Binaries, boxes, the grid and sorting — an exploration through habit, form, function, art, and philosophy
So, I want to tell a story of a pretty pivotal moment in my life. I went to University in ‘the city that care forgot’. I knew next to nothing about the place, but I knew that in March, when my hometown in Missouri was a mix of mud and snow and filth, the magnolias and the jasmine were blooming in New Orleans and it smelled amazing. So, I followed my nose…
The city felt like magic…
I spent most of my time with the misfits, the outsiders… and if you saw my OpenEd ’18 keynote, much of my time in the Music Library.
I majored in Philosophy as an undergraduate, but to be honest, I’m not sure I knew what Philosophy was.
I liked thinking, I liked the way Philosophy tickled my brain and made me feel a little queasy. So, while the other kids were binge drinking and getting high (enjoying the city that care forgot), I was feeling queasy reading Plato and Aristotle. Kinda nerdy.
When I was in my 3rd year, an LSU professor was going to be offering a graduate-level seminar on Heidegger at my University. I didn’t know squat about Heidegger, I didn’t know squat about LSU. I had no idea how long it took him to drive to New Orleans each Wednesday night from Baton Rouge, what he saw on his way, but I knew that I wanted to be in that class.
I wanted to see what graduate students did — they seemed fancy… I wanted to watch them be fancy, I wanted to be fancy-adjascent. But I was an undergraduate. So, I begged to be in the class. And this man…
Professor Gregory Schufreider, Dept. of Philosophy, LSU said sure. He didn’t judge me. I think he asked me a few questions and that was it. I was in. He made an exception! He didn’t follow the rules!
There were about 8 of us in the class.
His lectures blew my mind. I was thankful they were only once a week, because I’d spend the rest of the week gathering the pieces of my brain and putting them back together…
Schufreider was teaching the philosophy of Heidegger using Mondrian’s art. I’d never experienced anything like it in school.
And the way he taught made me feel as though I could accidentally, at any moment, say something profound — I might. Schufreider was honest about what he knew and curious about the rest. He was clear, gentle, never harsh, open, welcoming of ideas and comments from anyone. He maintained such an authentic curiousness about everything; so when I did get the courage to make a comment, he considered it carefully and wondered with me, pulling out the most redeemable morsel of thought, tossing it around out loud and then adding it to the accumulated wonder in the air.
He didn’t suggest he was the only one with the answers (like many profs imply), rather, he was a practitioner who had more practice time than the rest of us. He shared his practice, he was kind AND he was a philosopher! And profundity in this class was clearly NOT reserved for only him, it wasn’t reserved for graduate students either, and it wasn’t reserved for the young men in the class — the ones who ‘looked the part’ — the young Bob Dylan type with his tortured hair, his chewed up pen, and his brow stuck in perpetual wonder…
As you can probably tell, the social, the context mattered a lot to me. Who was brilliant? Who was garnering particular favour? Who was being judged. Who was being kind and generous and open to new things. Who had cool hair… look, I was 20!
Adrien de Pauger, a French engineer and cartographer, made some sketches of the city plan for New Orleans in 1721. As one author says, “What this map did not show was the smattering of huts, sheds, gardens, and paths paying no heed to de Pauger’s orderly vision. Worse yet, villagers continued building willy-nilly as they had since 1718 and reacted indignantly when the lordly newcomer told them otherwise… The engineer later nearly suffered blows from an enraged housewife — and narrowly escaped a duel with her husband — when de Pauger’s straight streets intersected her crooked garden.”
“…New Orleans was a monarchical and totalitarian society. Urban planning decisions, like all other expressions of power, flowed from the top-down with little regard for the concerns of citizens — to say nothing of the lives of indigenous peoples, whose displacement went hand in glove with imperialism, nor of the lives of the enslaved, upon which the entire colonial project rested.”
Uptown, the Garden District and beyond was parcelled out in what was called the “long lot”. “The unit used to survey long lots was the arpent de Paris, measuring 180 French feet or 192 English feet.” I’ve no idea why French feet are a different size from English feet! But “that size reflected the amount of land one farmer can till in one day.”
So, Wednesday nights… Schufreider, Heidegger, Mondrian.
Two worlds collided into one (art and philosophy) (undergrad and grad) (LSU and Tulane) (Baton Rouge and New Orleans) — and dare I say the spiritual and the rational culminating in the sublime (and queasy).
All this within the context of the question: what is being? What does it mean to be?
One thing that stuck from that course was Heidegger’s notion of DASEIN, a kind of coming forth, revealing of being, a presencing. Mondrian’s work helped visualize that in a way. My mind was revelling in now being tickled in two ways: through the written and through the visual.
You see, in Mondrian’s work here, the black, the grid is sometimes on top and sometimes underneath — there is a dimensionality to it — he’s capturing depth AND grid… coming forth, presencing, revealing. The black lines are the flattest part of the painting, the colour blocks are thick and created using brush strokes in one direction. The white is actually even thicker, layer upon layer of white paint. So, imagine that and you can get even further dimensionality and a clearer sense of the revealing, coming forth of the colours and the space.
It was sensory overload. And it was in this cacophony of modes that my mind expanded.
Now Heidegger would write these seemingly tautologous statements like
“Being is always the Being of an entity.” And I would squint and look at the Mondrian paintings. See that red line, sometimes over the yellow, sometimes under. Hmmmmm, I thought…
But I could FEEL something — not truly understand or grasp what he was saying, but understand that he was trying to get at something in the MIDDLE. Instead of falling in line and accepting Western metaphysics from Plato all the way through to “I think therefore I am” — he was trying to take a step farther back — what is being at all? Thinking comes after being.
And this was asked within the confines (of course) of the historical situation he was a part of. And the historical situation was one of transcendence. The world was changing dramatically. This is transcendental philosophy (Schufreider, Art & the Problem of Truth).
And in this context, Heidegger’s mind wandered in and out, intertwined with the grid, but moving more toward emergence… and abstraction. He was somewhere BETWEEN the word and the image. Somewhere between…
The human is unique because we can be concerned with, question, and be open to the notion of our own being. But we can also turn away from being, forget our true selves, and in doing so deprive ourselves of our humanity. Heidegger believed we had replaced authentic questioning about our existence with ready-made answers served up by ideologies, the mass media, and overwhelming technology. https://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/
We took the easy path and that wasn’t good.
We happily and simply exalted reason as an absolute value which, through education, brings about a gradual transformation of all spheres of human life — the RIGOUR of it all. But for Heidegger, he didn’t think that we needed more “calculative thinking, but instead we need more openness toward and more reflection on being.”
We have Mondrian’s broadway boogie woogie here — And I would listen to Schufrieder explain these complex notions of being that transcended Descartes, departed from Aristotle and Plato, wove in Eastern influences and considered other starting points — and I would revel in the looseness of it all.
What if the Western tradition of metaphysics had gotten it wrong? What is being at its most fundamental level?!
WE DON’T KNOW?!
We should KNOW!
And everyone else on the quad playing Frisbee seemed happy to plod along in the Cartesian assumptions we’d all been given as exact, clear, known, complete. Perhaps it was binge drinking they were doing…
But Heidegger left me feeling unsettled, inexact, incomplete, not-quite-articulated, fuzzy — and that felt like a real place to be.
If none of this makes sense to you, fret not; as Schufrieder says himself, “It is no secret that, in light of the original question of the meaning of Being, Sein and Zeit [Heidegger’s answer] fails.” Schufreider “Art & the Problem of Truth”. What he leaves us with though is that it isn’t clear. It isn’t exact. It is something else.
A gut sense — a queasiness.
Something isn’t quite clear, something knowable but not articulate-able… Something IN BETWEEN the knowing and the being.
So, on Wednesday nights…
I wanted to understand when in someone’s life does this kind of thinking happen — who was this Heidegger guy?
And I don’t know if you’re like me, but whenever I go to someone’s Wikipedia page, I scroll down immediately to the Personal section — I want to know who this person sleeps with — who gets them.
Heidegger slept with Hannah Arendt. So I began consuming books of their letters to each other, of analyses of how a “sort of Nazi” could be in a relationship with a Jew. I speculated about their arguments, I read INTO their theories. I wondered how they influenced each other. I made them into a soap opera… Of course I told no one I did this — this wasn’t rigorous philosophy… but I was curious. And my curiosity was not something I could turn off.
I couldn’t help wondering how we separate the man from his thoughts — do we? Could we? And in the midst of that curiosity, there was another coming forth — this time of my being.
I had a predisposition for being overly tuned into the social, but also a lack of clarity of how I fit into it. How do we reconcile the grid, the haves and the have nots with our ethics? The good city block from the bad? New Orleans is a checker board of good and bad — it is deeply complex. How do we make sense of the police in a place where many of them are corrupt? What about profiling? What about our decisions about who has access to clean drinking water, to an education, to who gets a breakfast, to affordable learning materials, to graduate level courses, to the right to own property on a flood plane? None of this seemed very clear to me — this wasn’t as simple as ‘black’ and ‘white’ — this was grey and squarely in the “middle.”
This is my existential journey. Which brings me back here. To the context I was in and its history…
Back to the original land of the Choctaw and the Chitimacha (a matrilineal society)…
The history in this land, it is soaked in history! It defies binaries. It is Atchafalaya. It is brackish in all ways…
it is:
- Flooding
- Corruption
- Celebration
- Debauchery
- Uniqueness
- Crooked Gardens
- And a resistance to the neat fit of the grid.
And what compromises have been made in that history? Who has been deemed the HAVES and who the HAVE NOTS? Who made the decisions that we’re still living with?
What did we lose when we chose to align the city as much as possible in a grid, a pattern so familiar to us, but one that precludes all other patterns… a colleague of mine in Toronto calls this epistemicide — the eradication of a way of knowing in favour of one way.
To indigenous groups (as well as others), the circle is paramount — what is the impact of imposing the grid onto the land, the places, and the people.
If you follow the grid farther back, you see its focus on a point, characterizing the late medieval Christian world… “the point when it all starts — creation.” Exact.
The Grid: History, Use, and Meaning Author(s): Jack H. Williamson Source: Design Issues, Vol. 3, №2 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 15–30 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1511481
Then we have the Renaissance and the Cartesian grid — a move from sacred to secular — that grid embodies more of a field where points or axes are marked by quantitative value. The scatter plot!
This grid is used in global exploration and discovery. It makes neat little boxes. Those boxes demarcate specific spaces, locations. Take a look at the states in the upper Midwest — they were parcelled out in squares — the map tells that history. The highways are either E-W or N-S, but rarely diagonal.
And with Descartes the grid makes an important leap: from not only the neat little boxes of locations, but also to problem solving and decision-making in later twentieth-century design.
The twentieth-century “grid comes to represent not only the structural laws and principles behind physical appearance, but the process of rational thinking [and decision-making] itself.” And that leap has done some gnarly things
Take a look at our fondness and arguable over-reliance on data (that is all around us today). Data driven decisions — the disembodied data told me to do it! Requirements, prerequisites, fixed learning outcomes, one way to demonstrate proficiency, etc. I wrote more about this in The Tyranny of “Clear” Thinking.
Stop for a moment and consider all the grids in your life — all the grids all around you that structure your life. What impact do they have on you? On your actions? On your decisions? On the haves and the have nots?
What if instead it was something in-the-middle? Something between? What if the edges were looser, the rules more flexible, the gut more listened to?
These are our cities
Notice the variations on a grid theme.
These are our conferences, spaces where we share.
Notice the exactness of the chairs all lined up in a pleasing symmetry
These are our offices, spaces where we work.
Notice the little boxes of sameness: computer, check; chair, check, 3 walls in a cube, check
This is where we put knowledge, information — this is where we encourage exploration, discovery, epiphany, wonder. Notice the boxes, the grid in this library.
We devised a system to put ‘nothing before something’ and organize our knowledge
And digitally, this is the space where education happens. Notice the two courses — music theory and the history of music — never the two shall meet… they shall never overlap, interrupt, connect, interrelate.
This is a Google image search for ‘zoom meeting’. And this is the space where we collaborate. We build ourselves into little boxes, mute our voices, disengage our gaze… physically and digitally.
And, perhaps most dangerously, we put people into boxes and categories too. We pathologize and attempt to enumerate just about everything.
Here we have 4 boxes for sorting people with disabilities. What do you think happens when you sort people into boxes?
We know that these taxonomies, this act of sorting that we all do to make sense of the world fails…
But when the grid fails us, we’ll just create a new category — this is street 13 and 1/2. It’ll be a little messy, not as pretty as we hoped, but it will still work!
And if you’ve ever been in the position of sorting or creating a taxonomy or, god help you creating a metadata standard, then you know what a fools project that can be…
As soon as you have a neat taxonomy, something comes along that doesn’t fit and you’re in the position to decide what to do with it. Will you toe the line and defer to the disembodied rules of the framework? Or will you create a new category and explain the variance?
And much harm has been carried out historically, in the name of taxonomic exactness…
Taxonomies seem neutral, but inevitably reflect hierarchic structures. Take a look at MITs list of objects in order of concern for autonomous vehicles from the Moral Machine experiment…who gets run over first.
When taxonomies legitimize and naturalize our patterns of thinking and sorting, they perpetuate social biases like marginalization, discrimination, and lack of representation. And worse, it becomes harder to dislodge them once they are codified in this structure… see metadata standard debates for proof.
Incidentally, there’s a great article from the Smithsonian about Taxonomic vandals… “those who name lots of new taxa without presenting sufficient evidence for their findings. Sort of like science plagiarizers. These are self-publishing, un-peer-reviewed bandits of the Internet age… and a lack of oversight, combined with a discipline that has been split between lumpers and splitters…has created this.
But wait a minute, you might say, science KNOWS TRUTHS. SCIENCE IS RELIABLE, FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH. These philosophers might not know what they’re doing but scientists KNOW (all caps).
Scientism
And I want to suggest, I think, that we’ve misunderstood or at least misrepresented what science is —
We reduce many things to science and describe it as THE way to describe all reality and knowledge, and the nature of things. Yep, being-ness too! It must be measurable, verifiable, reproducible, quantitative. It must be logical, rational, validated, and exact.
And we treat data like pure, untouched mountain streams.
But Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, quantum mechanics genius says, “it is our responsibility as scientists… to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed.”
What’s this? A hard core scientist saying that uncertainty, doubt are useful?
Rhett Allain from Southeastern Louisiana University has written this pithy, but enormously powerful post on Wired about science. It’s called
‘Science Isn’t About ‘the Truth’ — it’s about building models”
Allain explains, “these are still just models. They aren’t The Truth. In fact, the only way to know if a model is absolutely true would be to test every possible case that applies to the model. This means testing every situation IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE — oh, and for all time beginning with the Big Bang until the end. You can’t do that.”
“Don’t worry. All is not unknown. Even though we don’t know the truth, we still have great models. For instance, we still don’t completely understand the gravitational interaction, but our models are good enough to design that airplane that gets you across the country safely. Oh, and we still have models that are good enough to know that there is indeed climate change and it is caused by humans.”
We are flying spacecraft around our solar system — based on models. We can have models that are not “correct” or absolutely true, and we can still function, do things, make decisions, and move forward. And if we fail, we can adapt and try again. And we can discover new things because we are open to them. Open and somewhere in the middle…
If scientists can’t get to truth what do they start with?? And if they are just models, what are they telling us?
They start with
• Failure
• Questioning
• Curiosity
• And speculating and trying to disprove themselves — lest they have a conflict of interest or are invested in the outcome, the proving of the undoing is a nice ethical side dish…
And they’re trying their best to eradicate scientism…
In an article from Nature, “Scientists rise up against statistical significance” that more than 800 scientists have called for an end to statistical significance. They show that 51% of the time (in a sampling of 791 articles across 5 journals) it is interpreted incorrectly.
And they explain that, “the trouble is human and cognitive more than it is statistical: bucketing results into “significantly significant” and “statistically non-significant” makes people think that the items assigned in that way are categorically different. The same problems are likely to arise under any proposed statistical alternative that involves dichotomization, whether frequentist, Bayesian or otherwise.” WE MUST STOP THIS DICHOTOMANIA — this by the way, those 51% of the studies — that’s the data we’re making our data-driven decision upon.
This hasn’t thrown scientists down the slippery slope to relativism! They are comfy knowing and not knowing. In fact, they probably feel MORE secure when they don’t know — it means there is no finish line… We have to always explore and explore some more! David Attenborough said, roughly, to great scientists, truth is understood to be truth-right-now — until another ‘truth’ is ‘discovered.’ — this smells to me like humility, exploration, and a lack of completeness that allows us to wonder. Let go, be open, settle somewhere in the middle.
And then here we have Leslie Chan from the University of Toronto saying, “when we think about OpenScience, we have to be careful about whether we’re thinking of a monolithic concept. There should be many Open Sciences. Excluding other ways of knowing is to our detriment.” This is that epistemicide. People, we have some work to do!
Nothing is neutral
You see, nothing we do or say is neutral. It is embedded in our experiences, in our context, and in the historical assumptions we adopt. We make choices (and I’ll call them design choices) all the time. And those choices are made in a context at a time and with particular thoughts and expectations, biases too.
We are all well-aware of this lack of neutrality. This was a tag that Erin Leach brought to the American Library Association meeting a few years ago. It says Cataloguing is not a neutral act…
Do you make decisions? Yes? You’re a designer. Ok folks, let’s be clear: if you are making decisions, then you are a designer. And your designs have an impact on others… You are declaring *this* and not anything else. You might have reasons (they might range from ‘that’s the way we always do it’ to ‘because I said so’ to ‘because research shows it’s good for the majority’ etc) If you make decisions that affect another, then you are designing. You are a designer…
Do we know how to do this Inclusively? We get stuck almost as soon as we dig in…
Inclusion: Questioning, reflecting, disrupting
How can we do this Inclusion thing then? I think that we need to build skills around three things:
- Questioning why are things the way they are? What is the history? Where did this come from? Like we did earlier with the GRID.
- Reflecting on the fairness of that? The justice? The ethics… which we spent a tiny bit of time on with the GRID
- And disrupting to make changes in the ruts of the ways we do things… Imagine how we might disrupt the grid in our physical and digital spaces.
Curiosity is one of the core ingredients to this Inclusion soup. It is the roux that can make or break this gumbo. We’re often encouraged to build “empathy.” I find that building empathy is sometimes too big an ask. It still leaves questions — ok, I’ll build empathy, how do I do that?!
I maintain, it all starts with curiosity.
And so that doesn’t leave you out in the middle of the ocean of uncertainty, I’m going to talk to you about at least 3 ways to be curious… As an aside, I have to admit I have a fondness for things in 3s: yes, no, maybe; black, white, grey. And so you might find it curious that all of my lists are in 3s… I fully acknowledge there could be some number greater than 3 but I am fond AND happy with 3s.
So, I want to lead us through some practice of this questioning, reflecting, and disrupting in the three areas I think have a significant impact on teaching learning and education. The form impacts the function in these three areas
- The Architectural
- The Experiential
- The Interactional
Education, teaching and learning are situated in a space. It is an experience, and it is an interaction among people. These things make up the context — they are where learning and teaching is situated.
Let’s start here. Ready?
The Architectural
How can we QUESTION this? Can we say, is this a desirable learning environment? For whom? And why? Then REFLECT and ask: Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?
And then DISRUPT and suggest that this too is a learning environment…
How can we QUESTION this? Can we say, is this a desirable studying environment? For whom? And why? Then REFLECT and ask: Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?
And then DISRUPT and suggest that this too is a studying environment…
How can we QUESTION this? Can we say, is this a desirable sharing and learning environment? For whom? And why? Then REFLECT and ask: Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?
And then DISRUPT and suggest that this too is a sharing and learning environment… And we can ask in each of these cases of disruption how the change in form affects the outcomes.
What spaces have shaped you? We’ve tried out this questioning, reflecting and disrupting in the architectural space in the last few slides. Now, take a moment to reflect yourself on the spaces that have shaped you.
The Experiential
Now let’s give this a whirl with the experiential And don’t forget, form influences function and outcomes…
An interesting thing happened during a co-design workshop I facilitated. We were brainstorming the information architecture for a new website. It was a messy activity, so as a group we decided to each individually sketch out the relationships before coming together to work on refining it… One participant had a notebook and she started the activity and then got frustrated. She said the notebook was too small and it was making it hard for her to capture all the inter-connectedness. She asked if she could use the board instead. A couple of interesting things happened…
As soon as she went to the board what happened?
Everyone else put down their pens and looked at what the participant at the board was doing. In taxonomies of importance in a classroom or workshop setting, the board takes first prize. It was ok, because the others had at least begun some of their sketching individually.
So, her writing is in white. Then we grabbed different colours to fold in others’ ideas.
We created in an open, exploratory, intersectional, messy, collaborative, creative way to interrelate the information. Then, the next day there was a meeting with the stakeholders to present our ideas to them…
We flattened those ideas, formalized them, and were seeking validation! This is what was presented as the outcome from the collaborative info architecture session.
We dressed up that creativity, combed its hair, gave it a starched button up, and some serious shoes. And put it into outline form.
And in doing that we lost all the great work we had done. The people who weren’t at the design session began questioning the taxonomy of what we’d done and got bogged down in form and function we’d created.
We all do this…
Edward Tufte calls this the problem of the flatlands and it motivated him to create his own press so he could publish his books the way he wanted: with spans across pages, with marginalia, with 3D design, with popups, with designs for information that challenged the straitjacket or “flatlands” of the ‘typical’ published page — the grid, if you will…
Tufte says, “The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland?” — Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
But we get stuck with the experiential… it’s complicated space. We often oversimplify to binaries.
We are in Conflict
Safe space vs Out of comfort zone
Mono Culture vs Diverse + Inclusive
Stable / standardized vs Adaptive
Be the best / compete vs Collaborative
Win vs Cooperative
Us vs Them
Positive vs Negative
And we are a bit in conflict. We want to create safe spaces, but we also know we want to push ourselves and others out of our comfort zones — how do we reconcile this? We know culture fit isn’t often diverse or inclusive, but we hire for fit and sit comfortably in that space, creating mono-cultures. We like stability, but we know to innovate, to grow, we need to change. We want to be the best, but we also speak about the value of collaboration. We want to win, but we also want to cooperate. We create an ‘us’ to build a community, but our community also defines a ‘them’ in the negative space. We want to be positive, inspirational, exciting, but we know that so many of us learn more from the negative experiences if we allow ourselves to have them. How do we reconcile these? There are no black or white answers here and these binaries are false… we need both, and. I think that’s how we get inclusion — remember? QUESTION, REFLECT, DISRUPT — evermore, not just once. Each of these binaries could be an entire debate.
Numbers or People
Numbers Centred vs Human Centred
Statistical RESULTS vs Inspirational STORIES
Limited to a set of questions vs Freedom to explore through dialogue Reported life vs Real life
Out of CONTEXT vs As part of CONTEXT
Hear about issues vs Experience issues
Validate vs Explore
In our methods too! We know now, I hope, that we need BOTH AND and we’re no longer at a place where we can either hide behind data or just tell stories. Quantitative, qualitative, and anecdotal. That queasy feeling we had from Heidegger earlier — make a place for that AND the data you’ve collected in a well-meaning survey that might be embedded with bias and leading questions and false positives and and and. Embrace uncertainty, the incomplete, and not knowing. We do damage when we succumb to, without questioning, the naturalized and adopted methods.
Good or Bad
Thinking or Feeling
Pragmatist or Principled
Scale or One-off
Pros or Cons
Enemy or Friend
True or Fake
And we hamstring ourselves by thinking that it can be this overly simple. You do not have to choose — find spaces that understand both. Look at scale and one-off here… Much damage has been done in education in the spirit of scaling an approach, a standard, a framework. Scale to me is code for do the same thing cheaply for MANY more people — it is an economic decision. It is ALSO, though an ethical decision. It is an ethical decision to say that one-offs aren’t worth it. Ask again, for whom? Why? What history got us there? We think we know what is good and what is bad… And then we are confronted by something that is both… we oversimplify to make things neat.
In Education we manifest this with habits like:
- Study for the grade
- Valuing assessments, not learning
- All interactions are amazing; All meetings are great
- Failure is bad
- Exploration, discovery, epiphany — because we can’t measure them or “VALIDATE” them, are too costly, risky, flimsy We should focus on measurable, rigorous, data-driven
We’ve questioned — now let’s take a moment to reflect. Anyone have experience with the phenomena above? So, how do we end up in this conflict? How do we let spaces shape us in ways that we know don’t work? Why do we perpetuate experiences that we know oppress and limit? Why??
I think it has something to do with this. Listen, I have empathy for us — our goals are laudable. We want to
— know with certainty and therefore be able to reliably predict.
— so we make only data-driven decisions because they are validated.
— and we make rules that have edges that are clear and delineated for certainty.
— and in doing so we appeal to exactness in an effort to achieve “fairness”.
We like structure, certainty, completeness, simplicity, we like knowing. We approach the world with a transactional check-book accounting expectation — if we document our inputs and outputs, it should all reconcile neatly in the end. And as a result, we adapt our institutions, experiences, and interactions to contend with this fundamentally flawed, oversimplified causal thinking. For example, medicine contends with a patient that thinks a visit to the doctor should result in a tangible something, a new prescription, a referral, a plan; and education contends with a student who thinks that if she does everything the syllabus says, then she deserves an A (she’s done her part of the contract (that’s the syllabus), she has learned). And in the process, we wind up right back here…
At street 13.5 And we have cycles of exclusion and marginalization that do not get questioned or disrupted ever. We have kids who do not get an education. We have communities that do not have access to resources. We have mass incarcerations Louisiana. We have police profiling. We have black boys in hoodies shot for walking while black. Statistically significant OR NOT.
Ok one more to go — The Interactional
I was looking online for an image that would capture the moment — the touching moment, where something happens to you that changes you. As you can imagine, finding an image of that moment is difficult. Many of the images involve animals as does this one .
Here Jane Goodall reaches out as does a chimp to touch. In moments like these, both beings change — they both are impacted by this touching interaction. And we all had that one person — we remember their name, the moment — when they reached out to us. They changed us forever in that moment. They believed in us, the encouraged our love of reading, they said they liked the way we thought about things, they said they believed in us. Schufreider did that for me. Those moments don’t scale. Those moments aren’t scripted. They are authentic human (and animal) connections. And no wonder these moments are hard to find online… How do you capture this in metadata?
Interactions… What do we do when no one is watching? Someone snapped this man giving his shoes to a homeless man and then walking off barefoot down the sidewalk. We see plenty of examples of this — people who have an impact on another — people who touch someone else. The Toronto Public Library has a program where you can check out a person — literally, you can check out a person and hear their stories. Imagine spending the day with an elder who can give you lived-experience of history? That program understands the power of interactions…
And those interactions that live with us, historically aren’t always good ones. Here on the left we have Emmett Till — in August 28, 1955 lynched for apparently whistling at a white woman in her family’s store in Mississippi. And on the right we have Devin Myers August 14, 2019 in Royal Oak, Michigan — a white woman called the cops because Myers “looked at her “suspiciously.”” Interactions like love patches or painful scars live in us for a long, long time. If you need proof of this look no farther than where we are. 1927 the Great Flood, and the dynamiting in Plaquemines Parish. Then Katrina, the fear that they’d dynamited again. Those patches and scars stay with us.
Love patches + Painful scars
Spend just a moment thinking about interactions that have shaped you — positive and negative alike, those love patches or painful scars.
What does it look like to be off the Grid? What does this middle look like practically?
The Middle
What happens when we resist the urge to generalize, And instead understand the individual in her context, with the tools available to her to achieve the goals she has — that is all we are. And we can either experience match or mismatch in this scenario. Mismatch is disability, it is design solvable.
Resist the urge to design for. An assumption we make: We can engineer a fix — technology can solve it all and we are smart people who know what is best. Remember: Engineers are not the only ones building — we all adapt and grow design; we’re all designers. A good portion of Pinterest is dedicated to the thoughtful design of everyday things in innovative and surprising ways. We learn from how someone else imagined using something and we riff off of it.
Resist the urge to predict + speculate and avoid assumptions like
• the roadmap can be predicted + controlled
• We can know the problem + create a solution
• can be solved in a standard, linear manner
• we can control + predict requirements
• there is an end point + we know what success is
But we know that in reality project
• require ongoing transparent communication + recalibration
• complex projects cannot be predicted
• emergent, complex systems cannot be *known* — they evolve
• “Success” continues to evolve and change
What happens if we let go a little of the urge to predict and speculate?
Resist the urge to know an individual. We assume we can create persona categories that represent the possible end users — they have similar + static needs. But in reality
• one-size-fits-one
• empower users! agency!
• Be curious!
And what happens if we acknowledge we don’t know?
We need to shift our focus away from certainty, bang for your buck, or majority and instead look to the 20%. The 80% will solve for itself. The 80 is easy. Innovation hides in the 20% — the edge cases — look for failures, not success. And ask why? Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?
Let go… What happens if we let go of certainty, neatness, completion, absolute, fixed, inflexible… just a little?
… And instead do more to question, critique, be curious, be open. This is our map for moving forward.
Post-Grid
I still fret about the grid. I worry about the impact it has on us, the thoughtlessness it encourages, the illusion of easy among the complex. I worry about what is lost because of the grid. And so I’m really excited by works like this — from Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian-born artist, who grew up in East Lansing Michigan. Mehretu’s work continues to add to the history of the grid to problematize it.
Mehretu rethinks and reshapes the grid that has encased us for so long. The one that Heidegger wanted to critique, that Mondrian tried to break open, and so many others work to topple. Mehretu explodes the grid by making it layered, including other perspectives, narratives, stories. She makes it intersectional, global, feminist. And you know what she begins with? Her first layer is made up of images of city grids — then the complexity, the layering begins… This is her piece “Diffraction,” a landscape that was created a few weeks after Katrina.
And this piece, entitled Entropia, shows the chaos on top of the city grid. This is what I unhelpfully call the structured structurelessness — the IN BETWEEN, THE MIDDLE There is pattern, there is symmetry, there are grids in our world. and…
And this is what we know is actually the context we live, work, grow, and learn in. Things are unpredictable, dynamic, emerging, and adapting — evermore. When we let go of our notion of clarity, we see differently. Logos, resistance, commonality.
Mehretu said the following: “There’s this idea that happens in cultures and through time that if we try to understand the cosmos there’s this place above that is a point of destination, a point of beginning. . . . I think of it in terms of an hourglass shape. . . . There’s a space in the center where there’s really nothing going on, [and yet there is]. I feel that there’s a force extending from the top to the bottom, all this activity goes around just beyond it. To me that’s a point of potential, a point of departure. The beginning.”
Might we call this Dasein? The in-between, the open, the coming forth or revealing? The space of both self-determination, logos and resistance.
And finally, lest we worry that we are occupying space that is not our reality — cerebral space that isn’t grounded… Look at this. I see this as Mehretu’s act of resistance to the grid, her coming forth. It is DEEPLY embedded in our context, in our reality. Here is her mural on the wall at the entrance to the Goldman Sachs building. She juxtaposes her abstract work in the centre of Capitalism, within the belly of the beast. Because that is our grid and this is resistance on top of that grid. And this piece not only is the in-between, but it lives in between, physically.
“‘It took me a long time — six months or so — to decide I wanted to do this,’ Mehretu said, pulling off her cap and running a hand through her short, dark curls. Mehretu is thirty-nine, friendly, and open. What would be the reason to make a painting for a financial institution, you know? Why would that be interesting? One reason was this wall, which is so clearly visible from outside the building. It’s not so often that a painting has a chance to be public art. I was thinking about that, and about how I could never make a painting on this scale anywhere else.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/29/big-art-big-money
So, I ask you — how can you, in your context further engage the middle, the in-between, the coming forth, change, flexibility, emergence, unpredictability? How can you make the world more inclusive?
