Category Archives: Esoterism
Misusing esoteric symbols
I have a long habit of turning esoteric symbol systems into all-purpose concept models.
Two of the most dramatic examples: the trigrams (and hexagrams) of the I Ching and the Sefirot of Kabbalah.
When I interrogate myself on what I genuinely believe, I find that I I believe that this (mis)use of esoteric symbol systems that is the ground of their validity. It is primarily their value in practical use — helping us make sense of our own subjective experience, inspiring, motivating and animating our responses (or non-responses) and guiding our actions — that suggests that they are “true” beyond this sense-making use.
But I am a Pragmatist, and I’m not sure that I believe that truth is meaningful beyond this kind of practical use.
To repeat, the value of these models is threefold. They can help us live more lucidly, meaningfully and skillfully.* And I think it is important that the models engage us intuitively, that is, in a way that transcends what is explicitly sayable. This is the power of concept models, both in design and in religion. These models reach beneath language and help our intuitions organize themselves into living faiths, instead of forcing intuitions to push paper in the bureaucracy of talk — essentially enslaving them to doctrine.
All art and design derive their power from transcending the centralized control of language, which filters out all but the commonest experiences.
Note: * This, of course, is a paraphrasing of Liz Sanders’s Useful, Usable, Desirable framework, which is itself a concept model of supreme importance. It is, in fact, a mundane expression the Great Triad: Earth, Man, Heaven.
Earth is What-lucidity, that is objective mastery. Man is How-skill, that is practical effectiveness. Heaven is Why-meaning, a capacity to experiencing value, positive or negative.
The downside of modernity, especially its scientific aspects, is that it emphasized What/Is/Usable/Earth and How//Can/Useful/Man to the exclusion (or more, the compartmentalization) of Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven. We got amazing at explaining and manipulating the physical world. We developed myriad techniques for doing whatever we want. We accomplished this by bracketing all questions of meaning. When scientists ask “why?”, they are not asking for a meaningful why, they are asking for a causal account, “how?”
In late modernity Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven part of life has been sawed off from everything else entirely, and quarantined in museums, theaters and religious spaces. During the day, we are scientific, practical and dutiful, doing things without any Why at all, pretending very unconvincingly to be “passionate” about our drudgery. At night, after we’ve used ourselves up doing meaningless tasks all day, we try to regain some meaning through entertainments and spiritual stuff, and it fails to replenish us.
And this is why we can do anything we set our minds and hands to, but we find it harder and harder to want any particular thing. We have a crisis of caring. We are nihilists because our ways of understanding fail to take seriously the problems of value and meaning. We are forced to emotionally hype ourselves up to care about anything outside our most mundane needs. We project our own petty childhood feelings onto the world stage, finding stand-ins for our shitty moms, dads, friends, teachers — maybe movies or stories that touched us as kids — and wherever these projections fail, we force them into some shape we can feel about, or we just drift off into confused apathy, or cosmic generalizations that license indifference and dress it up as wise detachment. This is why, once our kids are taught the correct way to think about the world, they fall into hysterical despair and display every symptom of distress. We know damn well we damaged them, but we shout over our intuitions and call them prejudiced and phobic.
Fact is, we have no idea how to make sense of the world and continue participating in it — and at the same time, care about it. That can change, but we are resistant most of all to what will save us. We’re too clever for any human way of being. The theories of physics and our good standing with our fellow nihilists is far more important to us than living lives we can love.
Rambling on about self-formation
When children engage in repetitive play, it generates habits of personhood. It is important to be patient and allow them to be repetitive, however tedious it might feel after the zillionth repetition. I find it helpful to meditate on what kind of adulthood might grow from whatever habits form in various kinds of repetitive play.
The analogue for adults is ritual. Rituals can be intentional, such as religious observances, or secular (or semi-secular) routines like exercise or other practical self-maintenance activities. Or they can be accidental, like habitually consuming certain kinds of media, playing games or performing routinized work tasks.
Prayers are verbal-mental rituals. They bring us back to a way of understanding the world along with the emotional attitudes that naturally attend that understanding. Obsessive-compulsive thoughts are a kind of involuntary prayer. Reading challenging books and having challenging conversations can also be prayer.
We also have social rituals that shape our collective existence. Ethnomethods are the meaning-making social habits we use to be understood and to understand others in any given social setting. Nearly all ethnomethods function unconsciously and recede into the background of social life, unless they are not followed, at which point things become awkward or tense. Ethnomethods are a little like well-designed tools, which disappear in use. (Design researchers who know the history of their craft know that much of what we do is rooted less in anthropology than in ethnomethodology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. Lucy Suchman pioneered thinking of physical artifacts as social actors woven into the ethnomethodic social workings of their use contexts. It is sometimes very helpful to think of design flaws as a kind of ethomethodic breach objects commit. Maybe it would be better to reverse what I said. Well-designed tools disappear into the background like ethnomethods, because, in fact, they are materialized ethnomethods,)
Ethnomethods are also verbal and mental. To participate in social sense, we adopt a certain collective vocabulary and logic, and this becomes the conventional wisdom of the group.
I’m flaky enough to believe ethnomethods (enacted by humans and nonhuman) enable distributed cognitive processes that are a conscious being of a group. This seems less far-fetched, once we observe and take seriously how each person’s own mind exhibits intellectual polycentrism among factions and alliances (complexes) within one’s own mind, but that somehow this polycentrism creates a nebulous center who is each person’s I. What shouldn’t this same intra-self consciousness-generating social dynamic be possible between people and generate consciousness that transcends any one of us? I think it is not only possible, I experience it as actual.* (If you like this line of thought, see the extra-extra-flaky note below.)
These verbal and mental ethnomethods are enacted in official communications of organizations; in these cases, they function like group prayer. The mental ethnomethods are repeated in popular news and entertainment media, and then we repeat them in our own conversation. This same vocabulary and logic is, more often than not, adopted by individuals, made habitual through repeated use and internalized as truth.
Like all ethnomenthods, if a person does not participate in verbal and mental ethnomethods, and insists on using idiosyncratic or disharmonious vocabulary or logics, they will create confusion, awkwardness and strain. Severe breaches of verbal and mental ethnomethods have been treated with hemlock.
Our deeply-engained ethnomethods and personal babits are self-generating activities. Whatever we repeat shapes our first-person being — let’s call it first-personality — which in turn shapes our third-person being — our third-personality, or persona — and how we perceive it.
- Extra-extra-flaky note: For me, super-personal consciousness (also known as egregores) are not a matter of speculation, but is, in fact, a given feature of reality, as manifestly real as gravity.
And I’ll disclose right now — I’m feeling reckless, so why not? — that as service designers, we are intentional shapers of social arrangements within organizations. We attempt to create stable, mutually-beneficial interactions among people through modifications of physical artifacts (touchpoints), processes, policies and social roles.
This means that, whether we know it or like it, we in the egregore summoning business.
I got ever-so-slightly recognized (and I mean almost not at all) in some service design circles for pointing out that the essential medium of service design is organizations. An organization as a discrete social entity. As a disciple of Bruno Latour, I define “social” very broadly, and include within its scope not only humans but everything that supports a social order. Anything social is a human-nonhuman hybrid.
The medium we work with is social — organizations. But what do we actually aim to produce when we design in an organizational medium?
Monocentric designers (UXers, visual, interaction, communication, product designers) often say that, whatever medium they work in, the goal is to produce experiences — individual experiences.
Polycentric designers produce collective experiences, in which each of us partakes as participants, each with their own individual experience.
Right now, service design is heading into a new formalistic phase. It is probably necessary. But we must not lose the inward and qualitative whole as we focus on quantifiable parts.
Totality : Infinity ::
Some ideas alive and other ideas are not.
Nonliving ideas are mere content components. These content components can be combined with other content components to construct larger and more complex content component systems.
Living ideas are not mere content. Living ideas generate content.
Some living ideas participate in infinite being and others do not.
Transcendent living ideas are aware that they are organs of infinite ultimate being, and it this awareness that allows them to participate in being that transcends their comprehension.
Comprehensive living ideas believe they are themselves the totality of ultimate being, and whatever they cannot comprehend is, to them, nonexistent.
Levinas named his magnum opus Totality and Infinity. This book could have been given a very different title.
Hyperobject of knowledge
The reason I am clarifying my theology is so I can contrast it with Richard Rorty’s inspiring atheistic alternative. But as is so often the case, I share Rorty’s disbeliefs. The God I know is not the “God” Rorty rejects. And a great many of Rorty’s atheistic hopes are hopes that, for me, are inseparable from my religious faith. To put it in his own words, he favors an atheistic description, while I favor a theistic one.
My main point of disagreement with Rorty is over the role of religion in social life, and the importance of maintaining commonality of faith across divergent modes of understanding. Here I find esoterism persuasive. Religious language and practice support a pluralism that supports cultural solidarity and personal spiritual growth and flourishing. But conceiving this truth requires a different mode of thought than science. Those whose understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” is scientistic will find themselves unable to enter this mode of understanding. Worse, they will consider this incapacity a virtue, and reinforce their humble “can’t” with a proud “won’t”. They want’t to break with the past and with those loyal to the past, and actively effect a rupture they believe they merely observe.
Now I’m thinking about where I disagree with esoterists. First, I do not believe in their absolute hierarchy of development. I do think there are degrees of understanding of esoteric truths, and I these truths are common across traditions. But we gain these only with some real and painful tradeoffs. We lose some virtues as we gain others. A religious community needs the full range of virtues, not only intellectual ones. I do not believe esoterists ever arrive at a full understanding of God.
With respect to knowledge, God’s infinite being is best understood as a hyperobject (to use Tim Morton’s term), an object of knowledge of a scale and topology ungraspable by any individual mind, and therefore best “known” through distributed understanding. But this is just the belief part of religious faith. Religious faith is a whole-being affair, something done with the entirety of one’s heart, soul and strength.
If this blog were an online publication, I’d set this post aside for further editing. But this blog is a public diary, so I’m hitting “publish”.
How to close the theory-practice gap
I have never once just thought up a truly new practice and then executed it afterwards.
Every new thing I’ve ever conceived emerged from intuitive, nonverbal doing — from groping in the dark, from muddling through, usually under conditions of considerable perplexity and stress.
Only after, if it worked, can I go back and reflect on what made it work, and produce a theory.
I’ve never seen things go the opposite direction.
As far as I know, the only way to close the theory-practice gap is to theorize from practice. And it is less like a closing of a gap than it is paving something substantial but rough and poorly lit.
There is only a gap if theory has been sketched into a vacuum. I don’t think those gaps ever close.
And trying to practice from theory leads to mechanical sterility. It leads to execution of memorized dance steps, or the recitation of syllables from an alien language.
Every important thing I’ve ever conceived has come came to me this way. And every important thing I’ve ever learned has come to me first as a new practical capacity, a new ability to perceive or respond first — tacit know-how — and only much later has it become something I can actually explain.
Maybe a Sartrean formula would be helpful: Practice precedes theory.
What emerges from practice-forged theory is praxis — articulate practice.
I am excited about design as an alternative mode of practical life.
It is a new living tradition, a way of working, self-consciously developed by many diverse practitioners, solving a vast and growing array of real-world problems in every conceivable material (matter, space, time, information, imagination, feeling), for (arguably) the last 60-so years.
It is a tradition that must be appropriated and internalized before it becomes productive in the head, hearts and hands of a participant.
It is the appropriate mode of practice for anyone who works in systems in which humans participate. If you think about it at any depth at all, this category embraces just about all human activity, most of all the governing of people at every scale.
Design is the way we should be approaching life together, but its methods and even more, its core sensibilities, its conceptive capacities, are still largely confined to specialists. In my own life, I’ve found that disciplining myself to behave as a designer has made intractable, incorrigible problems soluble.
Almost anything I do, I do better if I do it in a designerly way.
But what is this designerly way? It is not methods. It is what animates these methods. It is a faith.
More and more, I am realizing that the purpose of my life is to illuminate and activate the esoteric underpinnings of design practice.
Like all faiths, design has a visible outward form that can be looked at — an exoteric expression — and an inward, esoteric being that cannot be looked at, but rather is seen from.
The reason I have been so quiet lately is I am returning to the sophia perennis. I want to do for design what esoterists have done with traditional religions — illuminate their transcendent unity. To this end, I am focusing on the esoteric depths of my own faith, and studying Kabbalah.
But just to preemptively address on obvious and important objection: I am not in the slightest interested in making design into a religion. I am just trying to invest our practical lives with religious energy. We cannot continue on with this vacuous, stressful, tedious slogging. Our oil-dependent economy depends even more on another rapidly depleting fuel source, will-power. Our will-power tanks have been sucked dry are emptied even of vapors.
We sit before our screens, commanding our hands to move and type out words, but they refuse to do what we say.
We need an alternative, renewable psychic energy source. But we cannot tap into this source as long as we continue to insist that all new sources conform to our current sacred theories of power. These theories possess us and will not release us until we pay the price of our redemption.
Six sensibilities of service
I’ve decided to experiment with making my course “Introduction to Service Design” an exercise in hermetics. I am going to re-title the course “Initiation Into Service Design”, and I am going to re-title the central module of the course “Six Sensibilities of Service”.
I’m using “hermetics” to mean applications of esoteric insights in the domain of mundane life — applied hermeticism. I’ve been working this way for decades, and have struggled for language to explain my approach to design and how it differs from the technique-driven approach of most professional designers.
The esoteric language, including the designation “hermetic”, however, is not for the public. It is just for me and my own clarity, and for the handful of weirdos who also respond to this kind of thing and find it clarifying, rather than mystifying. At this point, I do not plan to run around billing myself as a “hermetic designer”. My outward practice and language will and must stay compatible and cooperative with the exoteric practices and norms of the design industry and the business world to which it belongs.
This kind of skillful selective semi-concealment, by the way, is part and parcel of esoterism, which always remains in communion with the exoteric facets of its tradition — while serving it by investing it with life, or “vivifying” it, to use Valentin Tomberg’s words.
I’ve intuited this idea often, but I think it is time to say it explicitly: Design is a tradition equipped with exoteric theories and practices, rooted in esoteric understandings into which designers are initiated, or of which they are oblivious.
Merely learning the lingo, theory and methods of design does not fully equip a would-be practitioner to actually design. Nor does expertise in executing the techniques designers use. There is something else required if one hopes to “really know what they’re doing” as designers, or even “knowing where designers are coming from”.
The new goal of the course is to accelerate the acquision of this “something else”, which consists of activating a set of enceptions — what hermeticists call arcana — each a different capacity to perceive, recognize and interact with a certain species of given, without which the given is missed. The given is either not noticed, submerged in oblivion, or it is meaningless, or perplexing.
For the sake of sounding minimally sane, sober and non-exotic, I will call these enceptions “sensibilities”. After all, each is an ability to make sense of some particular species of given. Also, the word “sensibilities” is common in the world of art and design, and my use of it is, though novel, completely compatible with current usage. It is a very gentle repurposing of the word.
The six sensibilities are what one must activate and cultivate in oneself, in order to recognize, understand and resolve problems with services.
Think of the six sensibilities as parts of a mental hand — five fingers and a palm. All six are needed to grasp the complexity of any service as a simple whole. All six are needed to articulate this clear understanding of service and communicate it to others. All six are used to grip the tools of service design in shaping new services or reshaping existing ones. They are the background of any clear understanding, any effective communication or any skillful response to a service design problem.
These six sensibilities differentiate inspired, insightful service designers who work naturally and intuitively from designers who work formulaically and mechanically with tools and techniques they understand mostly theoretically. Before the sensibilities are active, a designer is like an aspiring dancer who must recall and execute each step of the dance they are performing. After the sensibilities are developed, the dance moves the dancer’s body with spontaneous, musical grace.
But this course is not only — or even primarily — for designers. It is for people who might hire and/or collaborate with service designers. But why would they need a course? After all, don’t we hire professionals to spare us the need to become experts?
Here is why: One of the challenging peculiarities of service design is that an organization cannot hire service designers to do service design work for them. They must hire service designers to work with them.
Service design work changes the way organizations operate, and even how they organize themselves around the delivery of services.
Every design discipline works with a particular material, and with service design the material is the organization.
For service design to work, an organization itself must, and cannot avoid, participating directly in the service design process.
That participation requires a significant degree of understanding of service design, and that understanding is hollow, ineffective and overwhelming without the six sensibilities.
That is why this course is needed.
So what are the sensibilities and how do we activate them?
I will list the sensibilities, and offer a quick and barely adequate description for each one:
- Temporal sensibility – Services are experienced in a series of Now points, each with a past and future. At each point in the experience, one remembers what happened before and tries to anticipate what comes next, and this shapes and colors what is happening in the present. When the service experience ends, it is remembered as a story with memorable ups and downs, and an overall impression of how it went. Designing an experience that unfolds over a significant duration of time requires a different mentality from designing an object experienced momentarily — it requires a temporal sensibility.
- Omnichannel sensibility – Services happen across multiple touchpoints delivered through different service channels. A typical service zigzags across locations (home, car, store, service centers) and physical objects (computer, phone, product packaging, product interfaces) and virtual objects (websites, apps, messages, social media platforms). But they are perceived as part of something, and that is a service. Designing an experience that unfolds across multiple channels of a person’s free choosing requires a different mentality than designing an experience confined to a single channel — it requires an omnichannel sensibility.
- Polycentric sensibility – Services are experienced by different actors playing different roles in the service, often interacting with one another. For instance in a retail scenario, a customer is an actor who receives the service, a cashier is an actor who helps delivers the service, while backstage in the stockroom another actor supports the service. Service design tries to make each actor’s experience a good one. Each actor is considered a different center of a common experience with multiple centers. Designing for multiple actors simultaneously requires a different mentality from designing for one actor at a time — it requires a polycentric sensibility.
- Reciprocity sensibility – At every point in a service, in order for the service to unfold as intended, one or more actors must be motivated to participate in the service. The actor wishes to get some kind of value from their participation, and if they see no value they are unlikely to play their part. They invest something valuable — effort, time, information, money, comfort, etc. — in order to get something valuable in return. This is as true for those delivering and supporting services as those receiving them. And it becomes exponentially true when participation is voluntary and non-hierarchical, for instance when partners cooperate to provide jointly-delivered services to shared customers. To the degree that a service provides a win-win value exchange for all who participate in it at every point, the service will flourish. Wherever it does not, the service will be weak or even broken, and actors will opt out (refuse to buy; quit their job) or choose services with a value exchange (buy from a competitor; find a better job somewhere else). Designing win-wins for everyone who participates in a service requires a different mentality from designing around the needs of only one actor — it requires a reciprocity sensibility.
- Operational sensibility – In the practical world, ideas are worthless unless they can be implemented and made real. Service design is radically practical, and to ensure ideas can work in practice enlists experts from throughout the organization to contribute their knowledge and disciplinary know-how, and to collaborate with other experts to push the boundaries of what is concretely possible. To guide collaboration among diverse experts each of whom has insights and knowledge required to ensure practicability of innovative ideas requires a different mentality from pie-in-the-sky “big idea” concepting — it requires an operational sensibility.
- Staging sensibility – It is a truism that some of the best designs are invisible. But at the same time it is also true that some of the best designs are delightful and memorable. The best services are an orchestration of both. Services design pays close attention to what elements or moments of a service should be unobtrusive or even concealed backstage, and which elements should be brought frontstage to be experienced, appreciated or remembered. To coordinate a service that appears the right way at the right time and conceals what should not be noticed requires a different mentality from something designed to only be invisible or only to delight: it requires a staging sensibility.
In the course itself, I will introduce each sensibility with a more extensive description, provide some examples to be viewed through the lens of the sensibility and outline some criteria and earmarks to keep in mind when.
After we have been introduced to each sensibility individually, and learn to exercise the sensibility to detect the kind of service problem that sensibility perceives, we will use all six sensibilities together to assess real services and clearly communicate our assessment.