Category Archives: Design Instrumentalism

Scientific Method vs Lean Startup

Design, Design Instrumentalism

In his instant-classic The Lean Startup, Eric Ries restores some crucial components of the Scientific Method to innovation processes, long-neglected by “scientific” management.  Among his most important restorations is the the experimental practices that are the heart of scientific discovery. This is enormously important: without experiment, the creative dimension of science is lost and “scientific rigor” of quantification becomes an expensive, time-consuming and intrinsically conservative hindrance to doing anything unprecedented.

However, I do not believe that Ries has restored the entirety of the Scientific Method, and for the sake of setting up an unimpeded engineering-dominated process, has omitted or de-emphasized key non-engineering components that improve outcomes and shorten timelines. Here is a partial list of omissions:

  1. Hypothesis formation. Hypotheses are not just guesses which can be tested experimentally. Hypotheses are informed guesses, and it is on-the-ground-discovery that informs mere guesses and transforms them into hypotheses. Starting with a hypothesis rather than some dude’s random notion can reduce development cycles. Also, some ideas are so weak that no amount of pivoting will tweak it to awesomeness.
  2. Theory. Theory in science is what directs experimentation and lends knowledge a progressive thrust. Without an appropriate theory, experiment devolves into aimless and fragmentary trial-and-error. This kind of aimlessness and fragmentation in a business context translates to confusing and disjointed products. It is not that Lean Startup does not accumulate knowledge, but that its “validated learning” is too product-centric and not nearly user-centric enough. Lean Startups know everything there is to know about their own product and the possible permutations of their product and the customer behaviors and reported opinions about the product, but insights into the user’s inner life and outer context — the things that inspire the best design ideas — will not readily surface using Lean Startup methods.
  3. Crisis. Without the rigor of theory and the discipline of reflection, the kinds of problems that produce revolutionary solutions cannot come into view. Teams will hack their ways right past the crises that and miss the chance to find simple radical product insights. This is the precise point where philosophy can become a competitive secret weapon. According to Wittgenstein “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.  Isn’t innovation  all about finding, posing and solving such problems?

I’m going to read as much as I can about Scientific Method and develop this thought further and support it with some research. But I’ve been sitting on this idea too long, and I wanted to at least sketch it out.

 

Outline

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas, Synesis

Introduction

  • What philosophy is
  • What designers do: empathy (as opposed to art which is sympathetic) creation of useful, usable and desirable things
  • Practical use of philosophy for design
  • Truth as reality interface (a useful, usable and desirable philosophy.)
  • Anatomy of this book: ontology, epistemology, ethic.

Ontology

  • Ontology = inquiring into being = asking “in what sense is this real?”
  • Being encompasses more than physical entities
  • Many kinds of being exist: objects, time, perspectives, imagination
  • Designer’s ontology: the more ways one sees in what sense entities can exist the more space a designer has to work
  • Order bounded by chaos
  • Chaos is superabundance of orders
  • Order filters chaos
  • Practical consequence of chaos: surprise
  • Knowing chaos means openness to surprise: nonsense might be not-yet-seeing-the-sense
  • Perpetual possibility of “otherwise”, esp. when otherwise seems impossible
  • Horizon and the otherwise — horizon always feels complete and excludes the otherwise
  • Pluralism: coexistence of ontologies united in possibilities of otherwise — possibilities which can (and ought) to be sought and actualized (“fusion of horizons”)
  • An ontological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of being (metaphysical manifold)

Epistemology

  • Epistemology = inquiring into knowledge = asking “how do we know?”
  • Knowing is filtering (determining relevance) and relating
  • Knowing is both explicit and tacit
  • An epistemological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of knowing (venn – name?)
  • Tacit know-how: skilled wordless interaction with concrete realities
  • Tacit morality: sensing value
  • Perspective and pluralism
  • Pluralism vs reductionism
  • Perspective and inspiration: the upside of pluralism
  • Knowing is social: “How do we know?” more than “How do I know?”
  • Self as a society
  • Knowledge shows realities: aletheia
  • Synesis: seeing realities as together with others together
  • Positivity and negativity: facts and questions
  • Knowing a subject vs knowing an object
  • Participatory knowing versus objective knowing
  • Hermeneutic holism: knowing wholes and parts
  • Social hermeneutics
  • Social creativity
  • A methodological framework: a simple way to approach social creativity (the outspiral)

Ethics

  • An ethics sustains an ethos (lifeworld)
  • Designer’s ethos: Maximum diversity within unity, mediated by things
  • Designer’s ethic: Commit to learning from others in order to design to them and provide them a place in the world
  • Designers outfit an ethos with things that support it — not preserve or conserve, but allow it to live and develop like a living thing
  • Enworldment: creating myriad ways to exist in the world with things and people
  • Virtue ethics
  • Virtue of receptivity: otherwise awareness
  • Learning a subject requires unlearning — unlearning is the hard part.
  • Learning involves letting go of what one already knows in order to know better
  • Unlearning is an anxious activity: immersing in perplexity
  • Virtue of sacrifice: willingness to suffer to understand another person
  • No method to emerge from perplexity
  • No way to predict the outcome
  • Virtue of fortitude: acceptance of the pain of learning
  • Inspiration as expansion of horizon: sudden acquisition of new way to see
  • Inspiration brought about by learning from others, suffering anxiety, accepting perplexity, emerging with new perspective
  • Virtue of reason: the obligation to demonstrate, persuade
  • Virtue of constancy
  • Virtue of honor – agreements

Thought scraps

  • Empathy vs sympathy
  • The way philosophy is read… hermeneutically: not step-by-step explanation
  • Blindness vs darkness

A Designer’s Philosophy

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

I am starting work on a book called A Designer’s Philosophy.

The book will outline a comprehensive philosophy suitable for a designer. To some extent it will include a philosophy of design, but that will not be its primary focus. One of the central, deliberately accepted assumptions of the work is the principle of pluralism, which is why it is “a” philosophy for one particular way of approaching life. This book will offer a set of conceptual tools to help a certain kind of person self-orient, understand, articulate and act in the world in a cohesive, consistent and meaningful way: a sort of user-interface for the environing, pregnant chaos we know as reality.

It will be based very heavily on American Pragmatism, phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics (fused in the tradition of Richard J. Bernstein), synthesized with several like-minded but diversely-focused parallel practical traditions including current UX practice, Soft Systems, Design Thinking and Actor-Network theory. I will also steal freely from late Wittgenstein, various Existentialists, philosophers/historians/scholars of science and even some not-very-reputable theologians.

But this will not be a scholarly book. I will do my best to include no quotations or footnotes, or anything that complicates the dead-simple but elusive concepts this book exists to convey. It will be a comprehensive, organic vision and whatever introduces a seam or calls attention to a grafting scar, such as a nod to the discoverer of this idea or that, will be cut, smoothed and disguised to the best of my ability.

In other words, this book will be a great theft. I will acknowledge the thinkers to whom I owe an intellectual debt in one little easily-skipped blurb introducing a bibliography. Essentially, I am going to steal a great number of insights and make them my own, then provide a list of the households I hit as a cursory acknowledgement of indebtedness. But in fact, it will be an act of thieves’ honor: “I’ve hit these homes and made off with all the loot I could carry in my own arms. I think I grabbed the best stuff, but it might be profitable to hit it again.”

My goal is to make this book as visual, as simple and as compact as possible. If I can distill it into a pamphlet of 16 pages of diagrams that will be perfect, because that makes letterpress a viable option.

The philosophy will divide into three parts (not including introduction and conclusion):

  • Ontology: “What is being?”
  • Epistemology: “How do I know truth?”
  • Ethics: “How should I live?”

The book will be 100% free of techniques, case studies, scientific corroboration and any other content that might give it the slightest chance of success. This book will be beautiful, and meant to be fetishized (and fetishized with the purest conscience, because the book will show why fetishes are necessary and valuable). My view is that while philosophy can be understood as a form of pre-science indispensable to scientific progress, it can also be understood as a form of art, and at its best is an inseparable synthesis of prescience and art, a beautiful and inspiring surveying and mapping of a field of possibility upon which methodical disciplines can travel, settle and flourish.

Because it is unlikely to sell and because I want complete control over its physical form, I’m anticipating self-publishing it in a very small run.

Worldviews

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

A worldview (weltanschauung) is a holistic vision of existence, which by its nature has an appearance of completeness. It is a totality comprising 1) perception of a particular pattern or field of relevance and irrelevance in its experience, 2) conceptual articulation of relevant experience into an interrelated, nested system of categories, 3) appraisal of values according to tacit but self-evident standards, and 4) the development of a characteristic set of practical responses to its experiences. All this manifests as an individual vision of the world — a way of seeing — but it also naturally generates outwardly visible phenomena corresponding to the dimension enumerated above: 1) an intentional thrust, 2) a characteristic symbol-system, of language and image, 3) an identifiable aesthetic-moral style, and 4) a body of explicit beliefs and formal customs. All of this together constitutes a proto-culture, a germ of tradition.

What is not outwardly visible, however — despite appearances — is the worldview itself that engendered these forms.

“Kernel of culture, invisible as sight,
Darkless and lightless in the back of an eye”

The worldview must be sought to be found, otherwise one tends to discover and rediscover only one’s own worldview. (* See note to nerds, below.)

*

(A sidenote: Worldviews are not formed in a vacuum. They form within cultural conditions, which in turn formed within cultural conditions. In the beginning is always culture, and culture is within reality, but culture is reality — and also it somehow produces cultural progeny. This is the chicken-and-egg problem. No culture, no humans; no humans, no culture.)

*

My theory: Coherent worldviews are constantly, spontaneously generated by a variety of spiritual impulses: philosophical, artistic, mystical, political, etc. Some cultures promote their production, others suppress them, but they are always coming into existence, and most die off without attracting the slightest notice, perhaps because the worldview itself lacks awareness of its essential differentness. But some worldviews acquire vivid expression as actions or artifacts, and gain cultural currency — and not necessarily from minds congenial with the actor or author of the works.

The symbol-systems in particular (especially when separated from the rest of the “tradition”), meant to represent particularities of the engendering worldview (its “meaning”), are also frequently capable of representing or describing features of other worldviews, quite different from the origin.

In particular, the symbol-systems are capable of hosting several perennially recurring worldviews, found in nearly every time and place, which recur precisely because they are capable of thriving within just about any symbol-system. They enter into the symbol-systems and animate them various spirits, and to the degree that these spirits can harmonize (however uncomfortably) within these symbol-systems the culture gains viability and force.

Three of these recurring worldviews are of particular interest: Fundamentalism, gnosticism, and philistinism.

  • Fundamentalists interpret symbols strictly literally, which means in strictly objective terms, using violent magical stop-gap concepts to fill in the gaps and form a totalistic worldview. In regard to others, fundamentalists oppose and impose.
  • Gnostics interpret symbols strictly figuratively, which means there are no gaps to fill, because the concepts are liquid, with no solid, practical obstructions to free-flowing completeness. In regard to others, gnostics stand apart, uninvolved.
  • Philistines just do what is expected, in order to keep doing, and symbols are just one of many practical concerns. In regard to others, philistines cooperate, uncritically.

Wherever there is culture, these three generic spirits move in and make their indispensable contributions. Nothing happens without them.

*

  • Note to nerds:

What the discipline of hermeneutics pursues is the recovery of the generative worldview behind created forms. The pursuit is a futile one — that is, it is never brought to completion — but the pursuit of completion is the goal that makes the activity possible. For this reason, any “hermeneutic” loyal to some set worldview, for instance a “Marxist hermeneutic” or “feminist hermeneutic” is impossible. The point of hermeneutics is precisely to overcome the limits of one’s particular worldview in order to experience beyond one’s horizon and to modify one’s worldview. An ideological “hermeneutic” is a contradiction in terms.

Not that re-interpretation of common phenomena into terms of  one’s own worldview is illegitimate. This activity is necessary. But when one reinterprets an author without first earnestly practicing hermeneutics, one strips away the author’s human status and treats the author and the work as mute, passive phenomena. A reader kills “the author” for the same reason any person kills another: to extinguish an active, apparently harmful subjectivity and to render it a passive object. A corpus has an author; without an author a corpus is corpse. It returns to dust, to impersonal text, to unprotesting material with which one may work as he pleases.

Techne, phronesis, design and innovation

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesis

A passage from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, illuminates a problem I have encountered innumerable times working as a user experience consultant: the need for predictability in innately unpredictable situations.

Before I quote the passage, I should provide some background, which involves the role of process in the practice of design, and how the need for predictability and preconceptions about process play into it.

What clients want is an established, proven process which can be applied to their business problems in order to lead them step-by-predictable-step to a predictable outcome. The ideal is maximum predictability throughout the process.

Predictability, though, can apply to many different aspects of a process. For instance, predictability can be applied to the specific form a solution will take, or it can apply to the general effectiveness of a solution to solve defined business problems. It can apply to the specific functions a solution must perform or it can aim at achieving more general goals (and leave open the question of what specific functions are needed to accomplish those goals). It can apply to varying granularities of time, ranging from the time it will take to complete the whole process, to the time it will take to complete each particular step within the process, all the way down to the number of minutes it will take to complete each sub-task in a project plan.

The question of which particular things must be predicted is very important because predictability comes at a cost. Every point of predictability necessitates a trade-off of some kind.

For instance, predictability in regard to the form a solution will take limits innovation: it means the form is pre-defined. The kind of solution available to this kind of pre-definition is most often an assemblage of “best practices”, which is a euphemism for “imitation”. An assemblage of existing elements is easily pre-visualized and implemented methodically and predictably with easily predicted results: a competently executed best-practices frankenstein will perform well enough to earn an employee a shiny new resume bullet and maybe a year’s job security. When a client comes in white-knuckling a feature-aggregate “vision”, nine times out of ten what looks like fixation on an idea is in truth only a side-effect of severe risk aversion.

Genuine innovation requires a different and slightly more harrowing approach. It requires a higher tolerance for open-endedness. Innovation entails, by definition, the discovery of something significantly new: a possibility nobody has yet envisioned and considered. Until it is discovered, the innovation cannot be shown to or described to anyone. (Innovation: ORIGIN Latin innovat– ‘renewed, altered,’ from the verb innovare, from in– ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’, from novus ‘new’).

Innovation does not necessitate radical unpredictability, though, and it also does not entail an undisciplined or purely intuitive approach. The locus of the unpredictability is in particular points within the process where discovery and the need to innovate are concentrated. At the micro-level, a solid innovation process is still mostly constituted of predictable activities, but wherever open-endedness is needed, the demand for predictability is relaxed or suspended. At the macro-level, at the overall success of the solution a solid, user-informed innovation process is predictably effective in its results, even if it is unpredictable in matters of form.

Most companies fail to innovate, not because they lack ingenious, inventive, creative people capable of innovation,  and not because innovation is unavoidably risky, but rather because the thoughtless demand for predictability at all points precludes innovation.

A big contributing part of this problem is that for many people, practice means predictability. It means pursuing closed-ended goals, and evaluating ideas with pre-defined criteria. The notion of an open-ended process, where evaluation involves human deliberation and multiple satisfactory outcomes are possible seems antithetical to “best practice”.

Here is where Bernstein becomes useful. It turns out that the Greeks were aware of this distinction, and had names for the types of reasoning  involved in each process. According to Bernstein, one of the most fundamental and damaging philosophical blindnesses of our time is the identification of techne (of technical know-how) with method. We tend to impose our conception of techne on understanding and practice in general, and in the process we lose something very important and central to humanity, a type of reasoning Aristotle called “phronesis”, generally translated as prudence or “practical wisdom”.

 The chapter from which this passage is taken is excellent from beginning to end, but here is the most directly relevant part:

…Phronesis is a form of reasoning and knowledge that involves a distinctive mediation between the universal and the particular. This mediation is not accomplished by any appeal to technical rules or Method (in the Cartesian sense) or by the subsumption of a pregiven determinate universal to a particular case. The “intellectual virtue” of phronesis is a form of reasoning, yielding a type of ethical know-how in which what is universal and what is particular are codetermined. Furthermore, phronesis involves a “peculiar interlacing of being and knowledge… Understanding, for Gadamer, is a form of phronesis.

We can comprehend what this means by noting the contrasts that Gadamer emphasizes when he examines the distinctions that Aristotle makes between phronesis and the other “intellectual virtues,” especially episteme and techne. Aristotle characterizes all of these virtues (and not just episteme) as being related to “truth” (aletheia). Episteme, scientific knowledge, is knowledge of what is universal, of what exists invariably, and takes the form of scientific demonstration. The subject matter, the form, the telos, and the way in which episteme is learned and taught differ from phronesis, the form of reasoning appropriate to praxis, which deals with what is variable and always involves a mediation between the universal and the particular that requires deliberation and choice.

For Gadamer, however, the contrast between episteme and phronesis is not as important for hermeneutics as the distinctions between techne (technical know-how) and phronesis (ethical know-how). Gadamer stresses three contrasts.

1. Techne, or a technique,

is learned and can be forgotten; we can “lose” a skill. But ethical “reason” can neither be learned nor forgotten…. Man always finds himself in an “acting situation” and he is always obliged to use ethical knowledge and apply it according to the exigencies of his concrete situation.

2. There is a different conceptual relation between means and ends in techne than in phronesis. The end of ethical know-how, unlike that of a technique, is not a “particular thing” or product but rather the “complete ethical rectitude of a lifetime.” Even more important, while technical activity does not require that the means that allow it to arrive at an end be weighed anew on each occasion, this is precisely what is required in ethical know-how. In ethical know-how there can be no prior knowledge of the right means by which we realize the end in a particular situation. For the end itself is only concretely specified in deliberating about the means appropriate to a particular situation.

3. Phronesis, unlike techne, requires an understanding of other human beings. This is indicated when Aristotle considers the variants of phronesis, especially synesis (understanding).

It appears in the fact of concern, not about myself, but about the other person. Thus it is a mode of moral judgment…. The question here, then, is not of a general kind of knowledge, but of its specification at a particular moment. This knowledge also is not in any sense technical knowledge…. The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (TM, p. 288; WM, p. 306)

For Gadamer, this variation of phronesis provides the clue for grasping the centrality of friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics.

 …

…for Gadamer the “chief task” of philosophic hermeneutics is to “correct the peculiar falsehood of modern consciousness” and “to defend practical and political reason against the domination of technology based on science.” It is the scientism of our age and the false idolatry of the expert that pose the threat to practical and political reason. The task of philosophy today is to elicit in us the type of questioning that can become a counterforce against the contemporary deformation of praxis. It is in this sense that “hermeneutic philosophy is the heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy.”

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To put it in Bernstein’s and Gadamer’s language: a solid, innovative design methodology requires an intelligently coordinated blend of techne and phronesis, guided by phronesis, itself. It is an immenently reasonable process – meaning that the participants in the process make rational appeals to one another in order to come to decisions – but what is being arrived at is not predetermined, and the decision-making process itself is not determinate. Many good outcomes are acknowledged as possible. The innovators are not looking for a single right solution, but rather a solution that is among the best possibilities.

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Incidentally, innovation is not needed always and everywhere (any more than predictability is). Unrestrained innovation is not a desirable goal, as fun as it may sound.