Category Designers

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Content with quotes and references to designers.

Invisibility of Systems

May 12, ’09 6:28 PM

I believe that one of the most significant developments in systems thinking is the recognition that human beings can never see or experience a system, yet we know that our lives are so strongly influenced by systems and environments of our own making and by those that nature provides … We can never see or experience this totality. We can only experience our personal pathway through a system.
Richard Buchanan, Design Research and the New Learning, p. 12

Albert Speer’s work, Inside the Third Reich, is a memoir of his life as an integral participant of the Nazi system. Speer was remorseful following WWII and served 20 years in prison. He had much time to think about the pathway he chose as a young man and found himself writing the memoir to discover why he did the things he did.

The film, Finding Forrester, ends with Sean Connery’s character’s (William Forrester) realization of the need for true friendship and meaning in life. Forrester, a one time Pulitzer prize winner who only published one book before leading a reclusive life, finds inspiration through an unexpected friendship and the film ends with a quick glimpse of a second book drafted on the deceased writer’s table.

I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of not being able to experience a system but being able to look back later and having one’s experience make sense – that in some stories, “things happen for a reason.” This is a common theme in spiritual realities. For example, an autobiography I just finished is titled, God In the Shadows, where the author shares about his struggles as a young person and how he came to know God on a hospital bed following an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Since then, Ravi Zacharias has led a rich life, impacting many people all over the world. At rocky moments in his life, he did not understand the “big picture,” but in retrospect, he claims to have had providential guidance all along – hence, God in the shadows. The Book of Esther in the Scriptures is also well know for this form of detached guidance where the God of the Hebrews is never mentioned (as in other Books) but is quietly overseeing His people.

One of my favorite poems is "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne. When the speaker tries to console the love he is leaving behind, he assures her that their love is not the superficial love that many in the world experience – instead, he says to look to the planets as a metaphors of their love. The “movement of the spheres” is not something you can see or even experience, but it is something more powerful than the things we can see or experience through our senses. He ends with the metaphor of the compass (drafting tool) where one leg of the compass (likens to her constant love) must stay while the other leg moves. But what is unseen on the final paper is a manifestation of an activity – the process of separating the tool’s legs so that the legs lean on each other which is needed to create the ultimate circle (symbol of perfection and eternity).

What is meant by not being able to experience a system? Perhaps we cannot experience a system, but maybe one can still understand a part of the system once time has passed? What can designers do in an invisible system detached from the senses, especially if one of our core qualities is having a grasp of the senses (polysensorial aesthetics)? How do you preserve the dignity of an individual (and sanctity of “the soul”) when our territory and discussions expands to systems?

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Always Being On

May 8, ’09 1:11 PM

Jan Chipchase had a session at CHI 2009 in which he presented some of his work gathered from all over the world. The work is definitely interesting and inspiring.

At one point in his presentation, he said something that got my attention. I think he was asked by a member of the audience about the boundaries between work and life – to which Jan answered, “I’m always on.”

Makes me think about Matt Damon’s character in The Bourne Identity, the scene where he walks into a diner and tells the girl how he’s aware of everything – details, like what the waitress is wearing, what it says on the license plate number of one of the cars outside. Takes me back to my teen years when I studied martial arts. After one of our tournaments, while everyone was at a restaurant, someone asked my sensei what the difference is between being disciplined in martial arts and not being disciplined. I remember him saying that after practicing martial arts, he walks into a restaurant or a bar and quickly scans the place to see who is there. He checks to see if he could take out each individual (in case of being attacked) before sitting at a table. I believe the CIA also trains this way – when entering a room, first consider multiple ways of escape and observe/calculate who is in there.

I wonder if this this is the subtle difference between environment and surrounding. I believe it is. If one’s actions are always relevant (coherence in all of life’s activities) – that is, if one is always “on” – this individual may just have a deeper understanding of life than others. Can an individual always be in an environment as opposed to once in a while being in an environment? There must be some underlying purpose to his/her life to be in such an environment.

This is one of the questions of philosophy. How can we have unity despite all of life’s diverse fragments?

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Hypertrophy of Information and the Individual

May 1, ’09 3:45 PM

The hypertrophy of information likewise trends to interfere with our enjoyment in the repetition of a work. For the presence of information as a factor in literature has enabled writers to rely greatly upon ignorance as a factor in appeal. Thus, they will relieve a reader’s ignorance about a certain mountain in Tibet, but when they have done so they will have less to ‘tell’ him [or her] at a second reading. Surprise and suspense are the major devices for the utilization of ignorance (the psychology of information), for when they are depended upon, the reader’s interest in the work is based primarily upon his [or her] ignorance of its outcome.
Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (1931; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 145.

As Richard Saul Wurman poignantly points out in Information Anxiety, “A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th century England.” It has become a part of contemporary life (at least for me) to struggle between getting information and being in-the-know and shunning information altogether. Soren Gordhamer, an expert on the over-stressed and over-connected, and author of the forthcoming Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected, points out a reality with which many of us can identify,

We reply to someone we don’t know on Facebook, and we won’t even look at the cashier at the grocery because we’re too busy typing text messages on our phones … Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen poet, says the most valuable gift you can give someone is your attention. The danger with this new technology is you can become less available to your children, friends and partners in your real-life world.

Where has subtlety gone? While everyone is rushing to package information in better forms geared towards various audiences, where is “ignorance as a factor in appeal”? Instead of pushing the “right” information to the “right” audience at the “right” moment, there may be great[er] value in suspension of information. One of the great pleasures of reading a well written book or even getting to know someone is learning to wonder about and play with the subtleties in content and form. For example, aside from some utilitarian apps on an iPhone, why are most apps never used the second time around? Perhaps we need more exploration on holding back information – suspension and subtlety, not necessarily predictable and obvious. Instead of primarily seeking the useful and usable, a little emphasis on mental/emotional gymnastics couldn’t hurt.

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