Kevin McCullagh has a really nice writeup of his thoughts on the recent The Big Rethink conference at Core77. Among many fine reflections on the profession, one thread of his discussion should be of particular interest to the BlogLESS crowd.

The Problem

Conference chair Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran "began by throwing down a hefty gauntlet to design. He explained that the world faces crises on many different levels, not only economic and environmental: politicians and corporate leaders are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy. This, in turn, has triggered a loss of confidence in the old ways of doing things and has led business and governments to cast around for new ideas. As design thinking is offering itself up as a process to solve many of these problems, what has it got to offer? Gulp!"

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, via.

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1. Perhaps needless to say, I think having philosophers working in design is just obviously a good idea. But why?

2. What makes a good designer? For my money, most of what good designers do is look at the world (or a certain very small subset of it) and try to figure out how it ought to be. Think about that. An Eames chair is just a claim about how chairs ought to look, feel and so on. And they're so damn popular among designers because we all, in our considered professional opinions, agree with that claim. "Yup," we think, "the world is a better place because of that thing. The Eames's really had something worth saying about how the world ought to be."

3. With practical philosophers, this is even more explicit. They are concerned entirely with figuring out what it means to claim that the world ought to be some way rather than another, and with figuring out ways to systematize their thinking in order to capture our intuitions and theories about that.

4. So what designers can take for granted (that they've got it right about the way the world ought to be), philosophers make explicit. That means there are two ways to be a good designer. Either you've just got spot-on intuitions, or else you do some practical philosophy to tune up those intuitions. And I think most of us can use a regular tune-up.

5. I think a lot of bad design is based on lazy, solipsistic thinking on the part of designers. When we all look at something and think that we were better off without it, or we'd be better off with something else, what we're thinking is that the normative claim the designed object represents is just wrong.

6. Which is all to say that if designers are interested in getting it right systematically, what they're interested in is scrutinizing their intuitions. You can do that with a lot of different tools: cognitive science, experimental psychology, design theory, and so on. But if you want to get down to the kind of skills that undergird those disciplines, there's only one place to go.

1. Philosophy is Back in Business

Are we ahead of the curve or what? First business needs design. Now it needs philosophy.

According to a recent article from BusinessWeek, organizations have lost sight of the big picture. Philosophy, which considers problems of values, character, and ethics, can put businesses on the right track, serving human needs and interests.

[C]orporations are promoting the notion that their mission extends beyond profit and provides new frameworks—transportation, fuel, manufacturing, and so forth—for improving existence. These assertions require supporting actions over the long term if they are to have merit. In our connected and transparent world, where so many can easily see deeply into our operations, it has become clear that companies and even nations have character—and that their character is their destiny. For institutions to ensure that their characters, or cultures, are consistent with their behavior, they need more humans within their organizations who can appropriately manifest the desired culture through leadership, business practices, and individual behaviors.

Looks like there's a future for philosophers in the boardroom as well as the classroom. We've been saying it all along. ;)

2. Zen Humidifier

Love this humidifier from Masuza. Made of Japanese Cypress, it uses no electricity. Water is naturally drawn through the wood and evaporated into the air. Minimal, beautiful, and natural -- this is a great little piece of design. Via.

3. Sheepthink

How much of popular culture is simply people following the crowd? Can advertisers get you to buy something by falsely telling you that that other people like it? Clive Thompson writes about a research study that attempted to find out.

In the study, a music store was set up with a ratings system and purchasing habits were tracked in a variety of scenarios. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found evidence that social pressure is real -- that popular music (as rated by other listeners) tended to sell better. Most interesting, though, was that when the researchers purposefully rigged the system to promote bad music, in at least one instance people lost faith in the system and bought less music overall. Another data point for honest advertising.

4. Letterhead Collection

Filed under Inspirado, I'm digging this collection of letterheads from Letterheady. Some of the older ones are especially neat.

1. A visual interpretation of Delueze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus

Check out this collection by Marc Ngui.

2. Time in nature makes us more caring

If we want people to do more good in the world, perhaps greater exposure to nature is the ticket. According to this study, you don't even have to be outside to experience the effect. Some outdoor wallpaper and plants can help make one more prone to care about others.

3. Delegate

This is timely. Feeling overwhelmed? Perhaps you need to learn how to delegate.

4. Google Analytics goes asynchronous

Google's new update promises "faster tracking code load times" and "enhanced data collection & accuracy". Time to revise those CMS templates?

I ended Wednesday saying that I find the WOMMA's "Honesty ROI" to be correct, consistent, and almost totally uninformative. Obviously, I implied, we'd like to have an ethical code that is deeply informative, one that can give us useful guidelines for handling a variety of situations in satisfactory ways. While the WOMMA are right (as we have long attested) that not telling lies is a correct ethical guideline for marketers to follow, we'd like to see a code that gives us a little bit more.

Of course, it's one thing to merely criticize, and quite another to make some positive steps toward a code like that. The latter is our objective today.

Which means that you're going to have to pardon me, because I'm about to get a little philosophical.

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We take these things seriously.

"Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."
-Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)