problem finding, not just problem solving

one of the guests on a recent obsessed with design surfaced a really good question. the guest was stephan ango, co-founder of lumi, and his thought-provoking question went something like this.

design is really good at problem solving. we teach designers to understand a context and constraints, and then they design (create) solutions.

so we (design schools and the design profession) teach students to be designers and to solve problems, but why don’t we teach problem finding? in fact, in many studio/project classes we teach students to redesign chairs and toasters (over and over and over), but that leaves the nagging question… do we really need a better chair?

now, from an episode of on being (which i can’t quite recall), i remember a woman talking about how and why we create. and, like she said, i believe that a fundamental part of human nature is to make things better, more beautiful than necessary, and in increasingly efficient ways.

but that said, design teaches and heralds people who are great problems solvers (think the eames’ and the eames chair)… but the problems those people solve don’t necessarily need solving. ango wonders why we don’t teach people to be better problem finders, and not just problem solvers. it’s easy to remake chairs over and over again. 

why not ask bigger, harder questions, and see what design has to offer? sure, it may not “solve” the worlds greatest problems, but it’s sure to net the world more positive than making another goddamn chair.

in a parallel way (i think), academia does the same thing. in the process of writing my thesis, i was forced to narrow my topic so much that the question i ended up researching almost wasn’t even worth answering. this is a common phenomenon (ask anyone who has gone to graduate school where an output was a paper). and, in the scheme of my program, my thesis constraints were very liberal.

the phd process is that same problem narrowing process, but to the nth degree. the process creates people who are experts about a very specific slice of the world. often it’s debatable (as several of my current phd earning friends will attest) if their work and research is or will ever be meaningful.

so how do we train people to be better problem solvers and problem finders?

some of the best things about religions aren't religious

i think this is the last thought that has lingered with me from alain de botton’s interview on on being. 

in his book, religion for atheists, he describes his own pathway through and around religion. he grew up in an staunchly secular household and was therefore never really exposed to religious spaces. but over time, he began to notice that despite his secularity, he really enjoyed some parts of religious contexts. he gave examples like collective rituals and incredible architecture. this inspired him to dig, from a research standpoint, into the history of those things that he enjoyed.

what he discovered was the religions tend to absorb things from the culture in which they are situated. in fact, in his opinion, some of the best parts (ideas, practices, rituals) of religions were incorporated into religious practices from non-religious people.

this sort of blew my mind even though conceptually it’s not that strange of an idea. all groups are situated in a context. in a very natural way, being relevant is important and about survival. if part of your job is to make sure other people have access to the thing (religion) you think is so great, you’ll do what it takes to share it. and that means maybe adopting some of the practices of your local culture in order to get people in the door.

alain says he goes in detail on this in his book, but even without reading it i understand his thought that one of the reasons many people find solace in religion, in spite of their own acknowledged dislike of the religion itself, is that the things they like aren’t actually religious at their root. they have been framed as religious practices, but they’re really not.

i’m not quite sure of the implications of this, but it’s definitely a cool thing to know and think about.

america: a nation founded on genocide and trauma that is afraid to acknowledge death and grief

back in july, i listened to the pauline boss episode of on being. i can’t remember exactly what she studies but below is a paraphrase of a comment she made:

we [america] are a nation founded on trauma and genocide. of course we don’t want to and are afraid societally to acknowledge death and grief. if we did, it would never end because it’s baked into every institution we have.

to be honest, i’m struggling to remember the exact context of what she was discussing, but it had something to do with the myth of closure. what i do remember is how true i thought her statement was.

i’ve specifically been thinking about this in the context of police. in america, so many people respect and trust in the police. however, the roots of the police are racist as fuck. the roots of the modern police forces we have today are people (often poor, white, and immigrant) that rich white people paid to “enforce order” among slaves, free black people, and people who agitated against the wage-labor systems enmeshed in slavery and indentured servanthood. this strategy (as is often employed by rich people) gave poor white people a stake in the systemic status quo. even though the extractive labor systems of slavery were bad for them and they should have been aligned with people trying to change the system, the police forces gave them incentive (jobs) to keep things as they were.

but we don’t talk about that. we talk about guns and police brutality and black-on-black crime (which isn’t real) body cameras and “good cops” and reforming police.

what we really need to do is re-imagine how communities stay safe. safety is almost definitely not possible when one community pays another to protect it from a third community. even if people don’t understand the roots of the system, the effects of its foundation reverberate throughout it. for a while i didn’t understand why people (especially some black lives matter activists) were calling for an end to police. i get it now.

if we stopped to truly acknowledge and move productively through the death and grief caused by our systems, we could no longer avoid the question “where is all this death coming from?” if we looked at the roots of almost all of our systems, we would be forced to face the fact that this whole thing is based on genocide and trauma (eradication of the native american people who were here first, slavery, farm labor, factory labor related to clothing and technology production, etc).

hm.

open question on internalized oppression

what do you do when someone who has internalized oppression says something that is oppressive to their own group? 

last week i was talking to a friend (woman) who called her boss a bitch. now, i fully believe that gendered derogatory terms are sexist and never to be used. had my friend identified as a man, i would have had no problem calling out that behavior. however, given that this friend was a woman (member of oppressed group) and i am man (member of oppressor group), i really wasn’t sure what to do. can someone in an oppressor group address oppression in the corresponding oppressed group?

this situation has presented itself a number of times. a different friend called her boyfriend a pussy because of his low work ethic. a third friend, who identifies as half-black (but still black), told me i was unqualified for something because i was a dark-skinned nigger.

how does one intervene in those moments?

managing your todo list: make lists by context, the weekly review, and the annual purge

a few weeks ago, i was talking to my friend miriam about some tips on managing todo lists. i realized i hadn’t written these down so here they are.

separate your todo lists by context

this is a tip i learned from getting things done. putting all your todos on the same list creates clutter and overwhelm. dividing them by context helps cut down on the size of each list. this helps them feel manageable (to a point).

additionally, you should only be looking at tasks in the place where you can make progress on them. this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it can definitely help. miriam can attest to it.

the weekly review

this is also getting things done thinking. your todo list(s) is only as useful as your brain trusts it (i wrote a full post about this over here). if your brain knows that you add things to your list only for them to never get done, your todo list is no longer a useful tool. this type of system failure looks like (a) your brain beginning to remind you again to do things that are already on your list or (b) you have the same task on your list multiple times.

the remedy for this is the weekly review. once a week, you should be going through everything in your personal system. david allen has a very specific order and routine for this (shared over here). i basically just go through my tasks (parking lot, todos, and doings) and make sure they all make sense or (re)move them if they don’t. knowing that you’re going to do this every week puts your brain at ease. this allows your todo list return to become a functional tool again.

the annual purge

i can’t remember exactly where this came from. i think it’s a mix of a few things, at least one of which is several of my friends who occasionally just delete all their emails. the parallel to the todo list is exactly same and follows the same logic.

basically, once a year, usually right before or right after the new year, i delete (archive on trello) all my todos. at a certain point, the lists just get too long. there are things that are great ideas that you will just never move. and the really important things either your brain will prompt you with again or they’ll come up again in some other way.

this really matters for two reasons. first, it keeps your lists manageable over time. second, it is really important to (viscerally and practically) remember that letting go is the best thing to do sometimes. you can’t do everything, no matter how much you want to. realizing that (really, not just mentally) and then implementing practices based on that knowledge actually feels amazing, too. the freedom to start over is truly liberating.