Last week I was checking out the new Alltop aggregator and noticed the title, Pragmatism and the Future of Product Design on the Critical Mass's Experience Matters blog, posted by Dave Robertson.
As with the topic of my last post on frank'snotes, I was excited to find other people discussing what I'm passionate about (I mean pragmatism and its potential for the future... well, I suppose I like product design too, but it isn't so rare to find someone writing about product design on the web).
Robertson's inspiration came from this post by Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones, which suggested that an impending economic downturn, demographic shift, and increased environmental sensitivity would bring an "era of pragmatism and restraint," and that "[r]ather than being a pessimistic forecast, I see this as cause for hope. Events are converging to force us to take steps that are entirely necessary and overdue."
Robertson’s response to the diagnosis was to propose “getting back to really understanding what customers need” and delivering sustainable products “that have ‘just enough’ features,” which are developed through “human centred research and design skills.”
“Human centred research and design” is a nice encapsulation of what pragmatism is about; it’s a variation on the original sense of the word, but not in a totally unrelated and meaningless way, as so much of the word’s common usage tends to be.
Pragmatism originates from philosophy, specifically American philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th century. It is deceptively difficult and subtle. In fact, its first proponents made clear that pragmatism was not ‘a philosophy’ in the systematic or doctrinal sense, but simply a method – barely more than a rule of thumb – for making ideas clear in the endless way of seeking truth.
In order to resolve the ongoing feud between rationalism and empiricism, the old pragmatists argued that truth is in the making, truthfulness is continually something to be decided by the future: always consider the potential effects or consequences of holding an idea to be true. They promoted the importance of subjecting knowledge to possible falsification, sharing it among an open community, and relating it closely with experiencing and doing.
These notions are largely second nature for people working in the progress-oriented fields of business, technology, and design. Perhaps without ever facing pragmatist ideas explicitly, pragmatism is tacitly the essence of their work – just as it was for the pioneers of American industry and commerce, continuing through subsequent generations of innovators and leaders.
So people who are successful as practitioners and executives (in the widest meaning of the term) hardly need to be convinced or instructed in pragmatist ways of addressing challenges and opportunities: they just ‘get’ it.
But this intellectually naive attitude only works for limited number of years – a number that seems to be getting shorter and shorter.
It isn’t so much that ‘practical’ people don’t rely on abstract theories; they rely on theories that are every bit as abstract as those promoted by even the nuttiest of professors; ‘practical’ people just manage to keep their theories be ‘off the books’ – outsourced to the institutions and conventions that form their working environment.
The ‘practical’ life is not a rejection of theorizing; it is rather an acceptance of an unknown combination of certain older theories that helped form present conditions and values.
You might not care to read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, or Dewey, and you might disdain people like me who do, but your attitude and values are every bit as saturated with philosophy as mine are, because the ideas those philosophers had (and the list of philosophers could go on) have been bred into the social conventions and institutions that we all inherited. And in this way, the person who reads philosophy is more sceptical of philosophy than the person who thinks it’s a waste of time: the latter trusts philosophy blindly, or at least lets philosophy go unchecked, whereas the former tries to stay above or outside of it.
Eventually the institutions and conventions we are accustomed to are surpassed by new ones. As the ground shifts, our old inarticulate assumptions may become irrelevant, and perhaps even misleading. Questions and doubts arise that call for an explicit response -- a ‘stiffening’ of one’s ideas, to stand up to new challenges -- or at least questions about the mysterious sources of assumptions and conventions. (How do people 'just get' stuff? And why do they 'just get' that stuff specifically, as opposed to something else?)
Up until then, the ‘practical’ person has owed their success largely to a willingness not to be distracted by such questions and doubts. So much of one’s early career is about doing what’s expected, getting along with conventions, focusing all of one’s attention and energy into the most immediate projects, not allowing future or ‘big picture’ issues to get in the way of getting things done on the ground, in the present.
So I’m going to use a business metaphor and say that ‘practical’ people, in a sense, ‘lease’ the theoretical frameworks in which they work and live, rather than buying into them directly. This allows them to focus on what they’re good at – getting things done – by providing mobility and freedom from the risks and responsibilities of ownership.
Accountants (for example) can’t afford to worry about a pipe bursting or a roof leaking at tax time; they need to focus on their business and let the property owner take care of the facilities. And most businesses will eventually grow and contract; such periods of change are precisely when a business can least afford to be distracted by peripheral concerns. It’s usually preferable to pay an outside specialist (or if your company is large enough, a sibling company) that can take care of all the real estate, facilities, groundskeeping, and property matters so you can focus on doing what you’re actually paid to do.
Now consider that we also work and live on conceptual grounds, in conceptual facilities that need to be regularly maintained and occasionally renovated or reconstructed.
By ‘conceptual grounds’ and ‘conceptual facilities’ I mean all the ideas, theories, assumptions, expectations and conventions that surround us, including all of our assumptions regarding the aims of enterprise, conventions of success, rules and unwritten codes of conduct, cultural values and norms, vocabularies and points of reference, the meanings of words (such as 'true,' 'right,' 'good'), favourite metaphors and models, objective methods and techniques, subjective preferences, even the supposed 'meaning of life' -- anything we can't see or touch that nonetheless influences our actions and decisions.
In general, a person’s conceptual facilities include all of their thoughts, knowledge, and ideas. More importantly, 'conceptual facilities and grounds' refers to the ways in which those thoughts are organized. (Here I’m going to use both ‘thoughts’ and/or ‘knowledge’ to include anything that functions in the mind, including facts, know-how, ideas, perceptions, conceptions, insights, theories, unconscious assumptions – and even feelings and desires, et cetera. Eventually I’ll be more specific, but there’s no point excluding anything at this early stage.)
Everything we do is saturated in thought and suspended in language (to borrow an insight from Niels Bohr). We can’t do anything without some kind of conceptual framework or background, and we can’t do anything with these frameworks and backgrounds without words and symbols to represent and manage their many components. These conceptual facilities and grounds are just as important to working and living as are our physical environment and material tools: they influence everything we do, and we can never get completely outside of them.
But in comparison to physical facilities, our conceptual facilities tend to be largely neglected; we can’t see and touch them in quite the same way (or rather, we can’t see or touch them at all), so they’re difficult to recognize and grasp – doing so requires yet another set of conceptual facilities and tools. This is especially true of those conceptual facilities that touch deeper (or ‘higher’) and more general levels of life.
Discussing thoughts and knowledge in this way – as if they exist on a separate level or in a ‘conceptual sphere’ – is a practical necessity but it’s not necessarily true. It takes advantage of a metaphorical, heuristic, pragmatic instrument to make these complex ideas more clear, distinct, communicable, and manageable.
This in itself demonstrates the point of my essay. Pragmatism means working with concepts to develop “for now” solutions to theoretical problems with practical bearings -- in order to develop even better solutions, which will eventually replace the current ones, and on, and on, and on, with no distinct end.
As William James said, by following the pragmatist method, “Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets one at work.”
This may seem to contradict my earlier claim that new kinds of challenges may need to be addressed by ‘stiffening’ our ideas. But pragmatism doesn’t call for a rejection of all rationalizing, it doesn’t mean we may not occasionally have to ‘stiffen’ a theory in order to find clarity, it simply calls for a new “attitude of orientation”: “The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories’, supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”
Now if looking towards fruits and consequences happens to be most effectively done using principles, categories, and supposed necessities as temporary facilities and tools, then it is pragmatically acceptable to do so – as long as thinking doesn’t get re-oriented back towards “first things” in the process, mistaking our instruments as the supposed aim.
On the other hand, pragmatism shouldn’t be mistaken as an excuse to walk away from theory and logic altogether: that would assume that pragmatism is a priori the best way of thinking, that our best practices are already worked out and settled – which is exactly the kind of assumption that pragmatism goes after.
To take pragmatism as absolutely the best practice would present it as an absurd contradiction: an absolute principle that advocates rejecting all absolute principles must itself be rejected.
Whereas if we appreciate pragmatism as an attitude, then there is no such contradiction: the pragmatist formulation of truth-in-the-making is an announcement by the pragmatist individual that they have already grown beyond absolute reliance on principles; their mind has matured enough to move about on its own legs; principles have become internalized as a part of that movement instead of being external supports. Pragmatism means taking ownership of one’s own conceptual facilities and grounds, taking them into account, putting them ‘on the books’ as assets.
This is by no means a cop out. There’s a lifelong debt the pragmatist must pay. To get away with saying that “truth is in the making,” you’ve got to actually keep making it, you’ve got to keep working with it and maintaining it, continuing to buy into it – like paying a mortgage. Owning your own knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment.
If you claim to be a pragmatist but don’t take this attitude of ongoing ownership, responsibility and work – continually updating, maintaining, and buying into your conceptual facilities – if you become too carefree about the pragmatist contradiction (i.e. if you say, “Truth is in the making, the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth, so never mind all that intellectual stuff at all”), then someone’s going to call your loan, and you’ll lose your claim to owning your own knowledge.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. You can walk away from “all that intellectual stuff” and be practical if you like, but you can’t claim it’s because of any knowledge, principle, or rationale.
If you walk away from the truth and truthmaking altogether, you can only claim specific practical or arbitrary reasons: you could claim you simply feel like doing so, or you could say it’s because you’re already in the habit of letting others take care of theoretical concerns, or you could say it’s because you’re just going along with everybody around you, or you could claim that your decision is based on some immediate necessity or benefit (i.e. “I don’t have time for that. There are other things I should be doing”), but any general rationalization of the decision not to care about theory and truth would be absurd.
I’ve heard ‘practical’ people make general statements about the superiority of “practice vs. theory,” but it’s just plain stupid to give theoretical reasons for not being concerned with theoretical reasoning.
Theory is itself a kind of practice; it is not opposed to practice. Being concerned with theoretical knowledge, truthmaking and thought does not necessarily mean being impractical. Theory is a different, more general kind of practice aimed at designing and maintaining the conceptual facilities through which we work, learn, and live.
In general, theory is the practice of using language to make our ideas manageable and clear, in order to more effectively make sense of experience. Like any other practice, it can be done with varying degrees of competence. Mastery requires sustained practice through a variety of challenges.
Language and action are generated from two different sets of neural hardware. A kind of indirect translation or mediation has to occur between them, so that a theory can’t simply be turned directly into real action, it must be entirely remade from the ground up; conversely, action can’t simply be turned into theory, it must be entirely remade according to the nature of the linguistic realm.
And because of the time and energy required to master the demands of either realm, it is rare to find someone who has genuinely mastered both of them, and most people who thrive in one tend to avoid the other.
(There are many people who are perpetually ‘too busy’ finishing concretely practical tasks to ever stop and think or talk about what effects all that work will eventually have, seeming to intentionally avoid having to face the mysterious sources of their habits, beliefs, and assumptions articulately, even if that means ‘digging into a deeper hole’ instead of confronting a major problem. On the other hand, there are many people – and I’m one of them – who are perpetually planning, speculating, criticizing, and theorizing, always finding newer ideas before the current idea can be executed, seeming to intentionally avoid ever implementing those plans and theories, even if it means letting opportunities slip away.)
Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with neglecting theory for the sake of focusing on concrete action; but there is something wrong with presuming to own knowledge that you never had to pay for and don’t actively maintain.
This ‘intellectual vagrancy’ is dangerous because it puts blind trust in mysterious and unaccountable sources. When things start to change or go awry, intellectually vagrant individuals (or organizations) get tossed about by circumstances, and have almost no recourse but to hope the system becomes somewhat stable soon so they can find another bit of shelter to crawl into.
By ‘intellectually vagrant,’ I have in mind a specific type of businessperson who does whatever they can for the sake of short-term results. What sets them apart from other more honest executives and practitioners (or ‘tenants,’ who admit they don't care to know and ‘lease’ their conceptual facilities), is that vagrants actually claim to know their actions are grounded in philosophical rightness, or ‘truth.’ Here I’m thinking especially of certain gross simplifications of pseudo-Darwinian ethics – i.e. “everything is governed by the profit motive,” “greed is good,” “eat or be eaten,” et cetera. Paradoxically, what intellectual vagrants know tends to represent an excuse not to learn any more, nor to ask hard questions, nor give any consideration to other viewpoints.
The big problem with such false claims to owning knowledge is that honest practitioner-tenants get fooled into working and living in the same derelict conceptual facilities, which aren’t properly maintained. When the pipes burst and the roof starts leaking, nobody’s going to fix it. At best, problems might get a temporary patch or cover-up, which may keep the facilities operational and seemingly in good order; but they might get repaired in a way that makes them less sustainable and profitable in the long run, so that one day the whole thing could just collapse all at once, leaving nothing behind, maybe even bringing others down with it. (Think of Enron.)
Of course, to say these collapses leave nothing behind at all is an exaggeration. They often leave behind infrastructure, resources, and knowledge to benefit former competitors, successors and other emerging enterprises. At the very least, such collapses educate its survivors and observers, who may learn something from the mistakes, and might even find a few good ideas that were brought down along with all the impoverished ones.
But it is important to recognize that knowledge – like any other kind of resource or infrastructure – is most beneficial when it can be integrated into a larger system. Events are most educative when they confirm, refute, or refine knowledge we already have.
Without existing knowledge, events will occur to us merely as a few disconnected stories and facts – which will probably be soon forgotten without a context to relate them to. Someone who had never thought much about business (or ethics, or culture, or psychology...) could not learn much from the Enron fiasco, or the tech bubble, or the more recent turmoil. Without having an existing set of ideas about the context in which they occur, such events don’t teach us much.
Whereas someone who already knows a lot about an event’s context might learn enough from it to fill a whole book – or even a whole academic career.
To fully understand events, it’s especially important to work out articulate assumptions, expectations, or speculations about how things might turn out in the future – before they turn out – and why you think that way. By doing so, the future becomes a scorekeeper – a source of objective feedback as to the validity of our ideas and the effectiveness of our conceptual facilities. The future then helps us overcome the subjective weaknesses in our knowledge, notifying us to ideas and assumptions that need to be improved, refined, expanded, updated, opened up, or shut down.
This is what I mean by taking ownership of knowledge. Learning like this is literally a kind of investment – putting ourselves into something, building a self-sustaining venture that can potentially grow beyond ourselves – whereby we eventually “make our ideas work for us.”
So now I can finally return to the point of this essay, which was initially inspired by those two blog posts – one that speculated there might be a “coming era of pragmatism,” and the other that built on that to suggest such an era would demand a more human centred and sustainable approach to product design.
Though it isn’t exactly clear to me whether this is roughly what Ho and Robertson had in mind, my suggestion for an “era of pragmatism” is essentially to make production more intelligent, and intelligence more productive.
For the coming era to be genuinely pragmatic, people in business must think of their work as being part of an intellectual venture, rather than merely a commercial and social one. The business enterprise must be conceived as a laboratory; products must be conceived as experiments, which are conceived so as to confirm, refute, or refine hypotheses; and these hypotheses must be organized and related to one another, with far-reaching general implications.
It is already fairly common to treat products as hypotheses and prototypes; there are always questions that only the products (or services), when put out in the market, can answer themselves: “Will people buy this product? How much will they be willing to pay for it? Will consumers use these new features? What other uses might consumers use these features for? What will people think of how it looks?...”
Now we need to push into a deeper (or ‘higher’), more general level of questions: “Why do people buy (or not buy) this product? What does consumer behaviour tell us about human nature in general? What does it tell us about nature in general? Why do people love buying stuff so much? Why do we love making it so much? Why are we asking all of these questions?..."
I’m not saying that people in business don't already consider some of these kinds of questions in their work. What I am saying is we should not shy away from the more theoretical questions. We should consider these questions more seriously as an essential aspect of our work.
As I said at the start, to not care about philosophy is to trust it completely. Every person and every organization should have somebody they trust, whose job it is to account for the sources of ideas and assumptions -- like a 'conceptual accountant,' or conceptual groundskeeper.
But this isn't just about adding another job title or department to your organization. This calls for a whole new attitude, a whole new culture. I’m talking about a total integration of work and school – business and university – which burnishes all distinction between the two.
[The following section could use a lot more work. This is where I'm stretching myself a bit further into territory I don't belong. Read on to see how/why.]
I mean that people who design products and services should aspire to do world-class academic research -- and make world-changing scientific breakthroughs -- as part of the design process, not just in obvious disciplines like business and engineering, but in anything that relates to human factors, even philosophy (think of ethics and epistemology: questions of what it means to be ‘good’ and ‘true’ will always continue to come up in any circumstance, and the more facilities we have to address these questions, the better).
It might sound kind of crazy, and obviously it will take years – even decades – to harmonize the different mindsets and develop the kind of education necessary to power such an enterprise, but it is far more down to earth than it might initially seem.
Consider the recent article on Edge.org by Nicholas A. Christakis, a sociologist who uses Facebook to study social networks (read here also). I hope it's alright to steal a whole paragraph from Christakis's "Social Networks Are Like the Eye," Edge 238:
"We are thus at a moment where a leap forward in the methodology for the study of social networks has been made, firstly by building on past work. But secondly, we are at a moment where — because of modern telecommunications technologies and other innovations — people are leaving digital traces of where they are, who they are interacting with, and what they are saying or even thinking. All of these types of data can be captured by the deployment of what I call "massive passive” technologies and used to engage social science questions in a way that our predecessors could only dream of. We have vast amounts of data that can be reapplied to investigate fundamental questions about social organization and about morality and other concerns that have perplexed us forever."
Business organizations have a wealth of resources available to study human behaviour; they may not know how to use the data to rigorously test hypotheses and develop principles and theories, nor how to design features in order to generate better data that could generate better theories and better understandings, but they're precisely the very same organizations who need those better theories and better understandings!
If companies have both the most resources and the most need for conceptual facilities, then why wait for the folks at Harvard to figure this stuff out? Become Harvard. Become better than Harvard.
(And note that the American research university is itself not very old -- about as old as the automobile, the telephone, and the motion picture -- and has never really stopped changing. I see no reason to believe that there won't soon be another evolutionary leap in higher education, like the one that created the new kind of research-driven schools, like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago in the late 19th century.)
[Something that didn't really occur to me while I wrote this -- which is so glaringly obvious now, embarassingly obvious (I can't stress that enough) -- is how much fusion of university research with business has already occurred in engineering and natural science disciplines: computer science, biotech, medical research, genetics, et cetera. I was so focused on social and human disciplines that I momentarily forgot about the growth of research parks and the many private ventures started by university affiliated researchers to manage and market their intellectual property and patents. This oversight by no means diminishes my case; I seem to have underestimated it myself. So let me say again (with even more confidence this time): social sciences (or 'human factors') disciplines will be the great late-bloomers, who finally discover the methodologies they've been seeking since they began, which I hope will bring both clarity and relevance (along with rigor) and finally generate the respect around campus they've always deserved. I'm going to pursue this in future revisions.]
Maybe most companies don't want to (or aren't able to) be distracted from their core business to develop their own conceptual facilities. Maybe most companies are better off 'leasing' their conceptual facilities from others. But this new enterprise that I'm proposing would work best if some businesses (or at least some people in, or from those business) get involved.
Now I could be more direct in my pleas; I could suggest that some kind of change in this regard will happen, eventually. And in the process, somebody could get pretty far ahead of everyone else. So do you want to be involved, or do you want to let the changes sneak up on you?
The funny thing is, whether I'm right or wrong, I'm still right. My whole point is that we have a responsibility to check and challenge other people's ideas: if I'm wrong, I'm asking you to explain how I'm wrong. And if you're able to explain how I'm wrong about this, then you will have demonstrated that I'm right -- "for now."
All playing aside, all I ask is that you invest a little more in ideas, or in thinking about ideas.
Think of how much life goes by without being harnessing for educational or intellectual use. There are ways to turn anything towards more generative, sustainable, and manageable ends. All experience is in a sense learning experience, but it is predominantly undisciplined and unproductive; we tend to let most things come and go without effecting us or our ideas and habits.
Meanwhile, we allow ideas and habits become important parts of our lives without accounting for them. We learn some of our most influential habits, preferences, and beliefs by accident. Most people have no clue how these were formed, nor would they know how to evaluate or correct them. When these habits, preferences, and beliefs are challenged, people will stand up for “who they are,” they’ll go to war over “what they believe,” but they are hardly able to make any account of the sources of their identity or beliefs, nor make the even the minutest adjustments needed to turn a destructive confrontation into a generative conversation. Instead, most people are content merely to be "who they are," and "agree to disagree" with anyone who's different. This goes nowhere.
The ultimate good of pragmatism is not profit or truth; the ultimate good of pragmatism is social. Pragmatism is the attitude by which individuals humanize the organizations and institutions where they work, learn, and live. As these institutions become more humane, it becomes easier to be humane ourselves. As we “unstiffen our theories” we are better able to communicate and collaborate – resolving differences, overcoming challenges, and addressing new opportunities, both in our private lives and as part of larger public enterprise.
A ‘pragmatic plasticity’ is required to be both tough and soft – rigid at times and malleable at others. On one hand we need to use hard facts and rules to avoid or overcome subjective excesses. On the other hand, the desired aim of life is subjective well-being and freedom.
So I’m going to suggest a couple of terms to describe two complementary aspects of the pragmatic approach to working, learning, and living: ‘open objectivity’ and ‘tempered subjectivity.’ Tempered subjectivity is the supposed end, and open objectivity is the means to that end.
Open objectivity recognizes that we can’t accomplish anything together unless we have hard structures and facts to serve as common points of reference. When disputes arise, we need to be able to say, “Well, let’s see how X turns out, then we’ll know if either one of us is right.” But this is no way to enjoy life; merely knowing what’s right and following hard rules is not the whole point of living, so this objectivity needs to be open-ended, incomplete, liberating.
The point of working, learning, and living in those objective structures is to develop enough personal knowledge and competence so that we’re not totally bound by those structures. The aim is to learn how to make spontaneous decisions and evaluations that are just as fair and effective as those calculated by objective instruments. This is what I mean by tempered subjectivity, whereby free thinking has been (in)formed by objective structures and facts, and those structures and facts are always readily available to keep thinking from wandering back towards past mistakes.
Creative freedom is both experienced as enjoyable in itself and serves practical necessity – just like owning your own home. At its simplest, a good and happy life is about having the freedom (which, don’t forget, also means having security and stability) to enjoy spontaneous moments of beauty, discovery, laughter, and love.
At the same time, emergencies and surprises inevitably occur, whether we want them to or not, and these cannot totally be accounted for by objective means in advance. The most effective response to new realties is performed by people who have been trained to just know what to do without being paralysed by analysis.
Ultimately, a society of human minds is smarter than anything we could ever design. But our minds can’t function without conceptual facilities, and these facilities are designed. If they’re designed poorly, we think poorly; if they’re designed well, we think well.
And if we think well – which is to say, in a way that is creative, tempered, organized, generative, alive, and accountable – then the rest of our wants and needs will cease to be problems. When thinking is done well, all living becomes a positive, creative, fulfilling, vital experience.
Visit openconceptual.com for more info. Email me at bd.frank@gmail.com or comment at frank'snotes.
[Thanks to a suggestion by Adrian, I'll be publishing a PDF of this and my other essays. It might take a few days because I tend to start tinkering too much when I do stuff like that. Expect it this weekend (by March 9). Email me if you want updates.]
[Another update: March 9 has come and gone by a few hours and the PDF isn't gonna happen, yet. I started fixing up a couple of parts that I wasn't happy with... and one thing led to another, and now somehow I've started to touch on Locke's ideas, among other things (that I shouldn't be 'touching' without more care and research). Needless to say, the forthcoming draft will not be shorter or lighter than this one, but it will be more comprehensive and include more citations, examples and explanations.]
