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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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?”

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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!

Minds secrete knowing like mother-of-pearl, coating irritant reality with lustrous likeness. 

To be recalled vividly as a person is the objective immortality of fame.

To be forgotten as a person but to be seen through like a lens or ghost — to become as invisible as vision itself — is the subjective immortality of  incarnate intuition.

The living immortality is extrapersonal.

In my view, the problem with Rorty is that he fails to pay sufficient attention to practices outside of language that serve to strengthen or weaken a person’s — or a whole linguistic community’s — conception of truth. Clearly language is very important, but even the most persuasive and cohesive description that fails to describe what eventually happens or already happened when it uses its internal logic to speculate on past, present or future will lose persuasive force. Without this kind of activity, science would never have progressed beyond scholasticism.

Rorty may not be metaphysically logocentric, but he is pragmatically logocentric. Only some of our truth-instauration practices are linguistic.