The Meaning-ful Design framework
Sketching the bigger picture of the structure that has been emerging out of my research so far.
Over the last several weeks I’ve been trying to shape the On simplicity series as it has unfolded so far into some kind of academic paper or essay. I can’t really claim that this has worked out great yet, but the process helped immensely making sense of my research as a whole.
As I was sketching, outlining, drafting, editing, shifting paragraphs around, I discovered what belongs under the topic of simplicity and what doesn’t. Those pieces that didn’t fit under simplicity, found their spots in a larger framework, which so far I’ve been calling Meaning-ful Design. I’m thrilled to see a structure emerging that will help me organize my own thoughts better and perhaps get me closer to explaining these ideas to others more successfully.
Meaning-ful Design
The overarching theme of pretty much everything on this blog so far can be summarized under Meaning-ful Design. I’m not sold on the name, but for now it works well enough and I haven’t had any better ideas yet that also aren’t more confusing.
The theme has its origin in the Meaning Crisis, which is an even larger scale cultural phenomenon we’re all living through right now. I’ve been carving out a smaller niche for myself by trying to find out what creators and makers in general and designers and software people specifically can do to alleviate some effects of the Meaning Crisis by doing what they do best — design and create things.
My first series, Mirror of the Self, chased an intuition for a strong connection I felt between John Vervaeke’s concept of The Sacred and Christopher Alexander’s concept of the Mirror of the Self. This laid the foundation for connecting meaning and design and culminated in my Building Beauty presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.
What started as a silly idea — take the cognitive scientific understanding of meaning and connect it to Alexander’s idea of wholeness and how to unfold it — turned into a generative fusion of two triples that keeps on giving. The three dimensions of meaning — coherence, purpose, and significance — join three fundamentals of design — form, function, and fit.
Both coherence and form are concerned with understanding structural-functional organization.
Both purpose and function are concerned with motivating behavior.
Both significance and fit are concerned with evaluating belonging.
I do not claim that there is a metaphysical connection between them. Smashing together meaning and design was purely a thought experiment that started with connecting coherence to wholeness. This worked out shockingly well. What I thought would be a nice touch for ending my presentation on a surprising and inspiring but arbitrary connection, turned out to have unexpected depth.
Fueled by this realization, I tried to find connections between the others — to similar effect. Whether or not there are real connections between them to discover, it already proved useful for my own sense making, so I kept this structure as the overarching theme.
Coherence & form: understanding structural-functional organization
It is not a huge leap from coherent form to complexity, simplicity, and intelligibility. My series On simplicity belongs here. Surely, there are other aspects that belong here too, but simplicity is an important one and a good one to start with.
I already talked about both sides to this: We need to look at the configuration of form, the structural-functional organization of physical objects in the real world and more abstract conceptual entities in software environments — atoms and bits. But we also need to consider our own cognitive processes and how we make sense of these arrangements of atoms and bits — the intelligibility of the objects and systems we create and our familiarity with them.
In the future I hope to extend this area with a deep dive into Alexander’s thoughts about symmetry, and then my own take on it. This will include Alexander’s 15 fundamental properties whose discussion I’ve been shockingly successful avoiding here so far.
Purpose & function: motivating behavior
Another huge area to explore is how we enable and motivate behavior, and what kinds of behavior. There’s lots more to say about affordances, conditions and events, potentiality and actuality, agent and arena, tools and environments, relations and constraints.
It appears to me that constraints in particular will turn into a deeper journey into complex adaptive dynamical systems and the work of Alicia Juarrero about selective and enabling constraints, which I’m just starting to become more familiar with.
Significance & fit: evaluating belonging
The third pillar adds a normative dimension to the other two. What is good fit? What is good? What is important? What is real? How do we know? Big philosophical questions that almost seem impossible to answer.
But we’ve already seen some useful guidance we can use to develop our feel for what’s important: step-by-step adaptation, structure-preserving transformations, a fundamental process of unfolding, complexification as differentiation with integration, judging fit by feeling, our sense of realness for different kinds of knowing, creating strong unique identities.
The goal here is not to solve deep philosophical problems. It is merely to take our understanding of the Meaning Crisis and how it disturbs our sense of what is meaningful and significant and find some small and practical ways to make the things we create more meaningful to us and to others. I believe there is plenty of good, practical, applicable advice we can rely on once we truly understand the issues we are facing.
The Meaning-ful Design framework can guide us, I believe.
Paths out of existential modal confusion
Another way to look at the three pillars that I find productive is to identify what’s going wrong right now with each of them, and what would be a desirable state to work towards. This sets up a gradient which motivates action to find paths from where we are today to potentially better places.
Because all three pillars are derived from and connected to the Meaning Crisis, we can start from a huge issue we already know about: modal confusion — the difference between existential having and being modes and our cultural preference (obsession?) for the former.
What are some of these issues that originate from our cultural preference for universal, mechanical, efficient problem solving that have taken us away from growing our own (distributed) knowledge and agency? I’m sure there are plenty of answers, but let me just present three in the context of software design and technology — one for each of the pillars:
We are hiding complexity instead of organizing it intelligibly. We are making the world harder to understand for everyone in exchange for convenience, efficiency, and what we call progress. Can we invent better systems if we increase transparency, familiarity, and understanding of the systems we design, implement, and run our society with? And can we make this simple enough to encourage more people to join in and design and build their own systems — computing as a personal dynamic medium?
We are obsessed with automation and replacing manual labor where machines can do it for us. We prepare to replace ourselves with machines, while we become scared of them surpassing our level of intelligence. Are machines really becoming more like us or are we just becoming more like machines? What happened to the idea of augmenting human intellect, using technology to enhance and amplify our own skills and agency instead?
We achieve efficient, convenient utility primarily through generic solutions that scale. Because universal solutions are never perfectly adapted to any context, we have to lower our expectations and standards and adapt to them. What would a world look like where technology uniquely adapts to us and our needs? And what would a world need to be like where we have the agency to adapt technology as we see fit?
These are questions I’d like to explore further.
Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.
Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
Series: Mirror of the Self • On simplicity… • Voices on software design
Presentations: Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order