This is a rough draft (V6.2.1) of the prologue to the memoir I’m writing about the unfolding of my design consciousness. The working title is Creation Story (which I’m rather partial to) . Its still tender writing but carries the intent of the book.

 

Prologue: Third Time Is A Charm 

The slopes of Mount Lyell disappear below the horizon, a two day hike away. The forty five pound pack on my back insisted that it was much further than it appeared. Silicon Valley lay to the west under a yellow pall of summer smog. I had just quit my career for what I promised myself would be the last time. Craggy snow dappled peaks along the John Muir Trail were my chosen setting for a stock-taking, a meditation on my career in design, and where I might take it next. I had become a designer believing that it was a way in which I could apply my creative inclinations to make the world a better place than the one I had found in Apartheid South Africa where I had grown into adulthood. 

Disappointed by a profession I found to be fixated on superficial appearances ignoring the urgent needs of our humanity lurking just beneath the surface sheen that was presented to me as its stock in trade, I’d spent the better part of my career pursuing an approach to design that satisfied my soul’s yearning to make things better, for how else would one want to make thing by design?  Each time I felt I had a strategy or method durable firmly in my grasp, satisfaction duly slipped away and I tacked again. Thirty five years is a long time to stick in the pursuit of an ideal, and I could hardly say which had changed more; the design discipline and profession that I entered with dreams of changing the world, the world that had changed but not always for the better, or me. 

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My writing coach has suggested that I get out of the planetary pull that writing a book is and liberate my imagination with an occasional short essay. Better that writing it would be to put them out into the world where they might be seen and read. Of course I have my resistances to her suggestion even though I know (and have known for a long time) that she is right. In fact this won’t be the first (or the second or third) time that I’m giving it a go.  I’ve thought this before and even occasionally acted on it so this blog is a trail of starts that haven’t gone anywhere nor made any ripples in the pond of ideas about design, design thinking or the all elusive design consciousness that I’m trying to bring to light.

So why write here now…again? Over the weekend I ran into a quote in Maria Popova’s Marginalian email that intrigued me as a delightful inversion of my standard design consciousness trope – that “design is how we give form to our intentions”. It was from a discussion of the work of N.J.Berril, a British marine biologist and science writer who was more or less contemporary with Rachel Carson and almost equally illuminating in his prose and insight into, well, the nature of things.

What drew me into an essay that I was going to gloss over because I’d never heard of N. J. Berril (nor his book You And The Universe from which it was taken)  was the fact of him sharing his first two initials with me (mine are N. J. G.), and that his book was published in the year of my birth. But it wasn’t till I read the following that I properly engaged with who he was.

“Nature, in the intimate and in the vast, is not designed. It is designing. Our own nature confirms it.”

A large part of my writing has been to claim the word “design”, in its verb form, to what we humans do to adapt intelligently, imaginatively and consciously to our environment. Sure the world is full of all kinds of design (the noun form of the world) that are not human created but are, in the general sense of things, designs. Or, more correctly, we know them by their form and the patterning they lay on the world, which we can refer to as ‘a’ design.  The pull of this quote for me, though, is that it points to life in all its forms  as creative process, and creative process as an expression of life.  We are a distinctive designer species – not as something separate from nature, but because we have learned to do what all of nature does constantly.

So how did this quote spur me to start writing here again? Well, I did a Google search on it. As expected the first link was to the Marginalian essay. What surprised me was that the next link was to my essay titled Nature, Nurture, Design that I wrote in 2017. The only reason I can figure for it to rate so high in the search algorithm, is because it too puts the words “nature” and “design” proximately – which suggests that there is way too little thought on this topic; this topic that to me is among the most important to consider on the non-adaptive path to creative destruction we are currently on.

In a couple of days I’m heading off on a road trip – to Wyoming, Grand Tetons and then coming back via Portland and Highway 1 down the coast.  I’m sure there will be much evidence of “design consciousness” out there in America – whatever the nature of that consciousness might be. Maybe I’ll get to make some notes about what I find over here.  Perhaps those little essays will contain the magic phrases to get them found, and perhaps that will get a conversation that is what I’m doing this for, going.

 

The last version of this presentation about design consciousness that I posted here was offered to a class of  marketing students at a business school in San Francisco. This one is a presentation to a class of divinity student at the Pacific School of Religion here in Berkeley. The course is called Design Thinking for Social Change. Needless to say, the presentation has evolved significantly – partly to address an audience with a far different context for understanding “consciousness”, and partly because my thinking about design consciousness continues to evolve as I write about  and teach it.

Design consciousness, in my framing, is borne simply out of our awareness that we live in a world that is largely of our own (human) making. If we consider that everything was put into the form it holds by some process that we might refer to as “design” (by the logic that the form of a thing IS its design), then the only choice we have when setting out to intentionally create change, is to design it mindlessly or with awareness of what we are doing…to design it poorly, or design it with the best of intention, and to design it well.

Design thinking is a framework for intentional creative action that has emerged over the past few decades. It is designed  to allow people to collaborate on creative challenges in the social sphere that they face mindfully and with skill. One can quibble about the specific mindsets, steps and methods one employs in designing just about anything – but not about the need to bring mindful attention to every act of  human creation.

It is in this awareness that I seek to ground students as they grapple with the ambiguities and gratification of design thinking.

I was delighted when Zvika Krieger came to Chochmat Halev, my Renewal Jewish community, as our spiritual leader. In his previous position he had been the founding Director of Responsible Innovation at Meta/Facebook. Who better to renew the exciting project of Jewish renewal than someone steeped in the discipline of design and innovation. 

I have found many of the drashes (commentaries on the Torah) that Zvika offers weekly to contain kernels of design wisdom in them, even when he doesn’t identify them as such. So I was excited when he agreed to join our conversation at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) about design consciousness from a Jewish Renewal perspective. I was keen to hear what he might have to share in a context where the connections between the many creation stories embedded in the Torah and our contemporary practice of design might be made more explicit. 

Zvika did not disappoint. 

The first 10 minutes are a meditation that Zvika offered at the intersection of the soul traits of “Gevurah” (strength, boundary) and “Hod” (splendour, perseverance) as a resource that allows us to keep moving forward when we’re in what he names the “mushy middle” of the design process.

At 00:10:16 on the video time bar Zvika tells his story of his journey at another intersection – between design and spirituality. 

At 00:26:55 he offers a reflection on the place of “wisdom of the heart” and “wisdom of the mind” in design and design consciousness and at 00:35:47 he offers thoughts about the portion of the Torah called Shemini

Finally at 00:43:15 he takes some student questions.

I was delighted when Grace Gilliam agreed to assist me through the Spring 2023 session of Design Thinking for Social Change at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR). As Associate Director of Community Engaged Learning at PSR I knew I could count on her to help student align their projects with community need. Grace was keen to get a grounding in design thinking to help ground her work. 

As a practicing Buddhist who took her Bodhisattva Vows in December 2017 Grace was keen to bring a Buddhist perceptive to our conversations about design consciousness and “towards a theology of creative praxis”.  In this presentation titled “Compassion and Creativity” Grace reaches beyond the customary design thinking of empathy into it even more radical soul cousin compassion to inform our design consciousness and practice.