesn’t merely provide answers to set questions or exhibits observable behavior. An informant teaches the researcher, and helps establish the questions the researcher ought to attempt to understand — questions the researcher might never have otherwise thought to ask. An informant is far more empowered to surprise, to reframe the research, and to change the way the researcher thinks. In ethnographic research the researcher is far less distanced and intellectually insulated from the “object” of study, and is exposed to a very real risk of transformative insight.

This attitude toward human understanding goes beyond method, and even beyond theory. It implies an ethical stance, because it touches on the question of what a human being is, what constitutes understanding of a human being, and finally — how ought human beings regard one another and relate to one another.

*

The passage that triggered this outburst, from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition:

Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds; yet obviously the affinity between speech and revelation is much closer than that between action and revelation, {This is the reason why Plato says that lexis (“speech”) adheres more closely to truth than praxis.} just as the affinity between action and beginning is closer than that between speech and beginning, although many, and even most acts, are performed in the manner of speech. Without the accompaniment of speech, at any rate, action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do.

*

The dream of quantitative research rendering qualitative research obsolete might be one more instance of an age-old fantasy: a world of people who are seen and not heard, who obey our predictions and commands, to whom we can dictate terms. Such beings cannot remind us of the difference between reality itself, and one’s own conceptions of it — and they leave the mind in peace to to be “its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell.” Hell is not other people, per se. It is speaking people showing us what we’d rather not know, which can strip us of what we knew but can no longer believe.

*

(Maybe we lack faith in our capacity to recover from loss of faith?)

When chaos is experienced, a failure of reason has already occurred. In chaos we encounter realities our reason is not equipped to order and make sense of. This is the experience of perplexity, where we relive the horror of birth.

The only people in the world perverse enough to find meaning in such meaninglessness are philosophers. Wittgenstein said it best: “A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.”

*

We prefer to believe the world is discovered bit by accumulated bit in a vacuum of space and knowledge. We want to believe in a world that is created ex nihilo. What is we have is established, and what isn’t is nothing.

We hate to believe in a world that is articulated from chaos, because we hate the consequence: the order we have lent to the world which has made it familiar and predictable could suddenly recede and  shock us with raw alienness.

*

This possibility — that the world can be revealed as strange — that makes people hate their neighbor. It is the neighbor, with his strange views, peculiar habits, and outlandish tastes, who jointly holds the potential to defamiliarize the world. The potential, though, is only actualized voluntarily by ourselves. Each person holds the power either to open the door to the neighbor, or to bar it. If the neighbor is invited in, if his views are seriously entertained, the two gathered in such a spirit of hospitality and truth are in a position to recognize that reality and our idea of reality are not identical. In some deeply disturbing and inexpressible way, reality transcends idea. Without the disruption of the neighbor, idea eclipses what is beyond idea, and becomes idol.

But the door can be barred. We are free to abide in the mind. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell.” By withholding the status of “neighbor” from all but the like-minded — those who ditto our opinions, who agree with us that the details of reality that appear to contradict our views (or more subtly the exclusive validity of our views) are irrelevant (if not outright deceptions), who share our antipathy toward our non-neighbors and agree with us that entertaining their ideas is fruitless at best (and possibly corrupting) — we find willing partners in reducing the world to pure idea. The impurity rejected is that of reality who transcends mere idea.

*

We stabilize our sense of reality through a variety of intertwined methods. One of these methods is by successfully observing and describing the world to ourselves. Another is to reliably anticipate or predict events, or even better to influence or control them. But perhaps the most important method for creating a solid sense of reality is to find agreement with others. This last method can compensate for the absence of the others.

*

[Solipsism] “is rare in individuals–but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

*

When a group agrees with itself that whatever appears to be an anomaly is mere noise, or error, or deception, or irrelevance, it is able to avoid (or at least postpone) confrontation with anomalies, which are the sparks of chaos, the pinholes in our knowledge. Anomalies remind us how much more there is to things than we possess as individuals, or as members of a particular group.

It is easier to love the reality we have made for ourselves — our own sense of truth — than it is to love reality. Reality challenges us, makes claims on us, changes us. If we think of ourselves as discrete, unchanging, self-consistent beings, reality threatens our mortality. If we think of ourselves as connected, evolving, expanding creatures, reality offers us perpetual natality.

*

We hate the possibility of the situation that requires the aid philosophy, so we deny that possibility and we deny the use of philosophy. Philosophy is a waste of time at best, and most likely corrupting.

But perhaps there’s some validity to the suspicion. Like generals thrive on outbreaks of war, and doctors thrive on outbreaks of disease, philosophers thrive on outbreaks of disillusionment.

The slippery slope argument is the slipperiest slope. In fact, it is the slipperiness itself, a universal lubricant that creates a friction-free abstract world where the slightest tilt automatically dumps whatever sits on it into an abyss of catastrophic consequences. The “friction” it removes is that of human judgment and responsibility — our ability to decide to change course.

Explicit forms of understanding and communication (explicit truth) can represent only some aspects of reality. In conflicts between rationalism and irrationalism, enlightenment and romantic ideals, suits and creatives, what is at stake is the leftover reality — its nature, its unity and/or multiplicity, how/whether truth can be established/shared, and how it relates to those realms of reality that can be known and spoken of explicitly.

My own hunch is that the non-explicit aspects of reality are precisely those that matter to us, and the near-universal requirement that things be known and spoken of in an explicit mode serves as a filter that systematically filters the non-explicit from consideration in most collective endeavors.

I also think the non-explicit aspects of reality are precisely those that most need to be agreed upon and shared, but this agreement and sharing is different from agreement on fact or sharing a belief in the validity of an argument.

I’m trying to develop a thought, and I suspect it’s already been worked out and articulated somewhere, but it sure isn’t present in the business world. It’s related to a point a friend made to me recently, that much of anthropology (and of qualitative research in general) is over-focused on language and ignores much of the pre-/non-linguistic concrete reality that constitutes our private and cultural lives.

As designers, language is a big part of what we work with, but as most people will admit, the best designs are great because they relieve us of the necessity to think in language. We just use our tacit know-how and accomplish what we wanted, without ever verbalizing the means or the ends. Designs that require users to stop and verbalize everything as they go are inadequate to varying degrees, based, I think, on the temperament of the user. I am convinced some people live their lives in verbal self-dialogue on most matters, oscillating between verbal thought and execution of what is thought, where others lose themselves in tacit activity, and every requirement to think verbally is an unwelcome interruption. This has serious UI design implications, because the former wants things spelled out explicitly, where the latter is feeling for intuitive cues largely invisible to many users.

I’m the second kind of temperament, and it really is why I don’t like to look at clocks, lists or timesheets, because it destroys the continuity of my activity. Even when I’m working in words, the words are not explicit questions and answers, but more like blocks I’m mutely playing with. I think this is a Wittgenstinean thought: I’m developing a tacit know-how in the use of language to do some particular thing that I can’t yet verbalize, not entirely unlike building a house using a command language.

I think language is a very flexible instrument, and based on how well developed it is, it is able to justly articulate much of what goes on in the tacit practical world, and once it is able to do this, it becomes instrumental, capable of being used in planning and executing. My real question is this: how valuable an investment is the development of language in design projects? What are the possible tradeoffs?

• We can inadequately describe the worldviews of our designands (sorry, experimenting with a coinage), and save time, and money at the expense of articulate understanding and design quality.
• We can adequately describe the worldviews of our designands, and gain articulate understanding and design quality at the expense of time and money.
• We can dispense with description of worldviews of our designands, and gain design quality for less time and less money, at the expense of articulate understanding.

Here’s a thought: when we write an ethnography, what we are really doing is designing language and models to help some particular audience cultivate some particular relationship with people of some culture. This sounds functionalist, but I think it sort of protects us from mere functionalism in the way that phenomenology protects metaphysics precisely by setting it outside the domain of its inquiry. This approach protects the dignity of informants by throwing out every pretense of comprehending them as people, and instead comprehending what is relevant to relating to them.

In honor of Hanukkah and Christmas, two great gift-giving holidays, this post is about gifts.

*

Agreement does not (only) mean correspondence of belief. More than that, it means compatibility of belief. It means the possibility of relationship in the medium of understanding, activity and purpose. A truly agreeable gift signals agreement in this expansive sense.

*

From Clifford Geertz’s “From the Native’s Point of View”:

…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

*

“Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them.

A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.

A good design shares the essential qualities of a good gift.

*

A post from an old blog:

Heaven is the world once it knows who it is, and what it is not.