January 21, 2021

Desiring

(Satisfying)

“Desire, freed from its state of tension no longer goes toward things, but everything quickens within desire like a continuous offering.” Daniel Odier

“To understand the limitation of things, desire them.”
Lao Tzu

Artificial augmented and immersive virtual realities amplify the instinctual desires and impulses that have survived our evolutionary journey. Evolutionary biologists coined the term supernormal stimuli to describe how features of certain environmental phenomena elicit instinctual responses that are out of proportion pin relation to their evolutionary purpose. Humans and other animals are susceptible to these sensitivities of the reptilian brain to distorted and amplified cues from the world around us. In her delightful book, Supernormal Stimuli Deidre Barrett describes how bird eggs are not coded for the overall gestalt of “health” but rather for certain sensory features such as “blueness” or “roundness”. Accordingly, mother birds can be instinctually lured away from their own eggs in favor of artificial eggs that mimic and exaggerate the traits of their own eggs.

The theory of supernormal stimuli provides an interesting possible explanation for why we human animals notoriously make irrational choices, choices that are not in our own best interest. It also goes a long way toward explaining the wild love affair between modern commercial design and capitalism. Like pornography and plastic surgery, design in its most conventional form trades in supernormal stimuli that tickle and titillate our primal urge to possess and to copulate. (This is not to be confused with Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary, in the works of Jasper Morrison & Naoto Fukasawa). How are our evolutionary meat brains impacted by technological acceleration? Constantly surrounded by hyper real and supernormal stimuli of every kind, our body minds are adapting to a concentrated reality offering immersive hyper-real media including virtual porn, pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, unlimited on-demand 24/7 food choices from all over the globe many of which contain phyto estrogens and excitotoxins.

Most designers are in the business of satisfying needs for “having”. From the functionalist, efficient and transaction-driven vantage point of the Modern worldview, which excels within the system and its rules, retaining controlling interest in the built environment and industrial product platforms is priority. The designer’s inputs would be seen as a strategic component that adds value and differentiation in the market, helping to avoid commoditization. A rock “starchitect” raises the investment value and naming opportunities of a property for example. Or, as in Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, intrinsic motivations are harnessed for their profitability.

Both as designers and as consumers, we want what we want and we have been conditioned, especially in the modern developed world, to expect it now. Conditioned to speed, convenience, fulfillment and satisfaction, we forget that desire and aversion are impulses that one can live with and get to know better. Ken Wilber’s book The Atman Project is a fascinating study of the evolutionary-involutionary ego’s project - that endless search for enoughness in a world of perceived scarcity. In Hardwiring Happiness, Rick Hansen makes a distinction between liking and wanting and offers practices to sharpen those distinctions. Says Hansen, “Liking without wanting is heaven. Wanting without liking is hell.” Liking without wanting is appreciation and enjoyment without the need to possess. Wanting without liking is impulsive, instinctual, even addictive. It short circuits are higher conscious awareness and even hijacks our behavior, compelling us to devour a bag of junk food coated with MSG is without taking any real pleasure in the act of eating itself. <Embracing - Releasing>

Design is popularly understood as a profession engaged with enticements to consumerism through beauty and branding rhetoric. But what if as a designer you want more? More meaning, more depth, and more engagement with matters of ultimate concern to you and your clients? In their book Me to We: Finding Happiness in a Material World, Craig and Marc Kielburger, state “If hedonic happiness is the happiness of the senses, then eudaemonic happiness is the happiness of the soul.” The term eudaemonic dates back to the time of Aristotle when society was conceived as a system of happiness and well-being. What if we as designers could decouple the generative power of designing from the sexy but hollow artifacts with which it has become synonymous? In this way we could harness the power of desire in service of matters of ultimate concern. Desire is fundamental characteristic of human being. Although we can make many fine-grained distinctions between wants, needs and desires, and between attractions and aversions, we are at any given moment moving toward or moving away from something. The something might be a person, an object, a food or an experience. Desire is significant because it signals the embodied encounter with the evolutionary impulse in the present moment. Is the link between our animal instinct and our behavior. We don’t always desire what is healthy and nourishing for us and there lies the basic paradox of our unsustainability. As human animals we do not always act on our own behalf. Why do we sustain the unsustainable? Because our technological capacity to instantaneously fulfill our desires has outpaced our wisdom in the form of super sized, supernormal stimuli.

What we desire is relative and varies by time, place and individual. However as Maslow demonstrated, the underlying needs that propel desire are transpersonal in nature. As we seek a good meal, a warmer place, prestige or financial invulnerability, we design worlds. As we seek belonging, affinity and self-actualization, we design worlds. Lack of distinctions between needs and wants is at the root of the distortions and injustices in the designed worlds that reflect our market society. The civilization that we have collectively designed is a tangible manifestation of everything human beings have aspired to over millennia. Timothy Morton has written eloquently about the realm of aesthetics as the past made tangible. In moment to moment compromises with the infinite, we have made choice upon choice that have resulted in what we call the world. As designers, we have a unique role in teasing out the distinctions between needs and wants, and elucidating these distinctions in the form of compelling value propositions. Every design brief is an opportunity to make a compelling case for the consumer to satisfy their deep needs rather than their superficial and fleeting wants and desires. In his book Sustainability by Design, John Ehrenfeld references Abraham Maslow’s injunction for healthy humans to move from lower more fundamental to higher, more complex needs in the process of becoming that he called “fully human”. Urging designers and other actors to discernment between wants, needs, and concerns, Ehrenfeld urges us to get on intimate terms with our deep needs and our superficial needs, and to get clear on what is of ultimate concern in our life. This requires a shift in our mode of existence from what social psychologist Eric Fromm referred to as the mode of “having” to that of “being”.

Desire is a teacher. Neither a problem, nor a final cause, but rather a movement in Being along a continuum. Desire is a fundamental impulse of our human creativity. When we are depressed or in poor health we tend to lose our libido. Desire is a signal of health and aliveness. Yet how we choose to act on our desires and aversions however means the world. By becoming intimate with our normal egocentric (safety or security for example), ethnocentric (belonging for example), and world centric (relief from poverty for example) desires, we liberate a lot of energy to move forward in our creative work. Meeting our own collective human needs is an enactment of our human creativity. Understanding human needs as valid we can learn to coordinate and prioritize the sometimes competing values that live within us at any given time. Can we reframe desire and redeem it from negative judgment as a central engine of conscious designing? Sexuality guru David Deida recommends brining our desires out of shadow and in to the light of awareness. “Most of your sexual desires, no matter how weird or kinky they may seem, are rooted in your need to give and receive love or your need to experience a specific part in the spectrum of feminine energy. These needs are natural, although if denied or hidden they can grow into ‘pathological’ forms that require healing. If you don’t embrace these desires in yourself with compassion, you can create an inner division that results in an energetic kink.” (Deida) <Accepting - Denying>

Because desire is an instinctual species behavior, it is naturalized, taken for granted — relegated to the unconscious. Human desire actually needs to be fully integrated into our designing because our individual, egocentric needs are fundamental to conscious designing. In fact, the neglect and repression of real underlying motivations is often the cause of design failures. Industrial Designer and founder of Continuum design consultancy, Gianfranco Zaccai, views designing in psychological terms as a balance of forces among the Super Ego, Ego and Id (Buchanan et al. Discovering Design 3-12) and offers design injunctions for product, system and service development. Whether sex or money, power or belonging, distraction or dignity, our attention as designers to the meeting of these needs in ourselves and our clients determines whether the products of our designing are ultimately relevant enough to be adopted in the marketplace. <Giving - Receiving>

In writing this I invite you as a designer to redeem instinctual human desire in service of genuine needs and ultimate concerns. In service of equitable distribution of the servicing of human needs. Desire is in a constant polarity play with gratitude. The existential texture of being grateful, being enough, and being satisfied elicits a pull toward deeper and more fundamental needs and wants such as the desire to simply delight in being alive in this moment, or the need to serve something greater than oneself. Conscious designers are at the forefront of stories and lifestyles that satisfy human needs from that deeper place.

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