Modes for toads

Nice DE-veining of ‘design thinking’ in the CHE:

Despite his enthusiasm, Miller struggles to define design thinking. “It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’ ‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration.’” He explains further that these seven points can be reduced to what are known as the five “modes”: “Empathize,” “Define,” “Ideate,” “Prototype,” and “Test.” He seems particularly impressed with “Empathize”: “Human-centered design redescribes the classical aim of education as the care and tending of the soul.”
Beautiful. Compelling. But what does it mean? According to the d.school’s An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE, “The Empathize Mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge.” We can dress things up with language about the “soul,” but this is Business 101: Listen to your client and find out what he or she wants.

Miller calls the Empathize Mode “ethnography,” which is uncharitable  to cultural anthropologists who spend their entire lives learning how to observe other people. Few anthropologists would sign on to the idea that amateurs at a d.school boot camp strolling around Stanford and gawking at strangers constitutes “ethnography.” The Empathize Mode of design thinking is roughly as ethnographic as a marketing focus group or a crew of consultants trying to suss out their clients’ desires.

Design thinking, in other words, is just a fancy way of talking about consulting. What Miller, Kelly, and Hennessy are asking us to imagine is that design consulting is a model for retooling all of education. They believe that we should use design thinking to reform education by treating students as clients. And they assert that design thinking should be a central part of what students learn, a lens through which graduates come to approach social reality. In other words, we should view all of society as if we are in the design-consulting business.

Okay maybe not so nice. But still, the designification of arts and any other kind of education is a wagon train that should stopped, frisked, emptied of its contents, its wheels broken and used for firewood and little shacks built from the wagon bodies to shield the shysters pioneers from the winter cold because THAT’s empathy and we’re not barbarians. The business-minded think everywhere they look is a frontier – that’s where all this consulting jargon comes from – when most of it is just the old world, with a deep culture you can share and learn something from, and even use for helpful, positive purposes that, yes, might even earn you a living. But no. Instead, it’s space travel. Deep tunnels. The hyperloop. Self-driving cars. Personal pods, juicer-toasters or whatever. And now some of the design thinkers want to change higher ed so their ‘IDEAS, man!’ make more sense. Just stop.

Connected Inclinations

Death_of_Marat_by_David

The cloth covering Marat’s bath tub in J-L David’s painting above… how does the color portray nature, luck, money and/or envy? The and/or is important as we must, and I think we do, hold out suspicion that green renders its power in some combination of these, not excluding the possibility of all at once. It’s a particular kind of power that connects our greed with our inclination to nurture and save things, including ourselves. Bear in mind, Dr. Marat apparently suffered from a kind of skin disease from which he sought the comfort of cold baths. This alone may invoke a necessary desire to set forth an updated version of prohibitions, to identify a set of New Sins, such as they are.

But speaking of necessary desire, consider the party missing from the David composition. Charlotte Corday, his murderer:

… struck by the Government’s exactions against the Girondins… Charlotte no longer believed that a Republic would be possible. She felt that Jean-Paul Marat, who daily demanded more and more heads, was in large part responsible for the misfortunes that the French people were undergoing. She resolved to rid the country of him.On July 9, 1793, Charlotte left her cousin’s apartment and took the mail coach for Paris. She stayed at the Hotel de Providence. There she wrote a long text titled Speech to the French who are Friends of Law and Peace, which explained the act she was about to commit.In Paris, on July 13, 1793, Charlotte requested an appointment with Marat at his home at 30, rue des Cordeliers. Marat agreed; by stating that she had “information to give him” and that he could even “render a great service to France”, she managed to obtain a meeting with him. The meeting took place in his bathroom; he was in his bathtub. It was there that Charlotte killed him, using a table knife “with a dark wooden handle and a silver ferrule, bought for a few sols at the Palais-Royal”.

She was guillotined four days later; within four months, David presented the painting of his friend, arguably his best work, to the National Convention. I’ll ask this again but… green as conceptual regression, can it disallow a muted nature in a way that permits our love for wealth? Is it, in a manner, a way for us to eat our cake – and have it, too?