Design thinking as magical thinking.
The story of Nacirema is an introductory academic text written by Horace Mitchell Miner to undergraduates about a obscure tribe which the name is an anagram: “American”. Students learn that Nacirema has strange body rituals in order to heal themselves. By thinking with metaphors about their own society, Milner´s readers get a grip of the concept of culture.
There are many ways to see that we have, as species, sounds, shapes and colors modulating our psyche. The sensorial and cognitive impact of these organized (by us) physical expressions like language and gestures, objects and environments. The mental organization of these stories subconscious, and all we get from that is an interpretation of it .
The use of Anthropology to elucidate human behavior is something that can be learned, but the human behavior itself, is not. We have our own cultural actions immersed in waters of meaning. The analysis of oneself is therefore possible only with objects resulting from actions; not the actions per se.
It is impossible to describe social complexity by stating what society does. By distinguishing what it is from how to make it. Since not all action are symbolic, even basic actions gestes as eating, resting, cleaning or using an ATM are regulated by social coordination. We of course are not automata, but anthropologists tend to view behavior as much more than a person´s actions. They see patterns.
From the above said:
- The fact that we, anthropologists, see patterns, do not avoid of us having our own as bias.
- As we cannot talk about “behavior”; we talk about products, but in a sense that goes beyond the object itself, attaching symbolic meaning to it.
- Culture can only be seen as a system by language, or a product of meaning, not a observable substance itself. So we called it “Material Culture”, “Symbolic Storage” among other flavors.
The attention to culture and cultural practices by designers has now been taken for about 40 years or so. It started in the XEROX mythical epoch, to the birth of interfaces, to the inception of the use of ethnography as a sustained research method, to the now blooming market of UX. And the flow nowadays goes with it derivatives superpowers ecosystem. It is all about magical thinking.
Since then, all culture and design people doing ethnography are int the rabbit hole/ the holy graal of meaning. One principle of the theory of magic, as described in Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande, a book by E. E. Evans-Pritchard is that rituals are tools for execution of the symbolic logic, not its explanation. The two dimensions are separated by the logic that supports the use itself of concepts, or methods, of rituals grammars.
Mental labeling things, processes and events is powerful. As in rituals, the description of steps by sequence, ordering not the act itself, but by its “symbolic dimension”. Meaning is a formal expression of a physical, cognitive and emotional experience, guided by collective memory or expectations.
As it goes, it is impossible to observe “behavior” without a theory about it. I have experienced that feeling by trying to build a system for research and documentation management. It was a process of unite digital and analog data processing. At the time, in 2006, I didn´t know about how to orchestrate what I knew about anthropology and what I needed from the design / software teams. So it was bad.
The two related topic of how magic goes hand in hand with anthropology and design are united by language. I knew it was necessary to do ethnography with the procedures of this magical ritual of software development. And then I did. Our team had a methodology for asking our needs to the developers: reports, interviews, paper prototypes. All without the magical wand of UX. Therefore, the ritual impact of our methodologies was far more weak from the established rituals from the tech group.
This scenario made up the system not proper to use. The company decided to buy a comercial solution, leaving processes and events without documentation. The adoption of certain rules to improve the total functioning of something that is already moving is polemical. Implies in change the state of the collective assumptions of “what is being done this way…” mindset.
Later on, in 2009, I had other experience as a curator of the to be mapped Brazilian digital memory. This time, not to build a system, but to map in the country´s culture institutions the existence of those in use already. By producing governmental document, a report about the state of art about the use digital tools, concepts and methodologies, I looked to improve the dimensions of the temples of material culture: the use of public cultural intuitions like museums, archives and libraries.
Using the same procedures adopted in the software system episode, I reached teams from those institutions to hear about how they used their space, the objects inside, their specificity. Not having how to describe the object, processes and events itself from the perspective of the team. There was a internet forum and this blog to describe the findings, as well the take conversation about the document construction with interested citizens who accessed the digital platform culturadigital.br.
Both experiences occurred without the labeling of what is the known standard modus operandi of a crescent number of institutions, comercial industries, banks, and all types of social situations. The name “user experience”, as the magic effects expands, it also taken with rapid adoption of such cultural jargon. Notions as identity, cultural background are taken as worldviews in these modern times.
So, why it works, what is the magic? The magic is in the group who wish, make and put the spell. Language is social and as much as people say the same word, more the word gets it meaning; whatever the word is. Content is given by context and with the write spell, any content makes meaning. A decision of expressing the exact shared perceptions of different cultural backgrounds. The spell is the context.
Originally published at http://metaimagem.wordpress.com on September 6, 2019.
