Design thinking and applied creativity is a mystique for many. We often come across a lot of bullshits because many simply want to push their own ideas and desperate to throw in all kinds of irrelevant thoughts and associations. Or sometimes designers use language that others do not understand and so labeled them as bullshits. Is it easy to tell when a design discussions becoming just bullshits or they are genuine design dialogue? Not all designers can communicate and sometime those who can articulate design cannot design. This is a post for another day.
Harry Frankfurt, a Professor of Philosophy at Princeton wrote in his book one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. We watch, listen to and read all kinds of bullshits everyday. There is no question some of us contribute our share. Many (like me) are very confident of our ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. Frankfurt, a popular moral philosopher, attempts to build such a theory. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and humor, Frankfurt explores how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. The book is worth reading. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.
Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Bullshiters don’t know whether they are right or wrong.
Essentially any pitch has some bullshit elements in there, or the process is an exercise of bullshits. In design, the pursuit often include some functional design objectives, answer to user needs or aiming at a number of user personas. The emotive elements are usually harder to describe. It comes from a deep belief and intuition that simply cannot be right or wrong. Is this bullshit?
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who preferred to be known as Le Corbusier 1887 -1965), was a Swiss-born architect, designer, urbanist, writer and also painter, who is famous for his contributions to what now is called Modern architecture. Early in his career, he was influenced by the problems he saw in the industrial city. He thought that industrial buildings and housing techniques led to crowding, dirtiness, and a lack of a moral landscape. It is certainly true today, but when he was advocating the ideas he wasn’t certain. He was simply an advocate of his ideas. Would that make him a bullshitter? Later he transformed his ideas to physical form, as houses which he created as “a machine for living in”. (I am a big fan of his work and I have half-a-dozen of his original pieces at home)
Bullshit is in fact part of the design process, we should not see in a negative fashion. It is simply a process to rationalize ideas and concepts or the unrationalizable. Sometimes these rationale are anchored upon observational insight which again has not quantitative grounding, but that doesn’t mean they are not scientific. It is rather hard to describe the inquiry as it a very personal journey for a designer to immerse oneself to look for signals, particularly those signals that are hard to pick up. So it is fair to say that every great inventor/innovator/designer/architect needs to be a bullshitter.
Sometimes I use the world “bullshit” within two completely different contexts. When we can say we need to put more thoughts around an idea and build a story around an innoavtive concept, we say “add some bullshit around it”, but we are not demeaning the process or intend to misrepresent the idea at all. Quite the contrary, we mean we need to put more thoughts on the rationale. We do understand the need to articulate the rationale on any innovative ideas. Sometimes we back up with some hard facts.
And sometimes I say “that stuff is full of bullshit” and that's when we refer to someone who has no idea of what he or she is talking about. That’s different from a designer expressing this design rationale. In this case, we are referring to people who has no subject matter knowledge, lack of a valid opinions or has no idea of what problem he or she is trying to solve. They are not misrepresenting or lying; just have no credibility, insight to anchor upon. I am using a different definition that Frankfurt. This is a very different kind of bullshits. And I am very good in recognize bullshit and never hesitate to dismiss them. I actually make that process quite painful for them. Ask anyone who have worked with me.
