Michael Lissack Research Articles

Is There a Designer?

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Michael Lissack and I co-authored Coherence in the Midst of Complexity. In this article, readers will see how our thought has since diverged. While Lissack has increasingly focused on a cognitive interpretation of basic concepts or categories of the mind, I have pursued object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) and rejected the mind-based thesis. Lissack has chosen for human cognition and the brain as his baseline, while I claim that objects inherently withdraw from perception, and that knowing is ontologically partial and incomplete. The “realness” of objects, whether the objects are mental, cultural, physical, imaginary or whatever, is limitedly accessible. I criticize “corrolationism,” or the assertion that all there is, is mind (or cognition and awareness). I insist that objects, in their enormous variety and complexity, require to be acknowledged and not reduced to epiphenomena dominated by thought; i.e. it is not mind all the way down.

Journalism and Biotechnology as Design Problems: A Personal Account

This is a short commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” I reflect on my careers in journalism and biotechnology in the context of Lissack’s rubric of cognizing, including his concepts of compression and representation and his use of agency and choice. The relevance of his analysis to everyday acts supports the potential of Lissack’s cognizing toolkit in overcoming civic and social discord.

Design: Necessity or Desire

This essay presents a commentary on Michael Lissack’s article “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” I contextualize key terms and ideas, and raise several questions concerning the relation between the concept of compression and design.

Addressing Cognitive Challenges in Applying Design Thinking for Opportunity Discovery: Reflections from a Design Thinking Teaching Team

In this commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective,” we reflect on our experiences leading postgraduate entrepreneurship education. We discuss our design thinking teaching experience in relation to a number of cognitive challenges that Lissack identifies, outline how our teaching and learning process addresses these challenges, and illustrate how activities supported by key principles of design thinking can support alleviating them.

Design Is Construction, Construction Is Design

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Lissack’s claim that cognition and meaning making can be understood as design processes is a reiteration of arguments already put forward by constructivist thinkers. By relying on a cognitive science vocabulary and science-based epistemology, Lissack omits a significant and relevant body of work that has argued and explained these points more elegantly, already decades ago. This commentary discusses Lissack’s claim with reference to radical constructivism and design cybernetics and argues for a design-oriented rather than a cognitive science-oriented approach to the subject of design.

Illuminating Michael Lissack’s “Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective” Using the Process Enneagram

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” This essay presents a structured tool that enables people to engage in deep dialogue about living with the uncertainty and ambiguity found in environments characterized by chaos and complexity. This tool bridges the gap between complex adaptive systems theory and practical application. Stanford Beer offers one way to use this tool, and here, I offer another.

Understanding the Systemic Structure of Models: A Missing Piece of the Design Thinking Puzzle

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” The insights and activities suggested by Lissack’s thoughtful article are certainly valuable. However, by themselves, they are insufficient. Progress in improving understanding may be slow and may shift in less useful directions. And there is no way to be reasonably certain that the resulting knowledge will enable our collective understanding for resolving the highly complex problems of the world. In this commentary, I will identify some important areas of agreement with Lissack’s article and show how a structural perspective to design thinking may be applied to more reliably generate actionable knowledge (including communication in the public sphere, theories, models, plans, and so on.) With this missing piece, design thinking becomes a more comprehensive, and so, more effective process.

Second Order Cybernetics: Why and Where to Steer To

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” In response to the two-part article this short commentary argues, among others, that there is no possible 'whole' perspective upon the world but only different perspectives held by different observers. It then discusses some aspects of the relationship between the design process and second-order cybernetics, applying an example of designerly practice to discuss the “double-diamond model” of the design process, and to demonstrate where first-order cybernetics thinking and where second-order cybernetics' thinking might come into play. This is followed by the argument that designers design not purely in their minds and observe changes in the reacting world – but that instead designers also think and design – outside of their minds – with their hands, tools and the materials. The transition between the designing mind and the environment is a fluent one.

Design and the Modeling Relation

Human perceptions of the world can be described in terms of models, such as mental models, formal models, and so on. All models involve some selection of the elements which comprise them. The degree to which those selections are consciously made varies according to the type of model being described, or thought to be relevant. This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” It discusses models in terms of Robert Rosen’s modeling relation, and explores the role that design plays in the process of modeling.

Heuristics for the Undecidable

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” While fundamentally agreeing with the main thrust of Lissack’s argument, this commentary seeks to amplify attention to the pivotal role played by values in constraining our cognition.

Design Thinking for a User-Centered Approach to Artificial Intelligence

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Artificial intelligence benefits us by enabling safer cars, more efficient homes, smarter investments, and personalized recommendations on everything from news to clothing. Machines do not act on their own. Our consumption and production decisions, whether active or passive, influence the algorithms that have become the touchstone of modern life. As such, we bear the responsibility of exercising our agency to think critically about the information served to us. User research can help by ensuring that new designs are both usable and useful and, throughout this process, the design thinking framework helps us take a step back and remain open minded, consider alternative points of view, watch for bias, recognize adjacent possibilities, and innovate. By engaging in this uniquely human thinking, we remain engaged, relevant, and active participants in shaping our present and future.

What Design Can’t Do

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” In the commentary, I investigate Lissack’s thesis that designerly thinking can be used as a pathway to understand the cultural and political world at large. From a design perspective, his thesis is problematic, as design thinking in itself doesn’t have the systematic checks and balances needed for achieving such a critical understanding. One could even argue that design thinking is one of the modes of reasoning that leads to conspiracy theories.

The Language of Design and the Design of Language

This short essay is a commentary on the article by Michael Lissack, and it provides a point of view. In this point of view it is seen that while one can admit that the channel capacity for human observers is limited, it is exactly this limitation that has led to the emergence of language and the use of language to transcend these very limitations. The problems of the present day can be solved by each observer/participant attending to design. It is in the design and use of language that individuality and balance can emerge.

Behavioral Economics of the Mind on Design: Identity, Bias, and More

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Lissack’s article offers a fresh take on the intersection of design thinking and cognition. The alignment of Lissack’s insights with what is known concerning behavioral economics provides an additional lens through which to recognize the validity of Lissack’s findings and the potential of his ideas to improve people’s flawed and often surprising approaches to decision making. The findings are particularly well aligned in the areas of identity, bias, and complexity, and how these factors are involved in decision making. Lissack’s application of meaning making as a design process provides an effective lens through which we can better understand the way people think and, building upon that understanding, how such thinking can be improved.

Understanding, Design, Models, Dialogue: The Orienting Role of Language

Language operates on two tracks: the descriptive (or representative) track and the orienting (or injunctive) track. Understanding involves thinking and thinking involves language. Vigilance with respect to the orienting track of language opens up new possibilities for thinking and hence understanding, as well as for designing, modeling, and interacting with others. In this commentary, I keep an eye on the orienting track of language while trying to map my own vocabulary to that of Michael Lissack in his two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Perspective.” My hope is that differences in how terms are used and ideas formulated could serve to generate new insights on how we might address complex societal issues together.

Downward Causation: Polanyi and Prigogine

Downward Causation: Polanyi and Prigogine