intuition
Half-formed perception
Design as an engineering problem
One receives with an empty hand
The difficulty of designing complexity
Off to the races
Write the books you want to read
In Defence of Intuition
An Essay by Boris MüllerDesign, it seems, is not only becoming more methodical but also more scientific. This is not surprising. Design as a discipline has moved from “product beautification” to being a central part of product development. It has incorporated methodologies from human-computer interaction, sociology, and anthropology as well as advertising and management. And with the rise of design thinking, a wider range of professional disciplines are using creative methods.
I don’t want to criticize design methodologies. But against the backdrop of an overly structured design process, it is important to remind our community that there is one fundamental aspect to design that cannot be formalized in a methodology. And that is intuition.
Seeing and Knowing
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuThe results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition.
Sermon for WIAD Bristol 2021
The language itself has been weaponized
It’s quite difficult, to fight back against the seeming wisdom of axiomatic “truths,” when the language itself has been weaponized through the power of pattern. Through rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and consonance.
The last time I was in England was at the invitation of Nomensa, to give a talk at a conference wherein I encouraged the audience to discard an axiom that I feel has done users of the English language more harm than good through endless and glib repetitions.
Like “Curiosity Killed The Cat,” “You Are Not Your User” sounds so good that we keep on saying it, without appreciating what we’re reifying through repetition. The pleasure of repetition, the pleasure of pattern matching, the pleasingness of Kuh Kuh Kuh consonants on the one hand, and of the round vowelly Yuh Yuh Yuh on the other make these things we say seem true because they sound and feel so good to say.
One Of Us
That’s the primary difference between an axiom like “Curiosity Killed The Cat” and an axiom like “You Are Not Your User. ” The former rings true in common experience. It’s test-able, like striking a tuning fork or dangling a bit of yarn in front of a kitten. The latter is just some stuff that somebody said.
Sometimes, axiomatic sayings like “You Are Not Your User” no longer have a who that’s saying them. They cease being an actual instruction, and instead serve as a kind of identity, to identify the person who’s repeating the axiom as One Of Us.
The technical term for when an axiom devolves into an ID card is shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.
You and your user are one
In the case of the seeming egalitarianism and beneficence of the voice from the cloud that says “You Are Not Your User,” what I hear in that voice is the ringing of a cash register, and the creaking of the crank on the side of a box that software development efforts disappear into, and that money comes out of.
A mechanism that would seize up instantly if some still small voice were to propose the opposite of what the thunder says: that you and your user are one.