Category Archives: Enworldment

Raw experiential resources for my next book

Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy

I am making a list of some strange phenomena which are the daily fare of strategic designers, but which are seldom experienced outside the field, at least not in the way designers experience them. By designers, I mean anyone engaged in human-centered design. These phenomena do not occur at the same intensity and frequency in problems that do not explicitly contend with subjectivity. Designers must live with them at full intensity, for long durations, without any easy escape route. Here is the list, so far:

  • Dependency on conceptual models (which I will just call “models”) to guide the forming of a system that is experienced as clear and coherent to those who participate in them
  • Uncanny difficulties in agreeing on models among members of design teams, which render subjective differences stark
  • Difficulties in interpreting phenomena, and especially subjective phenomena, among different team members
  • Difficulties in weighing design tradeoffs among different team members
  • Existential pain associated with relinquishing (or even temporarily suspending) models that one has adopted — even in order to listen and understand another perspective — a phenomenon that can be called “pluralistic angst”
  • Dependence on profound respect, trust and goodwill among team members to navigate through and out of pluralistic angst
  • Tactics employed by well-intentioned people to avoid the pain and effort required to overcome pluralistic angst
  • The ubiquity and invisibility of models — and the best models are the most ubiquitous and the most invisible — not only in design, but all understanding, which only becomes detectable in pluralistic conflict
  • The miraculous way truths and unnoticed realities leap from nowhere (ex nihilo) when a different model is adopted and used
  • The weird way a change in a sufficiently foundational model can sometimes change (transfigure) the meaning of one’s life as a whole, even when the change is meant only to affect a localized problem
  • The fact that there are no determinate techniques, rules, criteria to overcome pluralistic angst (though there are approaches that can assist the process) — that people are thrown back into their bare unequipped souls to find the resources needed to overcome it together
  • The solidarity among team members which can result from overcoming pluralistic angst with respect, trust and goodwill

Anyone who has been through the harrowing experiences described about enough times 1) to recognize what is happening, 2) to find faith that these things can be overcome, 3) to understand the value of overcoming them, 4) to find the attitude of soul most conducive to overcoming them (which includes grace toward one’s own missteps, doubts and moral failings during the process) might start seeing similar phenomena everywhere, at all scales, from international politics to personal relationships to one’s own inner conflicts. Or, at least this is what happened to me.

I was driven deep into existential philosophy, including phenomenology and hermeneutics then into pragmatism and its offshoots in social science to try to understand the weird kinds of pain I experience as a designer. Philosophy has never been speculative or abstract to me. It is concrete, near and a matter of life and death.

As a result of this search for understanding, I have designed myself conceptual models to help me re-understand the human condition as largely one of conflicting conceptual models.

It is here that it becomes fairly obvious how philosophy and design connect and merge into something inseparable. That is what I plan to write about and publish next, now that I have crystallized my core conceptual models in the form I believe they deserve.

Design-Centered Human

Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

Someone asked me, with respect to my work, what I call myself these days. If people understood 1) what design is, and that 2) all design, done competently, is, necessarily human-centered design, I’d want to be called simply a Designer. Because this is nowhere near the case, I call myself a Human-Centered Designer.

At that point my friend Tim called me Design-Centered Human. That’s pretty apt.

The worst product management fad, ever

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I’ve been pretty outspoken about the damage Lean Startup has done to design.

Mostly, I have emphasized the way such engineer-centric methods tend to encourage rushed release cycles that expose users to inconsistent user interfaces, often flawed ones. I’ve complained that an engineering mindset conceives products as things, where a design mindset thinks of products as experiences real people have using them, and that when design is controlled by people with engineering mindsets, experience becomes a thing added to the other thing, the primary thing, engineers make.

From this engineering mindset, Lean Startup makes obvious sense. The entire process is optimized to the goal of improving the product as rapidly as possible, the product being, once again, a thing. By this logic the users become valuable means for discovering new places where the product might be improved. Instead of wasting valuable days testing prototypes in artificial scenarios that only examine parts of the experience in ways that might not represent the full context of use and doing so with very small samples of users — why not release the product to much larger samples of users using it in the wild for real purposes, and to monitor that usage so that problems that show up in these real situations can be addressed in the next release that is never far away?

To a design mindset, this is exasperatingly wrongheaded. When designers perform usability tests on a product, yes, the product is improved — but the product is improved (with the help of voluntary, paid test participants) before it is released in order to protect any real users from having bad experiences with the product. This is because — and this is key — any unexpected change, even a change for the better, forces the user out of a learned habitual mode of use into a figuring-out mode that refocuses attention on the product instead of on what the user wants to think about and do.

This is why the engineer’s objectification of “the experience” is not a semantic nit-pick, but a true distortion of meaning with big consequences. If “the experience” is a part of the product that can be improved through experimenting on real users, why not do it? But if the experience is understood as being what happens when real people use the product, the incessant improvement of the product will be seen to occur at the cost of a deteriorating experience.

What designers want is to change the experience as little as possible as infrequently as possible. This is why we work so hard to understand the people we are designing for so we can get the product as right as possible before users invest themselves in learning it and incorporating our product into their lives. “Pivots” in product purpose are extremely disruptive to users, and represent at the least a need to invest in relearning, and at worst can alienate users if the product pivots away from their needs. In products users love, pivots feel like betrayal, and in fact pivots are calculated betrayals. They should not be treated lightly. Designers concept test in order to avoid the need to betray users who have trusted a product enough to adopt it. Designers usability test for at least two reasons. The first is obvious, and seems to be the only reason understood by the engineering mindset: to remove as many flaws as possible from the experience before users are harmed by them. But there is a second reason: to avoid the need to change the user interface later, after users have invested effort in learning them. As Beatrice Warde taught us, great design is invisible, and as Martin Heidegger taught us, when a tool stops functioning as expected it goes from invisible “ready-to-hand” to distractingly conspicuous “present-at-hand”. It stops being an extension of one’s body, mind and (I’d argue, heart) and becomes an unwanted rupture in attention.

One topic I plan to cover in my upcoming book, Philosophy of Design of Philosophy, is the ethical issues revealed by all the various flavors of extended cognition, which I plan to bloat into a much larger (Haraway-ish) theory of extended self. When a user adopts a product, that user has invited that product into the user’s own being. Contrary to currently hip “Eastern” attitudes that insist that we are not our possessions, I would argue that in an important sense we are most certainly our possessions, and most of all those possessions we use every day and count on to be there when we need them, just like our hands. The trust that users show when they invest in learning a tool so well that the tool vanishes into their body, mind and will should be counted sacred — and I will argue in my book, formalized into a tool covenant.

I am am definitely rambling now, because I haven’t even gotten to my main point yet — yet another way Lean Startup has harmed our daily lives. But before I shift to this next theme, I want to try to pull together the implications of the points I have made so far.

  • If a human being’s self, to some important degree, is constituted by the things they use;
  • And if this constituted self is only whole when these used things vanish and become extensions of their bodies, minds and souls;
  • And if changes to tools break this invisibility relationship and by extension break the extended self;
  • It stands to reason that great care should be taken to change tools as infrequently as possible, as little as possible, only when necessary and only when the change is known to be more beneficial than harmful!

No, most of us don’t see things this way. Even designers don’t. Users lack the language to describe the anxiety they feel when they cannot count on tools they rely on looking or acting the same way when they pick them up to use them, nor can they justify their feelings of betrayal, indignation and violation when product managers decide to overhaul the design of their product. It is as if strangers can rearrange rooms of our homes randomly whenever they feel the whim. We cannot describe, justify or argue for what our sanity requires because we think using philosophies which do not support the thinking of thoughts that clarify our situation and equip us with language to do something to improve our lot! Our working philosophies need to be redesigned to suit this need — and many others that are causing our worst social problems.

My core idea is: We can’t agree on how to emerge from our myriad crises because the folk philosophies we use to do our thinking and persuading are not up to the task. But we can design better philosophies with tradeoffs more suited to our contemporary situation that will render confusions thinkable and give public voice to feelings that are currently isolated inside individual souls. Since I’m coining terms left and right, I’ll add another: design instrumentalism is the concept that thoughts are things we use for our own human purposes (instrumentalism) and which therefore ought to be thought of less in terms of truth vs falsehood and more in terms of better and worse designs, which means that philosophies ought to be designed, using design methods.

And now, enough digression: the second way Lean Startup is harming our lives is by stuffing design processes inside Agile processes, and in the process making it nearly impossible for designers to consider experiences holistically so that every part of an experience relates to the others in a way that makes clear intuitive sense.

Our sanity requires us to sense relationships (even if we aren’t explicitly thinking them) between all the elements of what we experience — the people, the things, the events of the past, present and future, our own purposes, etc. These relationships are how we make sense of things — or, more accurately, they are the sense we make of things. When these relationships are missing, or inconsistent, or blurry, we are unable to make sense of our experience, and we feel perplexity and anxiety, if for no other reason that something is wrong and we cannot even put our finger on where the wrongness is coming from. We don’t have words to explain, only to express our emotional reaction to the chaos.

It is the job of designers to architect these relationships — to place “inside” experiences those connections people look for in all experiences — so there are relationships there to intuit in order to make sense of things, then to give concrete shape to these relationships so they feel unfailingly real. This gives users a feeling of solid ground under their feet. Lack of solidity, coherence, consistency, reliability, endurance — I will call this condition experience volatility.

But these relationships do not emerge automatically in the process of adding features to a product (or service). They cannot necessarily be overlaid onto products as they are built out bit by bit, feature by feature (that is, by constructing atomistically). They coherence needs to be developed at the level of the whole and the part simultaneously, which means both need to be kept fluid as long as possible, which is precisely what design does as a matter of method. Jumping straight in and building and bolting, and breaking and re-bolting is a cumbersome, frustrating and wasteful way to develop holistic systems, and this is why when systems get engineered atomistically the holistic sense of the experience is normally what is sacrificed.

But there’s yet another problem! I need to research this part more, but the IA (Information Architecture) conference I attended last week heightened my awareness of how pervasive stories have become in our design processes. Agile works on the model of nested stories of increasing scale. This has the effect of imposing models of step-by-step procedures onto interactions. The way I put it, it tends “wizard” things by making them behave more like branching linear processes than like objects, or environments, or conversations which afford users more control. I am also finding that Service Design tends to do something very similar, so that the design almost automatically constructed on a timeline backbone.

Time happens to be my least favorite dimension (not to imply that I like breadth or width much better. ) Sometimes time, timelines, the elements of literature/ theater) are the right organizing structures of design, but we shouldn’t assume or or make automatic choices due to habits of method. The structures that undergird our designs should be carefully considered before being chosen.

Back in the early aughts, before UX was a thing, back when I still called myself an Information Architect, the company I worked for acquired a legendary business anthropology outfit. The department they became post-acquisition was called xMod, short for “experience modeling”. This strikes me as an excellent name for the holistic meaning-structure development activity that helps overcome experience volatility, and which again, is made impossible when building and design start at the same time and design is rushed into producing specs for engineers ASAP, lest those engineers sit idle and waste company resources, instead of doing their jobs, which is building something — anything!

So this is my argument 1) that Lean Startup has exponentially increased experience volatility since its mass adoption, 2) that experience volatility matters to our lives, because in a very real way it injects volatility into our own being by constantly breaking our extended selves, and 3) the only reason we don’t all understand this and protest it is because the folk philosophies we use to think and communicate are badly designed for our current situation, but that 4) we can and should redesign our philosophies to help us live saner, more peaceful, and happier lives.

If anyone has actually read this far: Thank you for your patience!

So many ideas. So many coinages.

 

Next book: Philosophy of Design of Philosophy

ANT, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Extended Self, Fructivism, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Now that I’ve gotten Geometric Meditations into a finished state I am starting to feel a compulsion to write a more accessible book about design, tentatively titled Philosophy of Design of Philosophy. I’m excited to be freed from the excessive formal constraints that made Geometric Meditations take so long to finish.

There are several key points I want to make.

  1. Design needs to be rethought, along with its relationship with engineering. I propose re-defining design as “the intentional development of hybrid systems composed of interacting human and non-human elements.” Most importantly the human elements of the system should include the people for whom the system is intended, treated as an intrinsic part of the designed system, and interior to it — not exterior users of a system designed to be used by them. Follow this link to see a visualization comparing the “conventional” and “hybrid systems” view.
  2. We find it difficult to define design, and distinguish design from other creative activities (like art and engineering) because we think in a way that obscures the question. In particular, the way we think about making tools and using tools has gradually become inadequate for dealing with the world as it has evolved. Our working philosophies have grown obsolete, and their very obsolescence makes us look for solutions everywhere but where a solution may be found: in philosophy.
  3. Philosophies are essentially tools we use for living lives in an infinitely complex radically pluralistic reality. Every philosophy has advantages and trade-offs, meaning they make it easy, even automatic, to have some kinds of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and responses, and nearly impossible to think, feel, perceive and respond in other ways — and these other ways might be the key to confronting what are perceived, conceived and felt to be insoluble problems. Designers will recognize in this description characteristics common to all design problems, and that is my intention. The design field has developed effective techniques for dealing with problems of this kind. I propose we approach philosophy as design problems, using design methodologies to interrogate problematic situations we face to uncover and frame the most fruitful problems, to develop holistic approaches to thinking them that permit solutions to these problems, to iteratively experiment with and improve our practical thinking. I call this understanding and approach to philosophy “design instrumentalism”. We need to design philosophies that help us design better lives for ourselves, and this book will hopefully contribute to this project.
  4. Part of the reason we need to take design much more seriously is that who we are is changed by what we design. Indirectly, when we design things we use, we design ourselves. And this is because human being is extended being. To be a human being means to have one’s own being stream out into the world in every direction. Despite what spiritual conventional wisdom tells us, in some very important ways we are our possessions, we belong to where we live and we are our egos. But what we are can be released, transformed, improved or degraded based on what we do with ourselves: our environments, our physical tools, our conceptual/mental tools, our life practices, etc. This part of the book draws on extended cognition, cyborg theory, ANT, postphenomenology crossbred with existentialism, but I plan to be atrociously unscholarly, synthetic and magisterial in my approach and keep external references to a minimum. The goal here is to reframe human existence in a way that liberates us from the subject-object and self-other dichotomies that dominate the working philosophies that unconsciously shape our conscious thoughts. (The pre-conscious “how” of our thinking produces the “what” of our thoughts. I may have to also take some potshots at pop-psychologism that views the unconscious as sneaky little mind forces that lurk about behind the scenes motivating us this way or biasing us that way. Where most folks see secularized demons, I see poorly designed conceptual systems, a.k.a. philosophies.)
  5. The process of being human is a nonlinear (iterative feedback) process of co-evolution. As we change the world, the world changes us. This process has brought us to a perilous point where we must choose our next step very carefully.

This is an early sketch, but I think some of the ideas are interesting and consequential, and I think it will be fun to right. And my design approach will ensure that at least some people will find the book useful, usable and desirable.

The odor of burning rubber

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Trefoil

When thinking about truth, we expect both clarity and effectiveness. These qualities are so expected, in fact, that they serve as criteria for truth. If they are present we assume what we think is true, and if we are surrounded by people thinking the same way we might even succumb to certainty.

Certainty is comfortable. We tend to try to stay in situations where we feel we know what is true, or at least have a gist of truth. Most of us, who work at living normal, orderly, productive lives, mostly succeed most of the time.

The life of a strategic designer is not like this. Strategic designers are routinely asked to help organizations innovate. This requires framing or reframing problems: re-conceptualizing known truths, or making sense of chaotic situations nobody understands or resolving conflicts where incompatible, incommensurable visions collide.

Working to discover/make (instaurate) a concept that manages to produce all three qualities at once — clarity, effectiveness and consensus — is tricky work. Normally it is necessary to try on and discard multiple framings that only produce only one or two of these qualities before one comes along the fully resolves the problem.

This process is instructive if we are observant and ready to meta-reframe what we think is going on. In other words, this activity of frame instauration can produce philosophical shifts. These experiences and my attempts to account for them have shifted my own understanding of pretty much everything.

What have I taken from all this shifting? First, I know what it is like to shift between frames. I know what it does to my experience of whatever problematic situation I am trying to understand and I know what it can do to my experience of the world, instantly, all at once, as a whole. I also know what it is like to do without a frame, and the harrowing things that does to my experience of the world. I am used to radical surprise, of having (literally) inconceivable possibilities become conceivable, and along with it, all kinds of ideas that were standing in front of my face, invisible, staring me in the eyes while I was rooting around in the shadows for knowable unknowns. I have a very vivid sense of pluralism, and of a transcendent ground from which truth in all its pluralistic glory emerges.

*

An urgent question to ask: If an explanation is clear and effective why would anyone refuse to accept it?

A better reframing of this question is: What good reasons might a person have for refusing to accept a clear and effective explanation?

This question becomes even more effective if it is asked from a pluralistic perspective, assuming that multiple true answers are always possible because questions can be framed myriad ways.

What follows below is my answer to this question.

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It is important to us that our truths are clear; that is, they give us the means to think about our situations. This means, first, being able to ask a question that can be answered. Not knowing an answer to a question can be frustrating, but at least we know what the problem is. Perplexity, the incapacity to find the relevant question in the face of a crisis, is unbearable, when this happens we become anxious that we do not have the truth.

It is important to us that our truths are effective; that is, they work properly, orienting us to the situations we find ourselves in and enabling us to anticipate and respond to what is going on. If we lose this ability and we are constantly surprised and our responses falter we begin to suspect that we do not have the truth.

It is tempting to settle with truths that are both clear and effective, and for a long time many of us have, on principle, rejected all truth criteria but these. But there is another criterion that is just as important: it is importance itself.

It is important to us that our truths are significant; that is they make our own situation important to ourselves, and inspire us to care about it, whether caring means loving or hating, embracing or opposing. If we lose the capacity to sense significance in our situation we will become indifferent, and here we ought to learn to suspect that whatever truth we have is not worth keeping.

*

I know a lot of people right now who feel irritated, agitated and dissatisfied. If they are not angry or sensorily stimulated or intoxicated, they are just blank in a horrible way.

These same people are certain they know the truth, and everyone they know agrees with them that they know the truth, at least the most relevant aspects of the truth. Part of the truth they know is that philosophy is an inferior precursor to science, a cousin to religion. Both philosophy and religion opine, speculate and invent, where science demonstrates and establishes truth. It never occurs to people who know these things about science and philosophy to think about how they think, because we’ve figured that out, and we can skip to the scientific bottom line and just scoop up all the factual information science has made available to us.

So, they know a lot of true facts, and they know where to go to get more.

But what about all this ennui?

*

I heard somewhere that when we lose our sense of smell, we do not simply smell nothing. We smell something resembling burning rubber. It drives people into depression and sometimes to suicide.

Perhaps the moral blankness we don’t feel when we lose the capacity to sense importance is like the burning rubber we don’t smell when we lose our sense of importance.

 

Design Instrumentalism

ANT, Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

The best name for my approach to philosophy might be “design Instrumentalism”, a variant of John Dewey’s instrumentalism. According to Wikipedia,

Instrumentalism is a pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey that thought is an instrument for solving practical problems, and that truth is not fixed but changes as problems change. Instrumentalism is the view that scientific theories are useful tools for predicting phenomena instead of true or approximately true descriptions.

Design instrumentalism builds on Dewey’s instrumentalism by focusing on ideas as instruments that ought to be designed intentionally employing design methods and evaluated as designed products, using frameworks like Liz Sanders‘s famous triad of Useful, Usable and Desirable. These three evaluative considerations could be translated to the design of philosophies:

  • How well does the philosophy help its subscribers act effectively in response to concrete situations and produce good outcomes?
  • How well does the philosophy define, relate and elucidate ideas to allow subscribers of the philosophy to articulate clearly an account of reality as they experience it?
  • How well does the philosophy inspire its subscribers to value existence in whole and sum?

Philosophies, too ought to be designed as person-reality interfaces, which are should be viewed less as collections of true beliefs, than as as fundamental conceptions of reality that direct attention,  guide responses, shape beliefs and connect everything together into a comprehensive practical worldview (a.k.a. praxis).

Obviously, Design Instrumentalism has a lot of arguing to do to justify its legitimacy, but luckily most of this legwork has been done by Pragmatists and their various intercontinental offspring, and it is all solid and persuasive enough, and not in need of tedious rehashing. I’ll just skip to the bottom line, and rattle off some key articles of faith, which are basically the vital organs of Pragmatism.

This is a good start of a list of pragmatic presuppositions. The list is still incomplete and will be supplemented with ideas drawn from sources, including phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics and material turn philosophies.

One more thing about Design Instrumentalism: It is, like every ambitious philosophy, multilayered. Design Instrumentalism is itself (a) a philosophical tool used to explore what it means that (b) philosophy is a philosophical tool for designing philosophical tools, which are (c) applied to practical living. So Design Instrumentalism might be useful, usable and desirable for some thinkers who enjoy doing philosophy (the tool designers), but it also focuses on the design of philosophies for non-philosophers with little interest in doing philosophy (the tool users) who need concepts for thinking about their lives in general and for focused “single-use” for specialized purposes, such as finding frameworks that support the resolving of particular design problems.

Doing just this kind of work (strategic designers call it “framing”) in the context of professional design strategy, in combination with my private philosophical work is what brought me to this view of philosophy. For me, none of this is speculative theorizing, but in fact my best attempt to equip myself with the ability to explain myself, to function effectively in the situations I find myself in every day, and to infuses my work and my life with a sense of purpose. Something like an inarticulate Design Instrumentalism led me to articulate Design Instrumentalism.

One way to see design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Design is materialized philosophy.

When designing something — which always and necessarily means designing something for someone — the central question is always: what is the right philosophy for this context?

The purpose of design research is to get to the heart of this central question out, and then to pose the design problem in such a way that designers think about the design problem in the right way, from the philosophical perspective suited to the problem.

Design briefs are tiny philosophical primers.

A good design brief will effect a perspectival shift in the reader (the designer) that brings new possibilities into view, possibilities that were inconceivable prior to the shift. This phenomenon is what is commonly called inspiration.

It is the job of design researchers to produce precision inspiration.

Designers develop hybrid systems

ANT, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Politics

Reading Verbeek’s What Things Do, I’m reminded of Latour’s handy term “hybrid”, an entity that is neither purely subjective nor purely objective, but a fusion of both.

In Latour’s eye, the distinction between nature and society, or subject and object, which has seemed so self-evident since the Enlightenment, needs to be seen as a product of modernity that has far exceeded its expiration date. No other society makes this distinction in such a radical manner, and in ours it is more and more painfully obvious how poorly it allows us to comprehend what is happening in the world. The project of modernity, according to Latour, consists of the attempt to purify objects and subjects — we set objects on one side, subjects on the other, and draw a line between them. What is on the one side of the line is then material for scientists to investigate, with what is on the other side for the social scientists. … This purification and separation of subjects and objects, according to Latour, is coming to be less and less believable. Ever more entities arise that cannot be comfortably placed in this dichotomy. Latour calls these entities “hybrids.” The irony is that these hybrids thrive thanks to the modem purification: precisely because they don’t fit within the subject-object schema, we cannot recognize them and therefore they can proliferate at an astounding rate without anyone trying to stop or change them. But now, as their numbers become ever greater, it becomes more and more difficult to deny their existence. We are flooded with entities that straddle the boundary between humans and nonhumans…

Humans and nonhumans are just as bound up together in our culture as they are in others; therefore, Latour concludes, we need to study our technological culture similarly to the ways that anthropologists study other cultures. This means studying how the networks of relations between humans and nonhumans develop and unravel. In order to understand our culture, we must trace out both the process of purification and that of hybridization; we must understand how hybrids arise and why they are not seen as hybrids. In order to understand phenomena, they should be approached as black boxes that, when opened, will appear to contain myriad relations and activity.

If we grasp and internalize this understanding of hybrids, it becomes possible to compactly differentiate how designers approach their problems versus how engineers approach theirs — and why they so often marginalize designers and accidentally prevent designers from working in the way designers believe is best. Here it goes:

Designers develop hybrid systems. Engineers develop objective systems.

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I’ve written two elaborations of this idea, material to supply the understanding that makes grokking the compact definition above possible. I’ll post both, because there’s no time this morning to combine them.

Version 1

An engineering perspective treats design as a sub-discipline of engineering. Design adds an aesthetic (and among more enlightened engineers) and usable “presentation layer” to a functional objective system.

A design perspective ought to treat engineering as a sub-discipline of design. Once a hybrid subjective-objective system is developed through a design approach, objective sub-systems can be defined within the larger context of the hybrid system and built according to engineering methods. According to a design mindset, an engineered system is always and necessarily a subsystem belonging to a larger hybrid system that gives it its purpose and value.

The reason so few people see the obvious truth of the latter design perspective is that their vision is obstructed by a philosophical blockage. The hybrid system concept does not play nice with the modern subject-object schema. Designers learn, through the practical activity of design, to view problems in a new way that is incommensurable with modernity’s default philosophy (as described by Latour).

But designers are rarely philosophical, so the methods rarely progress to the point of praxis. Design language is all bound up with humans and the trappings of subjectivity (emotions, opinions, habits, etc.) on the side of who the design is for and the trappings of romanticism on the side of who does the designing (insight, inspiration, creativity, passion, etc.) Design practice is a jumble of “recipes” — procedures, jargon, styles and theater — a subterfuge to make design fit the preconceptions of folks who don’t quite get what designers are really up to. So design submits to modernist schema and goes to modernism’s special territory for people people, romanticism.

Version 2

Designers consciously work on developing hybrid systems where subjective and objective elements relate and interact. In design, people and things are thought of together as a single system. And things are not only material objects; they can be ideas, habits, vocabularies, etc. Whatever makes a design work or not work, including the engineered elements, as well as all business, cultural, environmental considerations are part of a design problem. When a designer opens a black box of their own making, they will see subjects interacting with objects and subjects, and objects interacting with other objects and subjects.

Engineering, on the other hand, works inside the subject-object dichotomy, and works on problems of objective systems. As a matter of method, engineering purifies objects and arranges them in systems. When an engineer opens a black box of their own making they see objective components interacting and working as a system.

From the view of engineers, the interior of the black boxes they make are their concern, and the surface layer of the box — the point where subjectivity encounters engineering, is the concern of designers. Engineers build the black box; designers paint and sculpt it to make it appealing to people.

Philosophy fails

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

This morning I was forced to use the redesigned Freshbooks. They’d totally revamped the user interface. It was very slick and visual. And it was six times harder to use.

This is a depressingly typical experience in these times. I’m constantly suffering the consequences of wrongheaded, well-meaning changes made to things I rely on to not change.

I was lamenting to a friend how much work, time and money Freshbooks (and companies like them) sink into solving the wrong problem and making new problem.

I complained: “Not only did they thought about it wrong — they didn’t even think about how they were thinking. This was a philosophy fail.”

And these are the mistakes that offend me: philosophy fails. People failing to reflect when reflection is most needed. They need to think about how they are thinking about what they are doing… and they instead choose to be all startuppity, and just do. Just doing is valorized, and it shouldn’t be, any more than just thinking. We need thoughtful practice matched with practical thinking: praxis.

Design talks

Enworldment, Philosophy

A list of design theory/practice ideas I’ve had that could become talks, all of which include monographesque provocatively non-descriptive titles with almost-clarifying subtitles, separated by colons:

  1. “No Pain, No Gain: Necessary Suffering in Innovation” – The agonizing experience of navigating the vacuum between framings fits poorly inside the fantasy image of creativity peddled by Design Thinking to the freedom-craving lanyard-tethered denizens of cubicle-land. Real, deep creativity is intensely painful at key points in the process, very few people are willing to undergo the ordeal, and anyone with authority will be tempted to use their power to abort innovative thought when they start to feel the anxiety inherent to the kind of radical reframing that produces innovative ideas.
  2. “Philosophy of Design of Philosophy of Design of: How Philosophy Is a Design Medium” – The implications of Dewey’s Instrumentalism crossed with both the methods and experiences of human centered design suggests that philosophies are mind-reality interfaces which ought to be thought of in terms of good design rather than faithful representations of truth.
  3. “Lean How?: How Design Methods Make Waste Tradeoffs” – Lean methodologies tend to emphasize efficiencies of time and money, but these are often gained at the cost of wasting other resources. This talk proposes looking at forms of internal waste (time, money, team morale, organizational credibility) and external waste (customer goodwill, innovation opportunities, attention and brand equity) and seeing choice of methodology in terms of waste trade-offs.
  4. “Who Is Our Engineer? is the New “Who is Our User?”: The Relationship Between Designers, Engineers and Users” – One of the most misconceptions that limits the effectiveness of design in many organizations is the notion that design fits inside a engineering as the people who responsible for making the “presentation layer” of an engineered product or service. This talk argues that flipping this relationship inside out and viewing engineering as a discipline within design permits both engineers and designers to increase the effectiveness of the other. In addition it will be argued that every relevant design discipline has one or more engineering disciplines involved in actualizing the design, and that design competence in any particular medium involves a working rudimentary knowledge of its engineering aspects and and understanding of how to collaborate with engineers of that discipline.

Philosophy should disappear

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I had a thought last week I want to record for later use.

Short version.

  1. Great design disappears, and becomes an invisible extension of a user’s will.
  2. According to my belief that philosophy should be regarded as a kind of design, a philosophy should disappear once it is understood.
  3. This accords with enneagram theory, that type Five (thinking) integrates toward Eight (instinct). To successfully design a philosophy that disappears into the background of instinctive second-nature is to “go to eight”.

Some notes.

  1. Many people have observed the fact that great design disappears.
    1. Certainly, beautifully designed things are pleasing to those who place them in the foreground and admire their design — but in use these designed things must disappear into the background of a user’s attention and become an extension of the user’s will. (Of the many balances and tradeoffs designers make, this is one of the hardest.)
    2. A merely competent design is one that can be figured out. The user must stop and think (and in so doing foreground the design) but once the problem is resolved, the design can be backgrounded again.
    3. One of the most important marks of design excellence is making verbalization unnecessary. The only words that should be running through a user’s mind are ones connected with the user’s task. Any words pertaining to recalling or figuring out how to use the designed thing is an obtrusive interruption to the dialogue.
  2. Philosophies tend to be regarded as idea systems that help us resolve problems.
    1. This might be the result of the view that philosophy is about the objects of philosophical work, and the neglect of the subjects doing the thinking.
    2. Most philosophical work is created for the consumption of other philosophers. This situation is analogous to how computers were once primarily built for other computer professionals. As long as this was the case, they remained largely opaque to lay users.
    3. Most philosophy is engineered to solve problems not designed to help people understand (and prevent problems from arising).
  3. I think the big difference between an Eight-integrated Five and an Eight is that the former designed his own second-nature, where the Eight works with innate and passively-acquired instincts.

 

Design of philosophy

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I have arrived at the belief that philosophy is another word for the design of conceptual tools used for the purposes of enworldment.

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Have philosophers taken a human-centered approach to their design work?

Before answering, consider the fact that many philosophers are professors who spend as much time preparing lessons, teaching, and evaluating the success of their teaching. They also write papers and submit them to peer juried journals. If accepted, their papers are published, and the ideas may or may not be put to use by others and cited.

Now, the question a designer is trained to ask at this point is: Who is the user?

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An innovation principle presented by the altogether brilliant design thinker Diego Rodriguez:

Design and trade-offs

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

For non-designers (and immature designers) the toughest part of design is trying on different trade-offs.

The reason it is so tough is this: while most people can shift between ideas with relative ease, it is harder to shift between conceptions — different logics of coherence and meaning that invest ideas with different significance.

Harder still is to allow new conceptions to animate perceptions. Old conceptions cling and highlight features of perception that would remain inconspicuous to fresh eyes. And each shift in design direction adds new relevancies without removing the old ones, so the problem becomes more insoluble with each iteration.

It is like memory: it is easier to learn on command than to forget. The old ideas, once seen, become hard to unsee. The old concepts, once learned become impossible to unlearn. Perception becomes almost cubistic — too many simultaneous perspectives are viewed at once.

Pluralistic play — the ability to flit between logics — to try on different conceptions and perceptions — this takes years of practice, and the practice can only start once a person has discovered the dimension of mind that multiplies the universe into innumerable overlapping everythings.

Idea dump: intimacy, design/engineering/philosophy, social science-technologies

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

The following is more of a diary entry than an article. I have put too little effort into editing, and it might make sense only to me. I just wanted to get a snapshot of these ideas as they exist today, before they change or disappear.

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The start of an idea: it seems that many “linguistic turn” philosophers become anxious encountering any concept that fails to promise eventual public accessibility and acceptance. I have a hunch I cannot yet support but this all seems rooted in a binary either-or of private and public: EITHER we speak precisely, logically and empirically in the least ambiguous language possible, OR we speak a muddledly, and self-sentence ourselves to imprisonment within our own private language cells.

I do love the private-public distinction and find it useful, but I think the most fascinating varieties of philosophy are between these extremes, in a region that could be called intimate, or what Martin Buber called the interhuman. This is where Nietzsche works, and I may read him with this theme in mind on my next tour of his corpus.

The intimate is where poetry happens. When poetry goes public it is lost to prosaicism. When poetry goes private it is lost to insanity. Poetry is intimacy suspended between insanity and prosaicism.

It is not true (or at least not right) that all language aims to be explicit. Sorting out the purpose of a particular vocabulary and determining its degree of explicit monosemic and pregnant polysemic content is an interesting problem — and less a philosophical problem than a design problem.

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Speaking of various kinds of problems, I’ve done much reflection in the last couple of years on what distinguishes engineering problems and design problems (my most recent formulation: an engineering problem concerns systemization of rule-bound entities, where a design problem concerns hybrid rule-bound and choice-making entities), but I have also been thinking quite a bit about the relationship between design and philosophy. It might be my most radical idea that philosophy is best understood as a species of design, and how it is designed determines what it can do. (I see a philosophy as a mind-reality interface analogous to a computer user interface to support intelligibility of unmanageable truths and semi-obscure phenomena. Philosophy-as-design strikes me as the furthest consequence of Jamesian Pragmatism.)

It might be interesting to converge these two themes, philosophy-as-design and design-vs-engineering. It might go like this: maybe we have been accidentally designing philosophies optimized for solving engineering problems, and further, when we think about philosophy in these engineering terms we successively engineer the possibility of design out of of our philosophies. We trust only logical rules that compel reason to accept a single conclusion, or the problem does not compute and returns a syntax error. We engineer philosophies good only for engineering, and this has distorted our understanding of what a science is and can be, including the social sciences. This is why 20th Century social sciences and social engineering are linked: social engineering was all that could be done with the philosophy that thought the social sciences.

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I’ve been groping with a vague new thought. Generally we define sciences ontologically, by their object of study. What if we defined sciences pragmatically, by the types of technologies they produce? The pragmatic definition of Actor-Network Theory then might be: the science that produces design. 20th Century sociology might be: the science that produces social engineering.

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For the past few years I’ve been enamored with (or maybe dominated by) Bruno Latour’s account of science and technology, and particularly his refusal to separate the domains of science and technology. Sciences use technologies at least as much as technologies use science. There is no pure scientific learning followed by pure technological application.

My intuition harasses me with the question of whether there is (or ought to be!) a similar dynamic at work in the social sciences. Currently the social sciences seem (I am not as well-informed as I would like to be) to place enormous emphasis on the front-end observational hypothesis-formation segment of the scientific method. Where is the interactive experimental moment of the scientific method, where technologies are employed to generate more knowledge? And what exactly is a social science technology, anyway? Have we asked that question enough? I am leaning toward a belief that a social science technology is a design, and in an experimental setting it is a design prototype introduced into a social situation. The social sciences merge with human-centered design practices. Not as the pure understanding that precedes a pure application, but as a profoundly mingled reciprocity.

Philosophy design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

For the last several weeks I have been trying very hard to care about Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In general, though, (with some exceptions) I have found its problems and approaches to resolving problems too tedious, too inapplicable and too dry to keep me engaged. It is cognitively, practically and aesthetically irrelevant to me.

Or to put it in UX language, for me, the experience is not useful, usable or desirable. I am not the user of this stuff.

I suspect the user of analytic philosophy is other professional philosophers who want to philosophize to other professional philosophers.

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pirate_flag

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the UNIX of philosophies.

My project is to design a Macintosh philosophy. (A well-designed thing to be used by people who don’t want to be forced to tinker with technicalities, unless they want to. And perhaps a thing that appeals especially to designers looking for tools to help them design better.)

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Philosophy is a kind of design. It is a mind-reality interface.

Every philosophy permits us to render some aspects of reality intelligible, while confusing or obscuring others; supports us in some practical activities and while muddling others; helps us intensify the feeling of value of some things while devaluing others. In other words, a philosophy makes our life experience as a whole useful, usable and desirable. But like with every design, tradeoffs are necessary, and where to make these tradeoffs is a function of the user and the use context. We can be conscious about it and make these tradeoffs intentionally — or we can be like bad clients and persist in trying to have it all.

And as with all good designs, philosophies disappear.

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Even bad interfaces disappear, leaving only frustration, alienation, friction, dissipation, confusion.

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We would laugh at an argument over whether iOS or Android is truer. Maybe it is time we laugh at philosophical arguments the same way. Let other people  sit around and debate whose philosophy does the best job of representing the truth. I will do an experience assessment.

 

Outline

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas, Synesis

Introduction

  • What philosophy is
  • What designers do: empathy (as opposed to art which is sympathetic) creation of useful, usable and desirable things
  • Practical use of philosophy for design
  • Truth as reality interface (a useful, usable and desirable philosophy.)
  • Anatomy of this book: ontology, epistemology, ethic.

Ontology

  • Ontology = inquiring into being = asking “in what sense is this real?”
  • Being encompasses more than physical entities
  • Many kinds of being exist: objects, time, perspectives, imagination
  • Designer’s ontology: the more ways one sees in what sense entities can exist the more space a designer has to work
  • Order bounded by chaos
  • Chaos is superabundance of orders
  • Order filters chaos
  • Practical consequence of chaos: surprise
  • Knowing chaos means openness to surprise: nonsense might be not-yet-seeing-the-sense
  • Perpetual possibility of “otherwise”, esp. when otherwise seems impossible
  • Horizon and the otherwise — horizon always feels complete and excludes the otherwise
  • Pluralism: coexistence of ontologies united in possibilities of otherwise — possibilities which can (and ought) to be sought and actualized (“fusion of horizons”)
  • An ontological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of being (metaphysical manifold)

Epistemology

  • Epistemology = inquiring into knowledge = asking “how do we know?”
  • Knowing is filtering (determining relevance) and relating
  • Knowing is both explicit and tacit
  • An epistemological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of knowing (venn – name?)
  • Tacit know-how: skilled wordless interaction with concrete realities
  • Tacit morality: sensing value
  • Perspective and pluralism
  • Pluralism vs reductionism
  • Perspective and inspiration: the upside of pluralism
  • Knowing is social: “How do we know?” more than “How do I know?”
  • Self as a society
  • Knowledge shows realities: aletheia
  • Synesis: seeing realities as together with others together
  • Positivity and negativity: facts and questions
  • Knowing a subject vs knowing an object
  • Participatory knowing versus objective knowing
  • Hermeneutic holism: knowing wholes and parts
  • Social hermeneutics
  • Social creativity
  • A methodological framework: a simple way to approach social creativity (the outspiral)

Ethics

  • An ethics sustains an ethos (lifeworld)
  • Designer’s ethos: Maximum diversity within unity, mediated by things
  • Designer’s ethic: Commit to learning from others in order to design to them and provide them a place in the world
  • Designers outfit an ethos with things that support it — not preserve or conserve, but allow it to live and develop like a living thing
  • Enworldment: creating myriad ways to exist in the world with things and people
  • Virtue ethics
  • Virtue of receptivity: otherwise awareness
  • Learning a subject requires unlearning — unlearning is the hard part.
  • Learning involves letting go of what one already knows in order to know better
  • Unlearning is an anxious activity: immersing in perplexity
  • Virtue of sacrifice: willingness to suffer to understand another person
  • No method to emerge from perplexity
  • No way to predict the outcome
  • Virtue of fortitude: acceptance of the pain of learning
  • Inspiration as expansion of horizon: sudden acquisition of new way to see
  • Inspiration brought about by learning from others, suffering anxiety, accepting perplexity, emerging with new perspective
  • Virtue of reason: the obligation to demonstrate, persuade
  • Virtue of constancy
  • Virtue of honor – agreements

Thought scraps

  • Empathy vs sympathy
  • The way philosophy is read… hermeneutically: not step-by-step explanation
  • Blindness vs darkness

A Designer’s Philosophy

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

I am starting work on a book called A Designer’s Philosophy.

The book will outline a comprehensive philosophy suitable for a designer. To some extent it will include a philosophy of design, but that will not be its primary focus. One of the central, deliberately accepted assumptions of the work is the principle of pluralism, which is why it is “a” philosophy for one particular way of approaching life. This book will offer a set of conceptual tools to help a certain kind of person self-orient, understand, articulate and act in the world in a cohesive, consistent and meaningful way: a sort of user-interface for the environing, pregnant chaos we know as reality.

It will be based very heavily on American Pragmatism, phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics (fused in the tradition of Richard J. Bernstein), synthesized with several like-minded but diversely-focused parallel practical traditions including current UX practice, Soft Systems, Design Thinking and Actor-Network theory. I will also steal freely from late Wittgenstein, various Existentialists, philosophers/historians/scholars of science and even some not-very-reputable theologians.

But this will not be a scholarly book. I will do my best to include no quotations or footnotes, or anything that complicates the dead-simple but elusive concepts this book exists to convey. It will be a comprehensive, organic vision and whatever introduces a seam or calls attention to a grafting scar, such as a nod to the discoverer of this idea or that, will be cut, smoothed and disguised to the best of my ability.

In other words, this book will be a great theft. I will acknowledge the thinkers to whom I owe an intellectual debt in one little easily-skipped blurb introducing a bibliography. Essentially, I am going to steal a great number of insights and make them my own, then provide a list of the households I hit as a cursory acknowledgement of indebtedness. But in fact, it will be an act of thieves’ honor: “I’ve hit these homes and made off with all the loot I could carry in my own arms. I think I grabbed the best stuff, but it might be profitable to hit it again.”

My goal is to make this book as visual, as simple and as compact as possible. If I can distill it into a pamphlet of 16 pages of diagrams that will be perfect, because that makes letterpress a viable option.

The philosophy will divide into three parts (not including introduction and conclusion):

  • Ontology: “What is being?”
  • Epistemology: “How do I know truth?”
  • Ethics: “How should I live?”

The book will be 100% free of techniques, case studies, scientific corroboration and any other content that might give it the slightest chance of success. This book will be beautiful, and meant to be fetishized (and fetishized with the purest conscience, because the book will show why fetishes are necessary and valuable). My view is that while philosophy can be understood as a form of pre-science indispensable to scientific progress, it can also be understood as a form of art, and at its best is an inseparable synthesis of prescience and art, a beautiful and inspiring surveying and mapping of a field of possibility upon which methodical disciplines can travel, settle and flourish.

Because it is unlikely to sell and because I want complete control over its physical form, I’m anticipating self-publishing it in a very small run.

Worldviews

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

A worldview (weltanschauung) is a holistic vision of existence, which by its nature has an appearance of completeness. It is a totality comprising 1) perception of a particular pattern or field of relevance and irrelevance in its experience, 2) conceptual articulation of relevant experience into an interrelated, nested system of categories, 3) appraisal of values according to tacit but self-evident standards, and 4) the development of a characteristic set of practical responses to its experiences. All this manifests as an individual vision of the world — a way of seeing — but it also naturally generates outwardly visible phenomena corresponding to the dimension enumerated above: 1) an intentional thrust, 2) a characteristic symbol-system, of language and image, 3) an identifiable aesthetic-moral style, and 4) a body of explicit beliefs and formal customs. All of this together constitutes a proto-culture, a germ of tradition.

What is not outwardly visible, however — despite appearances — is the worldview itself that engendered these forms.

“Kernel of culture, invisible as sight,
Darkless and lightless in the back of an eye”

The worldview must be sought to be found, otherwise one tends to discover and rediscover only one’s own worldview. (* See note to nerds, below.)

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(A sidenote: Worldviews are not formed in a vacuum. They form within cultural conditions, which in turn formed within cultural conditions. In the beginning is always culture, and culture is within reality, but culture is reality — and also it somehow produces cultural progeny. This is the chicken-and-egg problem. No culture, no humans; no humans, no culture.)

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My theory: Coherent worldviews are constantly, spontaneously generated by a variety of spiritual impulses: philosophical, artistic, mystical, political, etc. Some cultures promote their production, others suppress them, but they are always coming into existence, and most die off without attracting the slightest notice, perhaps because the worldview itself lacks awareness of its essential differentness. But some worldviews acquire vivid expression as actions or artifacts, and gain cultural currency — and not necessarily from minds congenial with the actor or author of the works.

The symbol-systems in particular (especially when separated from the rest of the “tradition”), meant to represent particularities of the engendering worldview (its “meaning”), are also frequently capable of representing or describing features of other worldviews, quite different from the origin.

In particular, the symbol-systems are capable of hosting several perennially recurring worldviews, found in nearly every time and place, which recur precisely because they are capable of thriving within just about any symbol-system. They enter into the symbol-systems and animate them various spirits, and to the degree that these spirits can harmonize (however uncomfortably) within these symbol-systems the culture gains viability and force.

Three of these recurring worldviews are of particular interest: Fundamentalism, gnosticism, and philistinism.

  • Fundamentalists interpret symbols strictly literally, which means in strictly objective terms, using violent magical stop-gap concepts to fill in the gaps and form a totalistic worldview. In regard to others, fundamentalists oppose and impose.
  • Gnostics interpret symbols strictly figuratively, which means there are no gaps to fill, because the concepts are liquid, with no solid, practical obstructions to free-flowing completeness. In regard to others, gnostics stand apart, uninvolved.
  • Philistines just do what is expected, in order to keep doing, and symbols are just one of many practical concerns. In regard to others, philistines cooperate, uncritically.

Wherever there is culture, these three generic spirits move in and make their indispensable contributions. Nothing happens without them.

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  • Note to nerds:

What the discipline of hermeneutics pursues is the recovery of the generative worldview behind created forms. The pursuit is a futile one — that is, it is never brought to completion — but the pursuit of completion is the goal that makes the activity possible. For this reason, any “hermeneutic” loyal to some set worldview, for instance a “Marxist hermeneutic” or “feminist hermeneutic” is impossible. The point of hermeneutics is precisely to overcome the limits of one’s particular worldview in order to experience beyond one’s horizon and to modify one’s worldview. An ideological “hermeneutic” is a contradiction in terms.

Not that re-interpretation of common phenomena into terms of  one’s own worldview is illegitimate. This activity is necessary. But when one reinterprets an author without first earnestly practicing hermeneutics, one strips away the author’s human status and treats the author and the work as mute, passive phenomena. A reader kills “the author” for the same reason any person kills another: to extinguish an active, apparently harmful subjectivity and to render it a passive object. A corpus has an author; without an author a corpus is corpse. It returns to dust, to impersonal text, to unprotesting material with which one may work as he pleases.