I am grateful I never had to meet Nietzsche the man, and only know the being who wrote and was written — the being who thought his way into my own living soul.
Nietzsche stands in for so many other flawed people who wrote books which brought authors to transhumous life in my own life. I am grateful to have known only their authors.
Who is the “real person” behind the author? Wrong question! Who is the author who enters a crippled actor to make of him an inspired actant? Who is the author who pours their being into their vessel in order to be poured out into so many others?
Whoever says “the author is dead” performs a contradiction, and proves the opposite. Only an author truly lives.
And a golden ball in flight condenses across the alembic: a throwing gift.
Years ago, a cynical friend remarked to me that when organizations hire companies to come in and implement enterprise software, what they are really buying is redesign of their operations. That is true, but let’s not lose balance: without enterprise software, redesigned operations will sink back into chaos.
In the future, service design will iteratively develop one hypercomplex deliverable.
A service is a hyperobject. A service is a multidimensional lattice laced so densely along so many vectors that the designer’s primitive tomography of “visual communications” cannot capture its being, or even do justice to its kind of being.
You could stack printer plots of experience maps and service blueprints and ecosystem maps higher than the stratosphere, but the more complete the documentation, the more unmanageable the towering edifice of knowledge grows, until it collapses into incomprehensible paper rubble.
Early last week Susan asked me if I could sense what is next in design. I told her no. For the first time in my career I had no signal. By the end of the week, I had a strong signal.
Any form of pluricentric design (including service design) crafts hyperobjects (objects of more than three dimensions).
Only now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, can we approach hyperobjects as what they really are and design them accordingly! Human minds are (possibly with rare exceptions) confined to thinking in three dimensions within unidirectional time. With four, we are outside human intuition, and must work very differently.
So – not only are services not trees, but they are also not semi-lattices! Nor are they anything as tame as three dimensional semilattices. They have at least four dimensions I can count:
Touchpoints along channels – line
Omnichannel motion across channels – plane
Delivery operations – volume
Actor – tesseract (since all three dimensions are duplicated by each actor, yet share the same hyperobject)
And woven through this 4D space (the word hyperloom comes to mind) are innumerable threads gordian knotted into a dense hypermesh:
Value exchanges among actors
Qualitative and quantitative data about actors
Measurements of various events within the service
Nonhuman service actors (ironically ANT’s flat ontology might only make sense in information hyperspace! Entities like data stores might end up making most sense inside of the actor dimension… hmmmm)
Team/-member responsibilities for shared opportunities, shared outcomes, implementations, etc.
I’m going on record. You heard it here first.
Services are hyperobjects.
Because services are hyperobjects, they cannot be adequately rendered by any amount of planar expression.
Until we learn to model, document, develop and manage services as hyperobjects — something only now possible thanks to AI — service design is an exercise in futility, doomed to partial success at best.
Participatory know-how precedes and embodies theoretical know-what.
Existential know-that and moral know-why precedes both, providing material and motivation of embodiment.
Know-what is not the paradigmatic knowing, and to take it that way demonstrates impoverished knowing.
Our being streams out through our senses and limbs, through our tools, into our materials, crafting the enworldment through whom reality is given in this momentary way.
In a speech to Parliament in 1943, concerning the design of the rebuilding of the space where MPs themselves met and confronted one another in debate and deliberation, Winston Churchill famously said:
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
This is one of the wisest things any sensitive consumer of design has ever said about design.
Had Churchill done any of this shaping work himself his insights into shaping — or to put it more neoplatonically, formation — he might have extended and deepened his insight even further:
As we form our materials, our materials form us.
In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer observed how in dialogue, we become participants in a conversation who transcends us; the conversation has itself through its participants.
Craft is material dialogue.
In craft, our being merges with our tools, our materials, and the forms emerging through the craft. The craft reveals-creates itself through us and our materials and our tools and the forms.
Craft instaurates (reveals-creates) craftsman and craftwork.
From Charles Stein I learned the word “artifex”, the alchemist participating in alchemical transmutation, and this affords a prettier formulation — pretty enough, perhaps, for an alchemical text:
Craft instaurates together artifex and artifact.
To be alive to craft is to be alive to world.
In craft, the dense and surprising reality of the world and the dense and surprising reality of one’s own self attune and atone to one another.
We once again belong to the world by taking part, and participating in its being.
For a designer, choice of materials is choice of the self one will become.
In service design, our material is organizations.
Some organizations are people serving other people, circulating value, sharing life.
Some organizations are corporations with nothing but dry dollars in their veins.
Heaven help the designer who attempts to craft such a material, for that designer will fuse with it. When the designer’s crafting hand touches the corporation, the corporation touches back. The corporation touches the designer with its own transmuting corporate touch, and a designer is now human resource, incorporated, corporate. The world is now given in quantities, words, abstractions, techniques, agendas, opportunities, dollars.
Hermetic design is just a truer name for human-centered design, and human-centered design is just a truer name for design.
Over the last decade, I have observed a pattern in political thinking concerning comparisons.
In this pattern, some real object of criticism is compared unfavorably to some counter-ideal.
But the counter-ideal is never sampled from reality. It is always a concept whose function is absence of whatever is being condemned.
The West. The gross unfairness of the real, nearby world is contrasted with a distant world free of this exact form of unfairness. The citizens of totalitarian regimes, for example, do not suffer from inequality, because every person has exactly the same status under the state. And the pervasive hate we hear about so much in the West is unheard of outside the West. If such prejudices exist far away where we have never been, we haven’t experienced it, so why would we assume it is existent?
Capitalism. The injustice of Capitalism is contrasted with non-Capitalism in faraway lands or times, conceived as life elsewhere that is probably lived in such and such a way, all so hazily conceived that just about any tantalizing utopian form can be discerned in its billowy rorschach clouds. I hear from a well-informed internet researcher that medieval peasants enjoyed short workdays interspersed with holy, frolicsome dance and play, similar to the life Cubans enjoy — or would enjoy if imperialists would stop meddling with their prosperity.
Wars. We look at images of atrocities, served to us by sources everyone around us assumes to be true, mainly because everyone they know assumes the same, and we can see plainly that this war is infinitely worse than all the other wars we have inspected with similar appalled fascination. This war is obviously a genocide, otherwise the images of dead and injured women and children wouldn’t be shown to us by disinterested parties who simply report the facts on the ground. But what we hear from the enemy is propaganda.
Marriages. This partner I’m stuck with is a neglectful, insensitive, selfish, farting, quarrelsome human-shaped mass of irritations, nothing even in the ballpark of the charming, engaging, self-sufficient tower of strength and integrity I deserve.
These times. Past generations had it so much easier than we do. They did not suffer the exact things that make our lives terrible.
Pain. You do not suffer the exact indignities I must endure. You cannot understand my lived experience.
No reality can compete with an ideal — least of all an ideal conceived for the purpose of unfavorable comparison.
When we love such counter-ideals it is only “love” of a negation of a negativity. And that is not love. That is hate flipped inside-out.
But also, ideals cannot be loved. Love transcends self. Nothing is more self than an imagined fantasy. Our ideals, beliefs, notions of what can and should be have more to do with ourselves than the reality they allegedly represent.
Only real beings can be loved.
And real beings are flawed.
But real beings are also mostly beyond our comprehension. What we think about them barely touches their reality. Reality surprises at depths we cannot suspect prior to shock. And these shocks can sometimes reveal the flaws in our own notions of flaw and perfection, our own capacity to judge, our own self-assessment as judges.
But all this is pure complacency to those still omniscient enough to believe that they can use their limited range of experience and logical faculties to model out reality as it is and as it should be. In most cases, a little more life brings a few more shocks and a bit more wisdom and caution toward making grand judgements about realities we barely know — and instinctively avoid knowing, because knowledge destroys counter-ideals.
What a world-spanning miracle a successful design is.
A successful design has successful engineering. Myriad components (physical and logical) are assembled into an elaborate system that functions together in concert as a unit.
But a successful design has more than just successful engineering. Design focuses on human responses to engineered things. Where an engineered system works objectively, building objects out of objects, design concerns itself with subjects in relation to objects. Subjective beings experience, respond to and interact with engineered objects, and, in their participation, complete the design. Design instaurates hybrid systems of subjective participants and objective parts.
But human beings are not solitary. Human beings are profoundly social. For one thing humans swim in shared linguistic meaning. Our heads are full of words. Words enter through our ears, words spill out through our mouths, words swirl about in thoughts, inner dialogue, imagination, poetic inbursts, looping self-talk, babbling. But our environments are overflowing with signs, signals, symbols, meanings, most of which were molded by and for human minds, hearts and hands. Most of what we see around us is only heard and read, but the best of it reaches through the words and touches or strikes our hearts. Our hearts. First person plural. We share our loves, concerns, cares and cultivate, protect, honor, repair them together. When we lose these things we let the world around us deteriorate and decay. We might even want to help it along. A successful design gives us a shared object, inspires shared concern, draws us together, condenses us around common love, gives us shared being with whom, in whom we identify. Without common objects of love, identity devolves into mere typology, classification systems, schema, categories, criteria, reified imaginary constructions.
But best of all, successful design requires us to leave the insular certainty of our own expertise and mastery. Design demands that we let go of what we know and how we know it, so we can expand our understanding to accommodate how truth and reality is given to others. We must, again and again, pry apart the grasping fingers of our all-knowing minds, force open our own comprehensive omniscience, and expose our tender palms to what is not yet graspable. To “open the hand of thought” is not a gentle release. It is a terrifying sacrifice, entailing the loss of everything our hand death-grips as its own possession.
Only in this opened state does our hand momentarily apprehend the incomprehensible vast richness of being, and it does so by allowing itself to be held in its openness. Vanishingly few can allow this at all, and almost none of us can do it for long — but this unfolding of comprehension is the one thing needful for inspired, inspiring design work.
And this is why the world is overflowing with unwanted garbage, forged in the closed fists and hard skulls of technical masters of design — experts in convincing heard-headed executives to build useful things, spray-painted with desirability, calculated to achieve measurable business goals. These design experts might complete many successful projects, but they do no successful design, and so, despite their best intentions, whatever they construct drains yet more love and care from the world.
In oppressive times, disorderly culture breaks bonds, loosens constraints and opens possibilities.
Disorder, having won freedom, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over order per se, until “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
In anarchic times, orderly culture offers bonds of belonging, defines generative constraints and narrows the field of possibilities to a focused mission to actualize.
Order, having secured Pax Imperium, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over disorder (including destabilizing alternative orders), and proceeds to dominate, constrain, suppress or destroy any possibility of alternative to itself.
Every extreme hates its opposite, even in trace amounts. A microdose of the detested essence is a gateway leading inevitably to deadly overdose. So attack it with excessive force in the cradle before it has a chance to toddle about as a minidose or walks confidently as a mezzodose, because we foresee where it is headed.
The true enemy of extremism, whether an extremism of excess or deficit, is temperance.
Someday temperance may discover that its golden mean and golden rules for maintaining that mean is not a mere averaging of extremes, but something of its own
Someday temperance may discover that its centrism is not a mediocrity between two forms of inertial unreason, but principled centeredness.
Extremists will sneer at this and feel wise to it. There is a word for this conceit of feeling wise to wisdom.
Most of our making is construction. We build systems of meaningful units, glued together with logic and causality.
We do precious little craft.
In fact, we do not even know what craft means.
We are dead to craft.
Because we are dead to craft, the material world is dead to us.
We are cursed with a midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to word. On contact with our skin, words to turn to more words — words about words — entire universes of words — packing inward, denser and denser, within our word stuffed suits.
We cannot touch the world. We cannot feel anything against our skin, except the texture of text. Words have woven themselves around us, webs, cobwebs, soul mummies, whited cocoons.
We can speak fluently about galaxy clusters, theories of relativity, subatomic particles, but we have to sit down with a computer to figure out what love is. We understand how things happen in supercolliders, distant laboratories, radio telescopes, but our own kitchen table, and the things sitting on and around it? It is all inscrutable epiphenomena.
Walter Benjamin quoting Stanley Eddington, made this same point:
I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.
Bruno Latour, crypomarian ethnographer of Sciencestan, said this:
When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.
…
Religion does not even attempt to race to know the beyond, but attempts at breaking all habits of thoughts that direct our attention to the far away, to the absent, to the overworld, in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was before misunderstood, distorted and deadly, of what is said to be “what was, what is, what shall be,” toward those words that carry salvation. Science does not directly grasp anything accurately, but slowly gains its accuracy, its validity, its truth-condition by the long, risky, and painful detour through the mediations of experiments not experience, laboratories not common sense, theories not visibility, and if she is able to obtain truth it is at the price of mind-boggling transformations from one media into the next.
What is it to be alive to craft?
How does the world feel on our fingertips when we remove the thick mittens that control our hand movements?
We feel what material suggests. We are medium. We, our instruments, the being coming are fused in medium.
My eye, my hand, the pencil in my hand, the vibration of pencil tip against paper tooth, that trace of graphite my pencil leaves, the form on the paper, the urge for a line here, a shading there, my eye and my heart — they are inseparable. Words, memories, stray emotions drift about discreetly. They know not to get in the way. Something comes into being through the work, among the converging materials, borne on media.
An unknown goal draws the present toward its desire. This is how it is to craft.
In craft we are alive to reality. In this state, we receive reality, take it in, incorporate it, grateful for what is given. We finally know that we do not need much, only a handful, but this handful makes us and the world real. Without that, there is nobody present to possess a retirement fund the size of the entire S&P.
Do you feel the unreality of what you take for life? Do you suspect you are living in a simulation? Entertain the reality that it is true. You are living a simulation — and this lingering suspicion is your last tenuous contact with reality.
Our being streams out into the world around us. Every soul is nebula-shaped and its ethereal arms radiate to the ends of the cosmos. The world streams into us, and its tendrils convey light and life from oblivion, the benevolent mask of infinitude. The streams crisscross, interweave, and each brightly knotted nexus is someone.
Reading Christoper Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree” I am realizing the extent to which a service, also, is not a tree — and the extent to which we service designers try to force services into tree-structures.
Alexander’s signature move, dating from his earliest work, is what I would characterize as polycentralizing design: identifying the multiple centers and fields of activity, noting where the fields overlap and interact, and how these overlapping fields are embodied and changed — most notably, vivified, strengthened, weakened or killed — by physical form.
Alexander’s eternal enemy is orders that abstract and simplify the complexity of life, and design structures reflecting this simplified abstraction, that are intended only to support this partial understanding, and end up severing vital connections that allow built environments to live.
Why is it that so many designers have conceived cities as trees when the natural structure is in every case a semilattice? Have they done so deliberately, in the belief that a tree structure will serve the people of the city better? Or have they done it because they cannot help it, because they are trapped by a mental habit, perhaps even trapped by the way the mind works — because they cannot encompass the complexity of a semilattice in any convenient mental form, because the mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception?
I shall try to convince you that it is for this second reason that trees are being proposed and built as cities — that is, because designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act.
I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.
It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.
I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)
I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.
It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.
The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.
My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.
An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:
James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.
When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.
All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.
I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.
For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.
In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.
Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.
There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.
I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.
I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.
I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.
The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.
+0(
“+”, plus sign: the four directions. Earth.
“0”, zero: positive absence, enabling finite cyclical life. Man.
“(“, open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.
The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!
It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.
This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.
Mathematics as sacrifice: one sacrifices one’s woolly fantasies for the orderliness of collective positivity. But the sacrifice is only satisfied or completed when the entire mathematical project becomes a noetic mandala and one’s sacrifice is of one’s phantom apparencies only as requiescent unto Being. What one believes or supposes to be real is accepted only in so far as it can be relieved of its ontological positivity which it offers up to unique, undivided Being itself.
My interpretation of this passage: Mathematics is a kind of tradeoff, or exchange. Give up personal, idiosyncratic, intuitive knowing and in return, receive a more disciplined, shared, public knowledge. But this tradeoff is only an intellective gain if we fully understand — (I would argue in a different, everted mode of metaknowing) — that all these various ways of knowing, these subjects (each with their own special objectivity) together belong (as all things do, including ourselves) to Being, who can be approached numerous ways but never reached and possessed in the form of positive knowledge.
In this everted metaknowing we situate ourselves… as comprehended by infinitude. And it is our situation we comprehend, not the comprehension itself. — This is suprehension: everted metacomprehension of comprehension.
Mathematics is one sacrifice to public life.
Another is exalting liberal democratic order above our own policy preferences and passions. Out of loyalty to our way of self-governing, we champion another citizen’s right to slander what we hold sacred, or we uphold a law we abhor because that law was established lawfully.
Jewish law is yet another. It is beyond silly to refuse to eat a cheeseburger in order to be neurotically certain we are not accidentally eating a baby goat that was cooked in its own mother’s milk. But we decided this matter together and that sacralizes the decision and makes it the furthest possible thing from silly. (This being said, I do not observe this particular prohibition.)
But I gladly make Judaism’s highest and most sacred sacrifice — the sacrifice that replaced the bloody, smoky, visceral Temple sacrifices, and founded rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple and subsequent Babylonian bondage. This is the sacrifice called Machloket L’Shem Shamayim — sacred conflict.
In Machloket L’Shem Shamayim, we vigorously argue our side against another, while suprehending that a higher truth always and eternally transcends my side and yours. I’ve heard this expressed as “The argument itself is truer than either side.”
Above our own certainty is agreement, but not mere compromise for the sake of practicality, but dedication to Being who permanently transcends any single truth, and ultimately all truth.
Those mystics who sneer at liberalism, believing they are wise to it, and in fact superior to it, demonstrate by this attitude that they are not even equal to liberalism — much less to their own religious tradition.
Higher sacrifices are sublimated Golden Rule, carried far beyond rule of computation, law or ideal — the metaprinciple of principle.
I, like you, am finite and limited in some unique way.
I, like you, am limited, but situated at the I-point heart of the world, which is one enworldment.
I, like you, cannot help but believe what seems most true to me.
If we can know this together we can dwell together in holy irony of comprehension within suprehension.
