Why do I love design research? Two reasons:

1. Design research often destroys existing knowledge and expertise,  creating new philosophical problems (as Wittgenstein elegantly defined it: “I don’t know my way about”). This is what I do.
2. Design research produces social solidarity. When a team observes the same realities, reflects together, produces hypotheses and prototypes together and tests them together, and develops a “common sense” — the members of the team become friends in a uniquely substantial way. It is the exact opposite of loneliness.

Why should companies love design research? Two reasons:

1. Problems that defy existing knowledge and expertise are the ones with the most innovation potential. Radically new problems produce the most radical, freshest-feeling innovations. Design research exposes these new expertise-resistant problems.
2. The team alignment resulting from design research creates more cohesive, efficient and inspired teams.

A person who is self-interested and unconcerned with what anyone thinks about it, will sometimes have a change of heart and become intensely other-interested.

Such a person believes he has experienced a conversion and has arrived at genuine concern for the other, when in fact he has taken only a baby-step.

A painful journey lies ahead.

The first leg of the journey is realizing that his change of heart and sacrifice of “self-interests” is mere preparation for a far greater sacrifice.

The second leg is wrestling with whether he is truly prepared to pay such a price. He had no idea what — and even less, who — was at stake.

In the third leg, he must calculate whether he even can afford to complete his journey once he has paid what turns out to be the fare. As he looks up from his tallying, he sees for the first time the reproachful glances of the other passengers who have paid their way.

In the fourth leg, he digs deep and pays up. Now he begins to move.

Emergencies are risky and costly and should not be declared frivolously.

When legitimate emergencies do happen, the heroes are not the hotheads who shriek first or loudest — the heroes are the ones who keep a cool head and maintain the ability to think clearly.

Over breakfast, an evaporating dream is fortified with a confabulated plot which displaces the dream’s truth, but makes the dream memorable.

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Dreams are unintentional, undisciplined, unformed.

Sleeping, the mind is permitted to repose in native chaos and to proceed by accident — but chaos is as immemorable as a speech in a foreign language.

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We remember words, images, forms. We remember by words, by images, by forms. If we do not form reality as it occurs, and derive forms from reality as it occurs — collaborate with reality to instaurate truth — reality escapes and vanishes and we must imagine truth like fiction authors, or lose ourselves to amnesia.

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A life lived without intent, without discipline, and without articulation is in some ways is truer to life than one lived in the artifice of faith, routine and language. Reality is permitted to remain real: unprocessed experience.

But human nature abhors a vacuum. A self demands a history, an I, a future. It is of past-present-future that a self is made and it is by this that a self endures.

If one does not impose self on reality in the moment, it becomes necessary to do so later after the fact, after reality has receded into oblivion on a stream of babble — after reality has evaporated like a dream and is no longer present to represent itself.

Past is fictionalized. And since the future forms itself from past, future is also fictionalized. And consequentially, self is fictionalized.

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Seeking self as an activity separated from trying to understand this world and the beings who inhabit it, is guaranteed to prolong the quest forever, and to deprive the search not only of any possible resolution, but of all sense.

People who think they must “find themselves” before they can move on to other questions, are guaranteeing that they will find neither, because the self is found by finding the world.

Toward alterity: eros, not altruism.

Permeable totalities, not infinity.

Finitude humble enough to fail at apotheosis, once again, forever.

The next time I hear someone call the U.S. healthcare system a joke, I will enjoy savoring the idea that perhaps this joke is being told at our great expense by a mythical comedian.

See if you think this joke is a funny one…

First, few people know that, until recently, the Caduceus of Hermes (what 90+% of Americans would call “the medical symbol”) had nothing to do with medicine. Since ancient times, the Western symbol of medicine has been the Rod of Asclepius — the staff carried by Asclepius, Greek god of medicine — which is a rod with a single serpent entwined around it resembling a U.S. dollar symbol.

The Caduceus only became “the medical symbol” in the early 20th century when it was confounded with the Rod of Asclepius by a U.S. Army Medical Corps officer.

Then note that Hermes is (among other things) the god of commerce. If you are cynical, you might also enjoy contemplating the fact that Hermes is also the god of thieves.

So, our medical symbol is actually the symbol of commerce. Our symbol of commerce is actually a symbol of medicine. We seem able to untangle neither these tangling symbols nor the tangled-up realities they represent, that of dollars and doctors…

Incidentally, Hermes is also a trickster god.

Good one, Hermes.

Ha fucking ha.

I am approaching a point where I will no longer be reasonable about unreasonableness.

The conditions for working with me: Adherence to the law of reason.

You do not have to believe me about anything in particular, but you do have to observe the Fivefold Laws of Reason.

Religions are born as freely-given gifts. They mature in gratitude toward the giver. They die as stolen gifts, snatched from the giver’s hand and stolen as a possession: a belief.

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The giver is a mystery known only by way of receiving from who-knows-where. In the absence of this receiving the giver becomes nonsense.

Once belief is perfected and eternalized — permanently comprehended fact — religion is stillborn-again.

Dis-born, dis-conceived, erased from past and future, annihilated: fundamentalist.

Reading, I just came across a new, excellent word: anadyomenous. It is the characteristic of “coming up or emerging (especially of Aphrodite from the sea).”

A google search turned up exactly one example of the word in use, in the very book I am reading.

Why do I love design research?

First, I love new ideas. Performing design research early in a project generates fresher ideas. Yes, the ideas are better informed, but more importantly, they are better inspired. When we know something we are selectively filtering what seems irrelevant. But what is deemed relevant to any industry gets overcropped by experts and it loses its vitality.

Yet, it is to this expert-blessed depleted ground we go when we want to generate new ideas.

The real opportunities to innovate are hidden in plain sight as irrelevant stuff nobody thinks is important enough to talk about.

Just as importantly, new ideas are impossible to argue in the conventional way, relying on success of precedents. Newness always loses that kind of argument. But prototype arms (good) new ideas with evidence of viability and gives them a fighting chance.

Second, I love reason. We often think of intuition as a purely benevolent force. Think of all the names it goes by: inspiration, imagination, insight, idea. All great things begin with an intuition — and a heroic will to champion it and actualize it. But this neglects to notice that the most horrible things have resulted from malformed intuitions and tyrannical wills acting in the name of heroism — and these vastly outnumber the successes that have given intuition its good name.

And really, isn’t the essence of tyranny to have an intuition — an imagined thing, an alien inspiration, a spurious insight — imposed as a reality you must accept whether you believe it or not?

Reason is what allows intuitions to be accessed, assented to, internalized and shared. Reason is the ethic that feels an obligation to show, demonstrate, persuade and share ideas to anyone expected to treat them as real.

Reason is not just logic. Any horrible idea can be argued logically, and the logical structure is rarely what makes a horrible idea horrible.

Reason is not just adherence to what seems correct. All intuitions seem correct. What make ideas horrible is that they take their own self-evident correctness at face value and sees this as sufficient to require all others to treat the idea as fact, whether it is self-evident to them or not.

Reason means to establish truth socially through experiment. Where people will not submit to experiment — (because there’s an emergency, or there’s no time, or there’s no money, or there’s no point, etc., etc. etc.) —  unreason is at work. Unreason is another name for tyrannical intuition.

Third, I love transcendent truth. That is, I love the kinds of truth that cannot even be imagined until the moment they appear. You cannot go out looking for any particular transcendent truth, because, by its very essence you cannot know what to look for. All you can do is create conditions where it can appear and to expect specifically the unexpected. When things feel constricted, played out, used up or settled, and you cannot imagine how anything new could possibly happen in your industry, your field or your organization — you are failing to factor in the innately surprising nature of transcendent truth. Again, what we know secondhand cannot produce transcendent truth: only de-filtered reality with some of its chaos permitted to shine through.

Fourth, I love dialogue. Dialogue is a very specific kind of conversation: one that allows groups (usually small ones of two or three) to gather in the name of reason, in contact with a reality, and in the urgent struggle to find-create-instaurate something new together, to experience transcendent truth, not only of the situation and its possibilities, but also of one another.

Last, and very much least, design research produces better products. I really like great products. There’s a lot of them, though. We are drowning in great products. What is rare — if we are honest with ourselves — is great work. So, the principle cultural value of good products is that they increase the urgency to make even better products, and the urgency can grow so enormous and so unavoidable that organizations will sometimes resort to doing design research to create them.

I’ve done work with research, and I’ve done work without it, and the difference is total. But you have to want that difference. Powerful people and complacent people rarely want it. But the world needs it.

There’s a lot of painful lessons about love in this passage from Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. I used to want my daughters to read it, but really this is for the boys. The last conversation between Cosimo and Viola is excruciating.

Continue reading From Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees →

Serres: “Whether royal or imperial, whoever wields power, in fact, never encounters in space anything other than obedience to his power, thus his law: power does not move. When it does, it strides on a red carpet. Thus reason never discovers, beneath its feet, anything but its own rule.”

I’ve tried to make this point several times when observing the phenomenon of the elevator pitch.

Today’s power is busy, and it expresses itself as intense impatience: “Say it so I get it instantly and effortlessly, or don’t say it.” This constraint constrains all communication to repetition of the already-known; a reference to a thought already had; a ditto; flattery.

(Ditto. Irony detected and left intact.)

Reason is willingness to submit to trial by experiment.

Unreason believes reason is logical derivation of truth from principles.