To say that design sometimes requires tradeoffs is certainly true, but not true enough. It would be more accurate to say that making tradeoffs is essential to design, and that good design is largely a function of insight, skill, discipline and courage in making tradeoffs.*

My belief is that the “de-” prefix of design designates the tradeoff element of design. De-signing is setting apart significant things, against what is seen as irrelevant or insignificant according to the vision of the design, so their complexity is contained and it becomes possible to systematize the parts and produce a whole that is both manageable and grokkable.

Of course, eliminating unnecessary tradeoffs is also an important part of the art of design, but making sacrificed considerations invisible or manifestly irrelevant is even more important.

It is often hard for people new to design (or bad at it) to accept the necessity of tradeoffs, much less to embrace tradeoffs as the key to simplicity and specialness. More often tradeoffs are seen as omissions, flaws — evidence that a system is still incomplete. So wherever missing elements or considerations are detected, attempts are made to incorporate them, often in the locales where the omission is noted, without regard for the whole.

In attempting to avoid tradeoffs an unintended tradeoff is made: simplicity is sacrificed. And it is not just any simplicity. It is simplicity informed by a clear sense of what does and does not matter. And that sense of relevance is the tacit moral content of the design, what is spontaneously experienced as personality or soul. This tradeoff of soul is hard to pinpoint in particulars and articulate. To minds dominated by language — minds who equate word and truth and reality — such tradeoffs of ineffable who-knows-what for effable features seems more acceptable than the reverse, trading a vague and subjective sense of rightness for hard, objective things. By this process, a je ne sais quoi rightness of a product becomes a je ne sais quoi wrongness. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the thing, besides the fact that it seems a bit complicated or confusing — but there’s also nothing right about it.

*Note: the oft-observed incidental beauty of industrial objects engineered with no concern for aesthetic considerations, might be due entirely to the uncompromising tradeoffs made in optimizing performance. Nietzsche wrote extensively about how prolonged, relentless and often brutal observance of custom — much of which consists of prohibitions — eventually results in refinement, elegance and the highest forms of beauty. It might be that every aesthetic sensibility is a disciplined logic of exclusion. It might be that our instinctive detection of personality is a sizing up of value selection and prioritization, in terms of substance, definiteness and consistency.

Wikipedia says “According to the second law of thermodynamics the entropy of an isolated system never decreases; such a system will spontaneously proceed towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the configuration with maximum entropy.” Maximum entropy = maximum disorder. 

It seems that systems created by human minds have the opposite tendency: an isolated system proceeds toward minimum disorder. The simplest and least disrupted life — the secluded life of the ascetic — perceives the most perfectly ordered reality. 

People with complex, routinely shocked and disrupted lives perceive a chaotic reality that overflows a mind’s capacity to contain and order. Usually we think of the ascetic life as more concerned with the transcendent, but this could not be less true. They are interested in protecting the mind as its own place, farthest from the disruption of transcendent reality through its myriad obstructing agents, chief among which is the disagreeable and detested neighbor. But to approach the transcendent with all of one’s heart, mind, soul and strength cannot be done without also approaching one’s neighbor. 

Diagnostic Self-Privileging is a phenomenon where a person behaves as if an ability to name, explain and assess another person’s attitudes, behaviors and beliefs constitutes genuine understanding.

The Diagnostic Self-Privileger’s (DSP’s) stance is the stance of the expert: “This has been seen before; it called this; it is an understood phenomenon; we know what to do about it.” The DSP comes prepared with the knowledge, the language, the skills, the judgment of an expert — and perhaps with credentials of whatever kind the community seeks and respects as signifiers of legitimate forms of privileged knowledge — and expects to be regarded as an authority on the matter.

Rather than listening, empathizing, attempting to understand, and contending with the substance of a diagnosed subject’s points the Diagnostic Self-Privileger diagnoses the subject as pathological, treats their opinions as symptoms of the pathology, and then proceeds to explain the pathology in terms of theoretical factors and forces (rarely accepted by the diagnosed).

And of course, diagnoses imply cures. For the DSP, whether the cure is vaguely insinuated or explicitly prescribed, the cure is rarely voluntary. Negative moral valuation is useful here, as incorrigible wickedness justifies involuntary cures. The subject deserves it. But also, the opinion of the diagnosed about his diagnosis is where is delusion is most virulent, so the diagnosed is ignorant of his wickedness and its true causes. He is ignorantly evil, and willfully ignorant in an evil way. Everything points to coercive intervention.

But also, by framing the other’s perspective as disease rather than something worth learning about, the DSP can justify excluding the subjects of explanation from participation in developing or testing the explanation. Again, the diagnosed’s objections to the diagnosis are intrinsic to the disease. To listen to these objections, is to risk seeing their validity, and seeing the validity is to contract the disease, or at least weaken one’s resistance to it. Instead, the DSP observes the symptoms, collects more data, finds new connections as well as new examples, and works the theory into something more cohesive, more airtight and bullet-proof, more emotionally satisfying and more effective in justifying a coercive or if necessary, violent solution.

For this reason, Diagnostic Self-Privileging must be treated as a pathology. Diagnostic Self-Privilegers construct elaborate closed arguments to invalidate, dehumanize, silence and dominate their alleged patients. They will claim everyone benefits under their treatment, but the DSP defines what “benefit” means, and they are willfully ignorant of what truly is beneficial or catastophic to those they diagnose. They cannot be reasoned with or appealed to, because the only reasons they admit are their own, and appeals are treated as contagions. But in fact it is their reasons and appeals which are the real contagions. One cannot afford to get entangled in their elaborate arguments and theory-systems — whether the arguments are theological, sociological, economic, or psychological — because this can only confuse what is really going on, which has nothing to do with what they claim, and everything to do with their end-game, which is, as often as not, almost entirely unconscious. They, of course, will object, but despite what they think, their circular reasoning is neither true, nor good — for others, or for themselves — nor even understood by themselves.

Right?

*

To observe a recurring pattern of attitudes, behaviors beliefs, etc. is one thing.

To see the pattern as a syndrome and to name it and define it so others can identify  is another thing.

To attempt to explain the causes of the syndrome is yet another thing.

To assign the syndrome a moral value is another thing still.

To prescribe a cure for the syndrome is another thing altogether.

To see these things as inseparable and necessarily implying one another and nothing else, this is the point where incorrect and wrong intersect.

A surveyor articulates a landscape, while an author places boundarystones along a plot of language. 

Some concentrated world-tilting words of the kind which frequently finds its application in daily life and spontaneously reemerges as a reality:

Returning perception to an organic membrane that communes with reality, the stop discloses timing. Time in the singular is revealed as an abstraction. With a thing, process, or event, there is no single time, overarching each and every aspect, but many. There is a time for meeting, a time for falling in love, a time for marrying, and a time for begetting. As Paracelsus, who studies the dynamics of timing, says, “time does not run in one way, but to many thousand ways. For you see that thyme blooms all the year round, whereas the crocus has its time in autumn.” Each thing, process, or event is a nexus of tempos, a cluster of rhythms responding to different influences. The deeper knowledge of organic perception pertains to potential times or timings of an object.

(From David Appelbaum’s The Stop.)

I welcome this insight into that cluster of recurring realizations that constitutes my life.

A design brief is itself a designed thing: an object whose purpose is to equip, inspire and empower a design team to design with maximum effectiveness.

A design brief defines a problem succinctly, precisely, comprehensively and objectively, so that the design team is clear on 1) what the designed artifact must do, 2) for what people, 3) in what contexts, 4) with what resources. It should specify 5) how proposed solutions will be assessed as successful or unsuccessful. And it should be distilled and presented so each member of the team can grok the problem as a whole, intuitively internalize it, and hold it in her mind.

Ideally a brief operationalizes a design problem, meaning the brief specifies tests to which proposed designs will be subjected, so that evaluation is detached from arbitrary, intuitive and subjective judgments of project sponsors. If objective criteria are satisfied, the problem is by definition solved.

*

A design brief is the social contract of a project. It specifies the precise constraints to which the team must submit. Because the team knows exactly where it is unfree, it can confidently exercise freedom elsewhere, including discovery of new forms of freedom capable of producing new conceptions and innovations.

The motto of the Vienna Secession: “To every age its art. To every art its freedom.”

And to every freedom its responsibility.

All tools extend our abilities in some way or another. They let us do things that we could not otherwise do, or at least not as quickly, efficiently or easily. But there is a special class of tools that extend our minds, and allow us to conceive things we otherwise wouldn’t. These are my favorite tools.

My first experience of this relationship with a tool was with Pilot Razorpoints (and later Pigma Microns). When I drew with this instrument, very different types of images emerged from the process of drawing. I’ve had the same experience with film photography equipment, some versions of some graphics software, musical instruments and software.

Somehow I, the instrument and the thing I am working on all merge into an activity, one which is greater than each of the parts. The tool becomes like a person with whom we become absorbed in conversation to a degree that it feels as if the conversation is having itself through us.

I am going to call this state of relationship with a tool “instrumental rapport”.

No matter how much a fundamentalist stresses the primacy of his denomination, his real religion is fundamentalism.

The most certain events of life are inconceivable: birth and death. Between them is love, which, while equally inconceivable, is misconceived and familiar.

Perplexity is the dark reverse face of inspiration.

*

Perplexity is the philosopher’s element. The element is intelligibility void of concept — pure unconceived, answerless, questionless, borderless mind-aether.

Perplexity is the conceptual vacuum that sucks answers and the questions to which they belong out of our lungs.

Though perplexity is the philosopher’s element, even philosophers hate perplexity. What philosophers love is coming out of perplexity. Emerging from perplexity after prolonged submersion in its disorientation, groping blindly to an exit on the far side, a soul emerges in a new world, in a new life, as a new everything. But entering perplexity, even approaching it, a soul senses its finitude against intolerable infinitude.

The output of objective thought is so persuasive that it can overwhelm the subjective processes that produce it. Subjectivity then appears as something that stands against an objective world.

If you pay close attention to the production and evaluation of objectivity, however it becomes clear that objectivity is not the absence of subjectivity, but a form of super-subjectivity or trans-subjectivity — truth that remains true even when detached from the what, when and who of the originating subject and conveyed across time and space to other subjects.

*

So far, I am loving Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. It is shifting how I understand objectivity — slightly. He emphasizes the generative dimension of objective knowledge.

Something I jotted in the endpapers of my copy of Personal Knowledge:

• Logical – coherent?
• Rational – calculable?
• Reasonable – super-subjective?

Fluency is immediate interaction.

There is no interpretive mediation — no translation in the middle — between intention and action, perception and understanding, or understanding and intention.

Intention flows directly into action; action flows directly into perception of its effect; perception flows directly into understanding; understanding flows directly into intention.

*

Algorithm is action mediated by explicit language. Where one must explain (or justify) how one will do a thing before doing it, explain (or justify) how one is doing a thing while doing it, and explain (or justify) how one did a thing after doing it, the mediation of language is necessary.

Algorithmic activity and flow are incompatible.

*

Understanding a philosophical work means understanding a new set of concepts and gaining fluency in their use in understanding.

*

A philosophical work is understood only in an experience of fluency acquired through the act of reading, which is transferable to practical life beyond books and reading. What is happening is immediately understandable through the philosophical concepts.

*

If one is fluent in a language, novel things are said without thinking about the language. The novel sentence flows forth as an expression of the intention.

A great designs supports fluency. Not only in repetitive tasks, but in novel interactions. One intends to do some thing, and the action flows out through the designed thing without a mediating “how do I?”

*

In David Appelbaum’s The Stop the awareness of the blind is sightless fluency. No visual image of the disposition of objects intervenes.

*

A dancer is not recalling steps, nor imagining the visual effect of the movements of her body. She has the awareness of the blind.

*

The most exceptional experience bypasses words and makes language reel. Then language recovers and talks it out of its uniqueness. When asked “Why?” we give an answer.

Great user interfaces operate at a tacit level. The hands work without verbal instruction, to manipulate the objects on the screen.

In this sense, the interface becomes an extension of the body. We do not have to give verbal instructions to the parts of our body to make them do what we want — at least not once we’ve mastered a movement.

When we work to learn a new movement, it is as if the tacit mind transfers control to some other verbal part of the mind that clumsily operates the movement while the tacit mind works to understand in its own kinetic way so it can take over. And when it takes over, the verbal mind must get out of the way. If it remains in control — even a little — its verbalizations will get in the way and trip the tacit mind up. As a teenager I read a dirty trick from The Inner Game of Tennis on how to destroy an opponent’s serve: ask for an explanation on how the serve is done. Instantly the serve stops working, and the opponent falls into a vicious down-spiral of frustration and attempts to analyze and fix the broken serve.

So when software gets in the way of our hands and requires a shift of attention from the work to the operation of the software, it is a profound and frustrating shift of consciousness that makes any work that requires concentration and flow fall apart.

The more a person’s work requires flow, the more frustrating it is to have the flow broken by verbal interruption. Worst of all is when a piece of software has been mastered, the tools becomes an extension of the body and the mind, and flow has become easy — and then the software is changed in a way that requires retraining of the tacit mind. Suddenly, an impediment  breaks the continuity of thought and motion and effect, and the flow is no longer accessible. Then, not only is there a difficulty — there is an irrecoverable loss of a mode of activity, a violation of hard-won mastery.

Sometimes the change is worth it. It is an investment. The retrained tacit mind works even better than before. But this is not always the case. Sometimes what motivates the change is a personal aesthetic preference of a designer or product manager. Sometimes the change is made to accommodate more kinds of tasks and users. Sometimes the change is made to make room for more features, added for the sake of demonstrating innovation, or having a bigger feature list to whip out to impress customers and humiliate the competition.

In all these cases, someone is thinking about the software as something that is looked at, noticed, thought about and evaluated. Great software, however, disappears behind the actions it supports, as a great sentence disappears behind its content.

With sentences and software a compulsion to stand out, to make an impression, to be thought of as great creates annoying mediocrity.

*

Great software disappears behind the actions it supports, as a great sentence disappears behind its content.

The goal is flow, and flow requires tacit mastery of the tools one uses. Tacit mastery is fluency.

We usually use the word fluency for mastery of language. And what this means is we are no longer verbally operating the foreign language with our verbal mind. The tacit mind has stepped in and works with the new language directly.

So, really, it is not a tacit mind or a verbal mind. It is always the tacit mind — the tacit mind extending itself through fluent mastery of tools. And one of the most powerful and flexible tools is language. With the tool of language the mind can extend itself to all kinds of other tools, by asking itself questions, making tactical plans, and executing on those tactical plans.

Some people seem only to master this mode of activity. It is probably a great investment and a winning strategy — learn the one tool and use it for everything. But working exclusively through language does limit what can be done beyond the limits of language.

And what are beyond the limits of language? As-yet-inarticulate possibilities. To work through language — to only think or do what one already knows how to say does not entirely preclude innovation, but it does hobble it considerably.

*

In reading difficult books, especially philosophy books, a mind is learning fluency in new language tools. Sentences, paragraphs, chapters — the whole book — the whole corpus, even — must be read and reread from different angles until the words hang together and make a whole fluid meaning. The tools are learned and then they are used, but there is not always a nice verbal link between the before language and the after. It would be like showing how to use a hammer by operating a screw-driver.

Most of us choose to read books that make use of pre-existing fluency for effortless consumption, or to build upon the old mastered language and extend or refine what already was. Philosophy, however, breaks your serve.

But often, as with software, we have to ask why. Why would you break my existing tacit understanding? Is it a good investment? Will you help me think better? Or are you building your list of publications to impress colleagues and intimidate rivals? Are you moved by the work, or the need to compete?

Great philosophy disappears behind the thoughts it conceives.

I like fill-in-the-blank formulas. This is the formula for a design problem: “We need __[person]__ to __[action]__ instead of __[alternative]__.” 

When the acquisition of a new concept suddenly brings profoundly surprising possibilities into view, it is important to remember that one can legitimately move from ignorant opposition to informed opposition. It is all too easy to confuse the impact and aftershocks of understanding with obligation to agree. 

Any competent engineer will tell you that good engineering depends on understanding materials. If you misunderstand your materials the system will fail.

Materials must be understood with highly nuanced specificity. Two metals that look and feel the same to an untrained eye and hand might behave drastically differently when subjected to friction, heat or strain.

Design has a similar respect for materials. Design, however, also includes categories of “material” that are not physical — ones that engineers typically factor out, namely subjectivities.

Where an engineer sees a car as a system, a designer is trained to see the car plus the driver as the system — a system with both physical and psychological components. Same with a retail space: a system of objects, surfaces, light, sound, merchandise, customers, sales personnel. Or a hammer — a system that includes an arm, a hand, a nail, a board and a metal form. And with the insight of Design Thinking — (the realization that all systems that include and depend on people are actually best approached by methods used to solve design problems) — things that aren’t normally thought of as “design” are viewed through a design lens — like organizational structures, or business processes, or political policies.

How do you recognize a design problem? If a system being developed will succeed only if people cooperate or participate or behave in some particular way, your problem is a design problem. Approaching such problems as a design problems, using people-centered design methods, will increase your odds of success.

But doing the usual, and treating design problems as if they were engineering problems by failing to factor people in at all, or making uninformed generalizations of “how users are” (or “how women are” or “how female general managers are”, etc.) will get you exactly the kinds of results as you’ll get if you specify “metal” for your engine block. You might get high-carbon steel. But you are just as likely to get tin.

Of course, you can reinforce a tin engine block with a different metal and maybe get it to function, but you’ll never get the level of quality as you would if you considered the material from the start.

Likewise, trying to add design after something has been fundamentally developed for nobody in particular will lead to a mediocre solution is unlikely to be embraced by anyone with much enthusiasm.

Or to put in another way: engineering your way through a design problem is bad engineering.

Know your materials!