[Sample Chapter] The Design of Everyday Desire: Discoverability
The following is a sample from the forthcoming The Design of Everyday Desire: Designing a Pattern of Life Your Soul Loves.
Chapter 2. What is my life? Discoverability.
“When we interact with a product, we need to figure out how to work it. This means discovering what it does, how it works, and what operations are possible: discoverability.”
Let’s start with a basic question: What’s the meaning of life? The answer might seem obvious. Famously, the Westminster Shorter Catechism says this: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” But what’s the meaning of my life, specifically? What am I (as me) for? And how do I use my particular life—the opportunities, gifts and resources that comprise it—to make my reason for being created a reality?
These aren’t everyday questions, but they’re questions with everyday importance and everyday influence. Existential crises notwithstanding, we typically don’t get up each morning wondering, “Now what? What am I for?” This is because our ordinary lives are filled with structures and guideposts immediately in front of us that direct our actions and choices throughout the day. For example, when my alarm rouses me at 7 a.m., my theological account of life is far in the background; all I need to know in that moment is that my purpose is to get showered and ready to go into work, deliver on projects, make clients happy and continue to earn a living so I have somewhere to live and something to eat while I endeavor to make my life about the bigger things. At some point and at some level, I decided to take this job, decided on when to get up, decided on how to prepare myself to go into the office so I didn’t oversleep or make myself late, because I believed or decided that this all fits with some larger point and purpose of my life—what my life seems to be for. With something as simple as an alarm I’ve set, my morning is designed to accomplish this; the design of my morning points me toward the office so that I don’t have to think about what to do with my life in the morning; I just do it. I don’t have to work to discover the orientation of my life or contemplate what I want from it when I wake up; I just take what it gives me, starting with my alarm going off at 7 a.m..
The way we structure our lives inevitably signals to us what our lives are about and how to execute them “properly.” If we don’t ask questions with such a huge bearing on our everyday life as “What am I for?” every day, it’s because we typically don’t need to. Our lives tell us as we live them. It’s not so much that our days are scripted but, rather, that they end up having a kind of design to them—constituted by structures and guideposts, rhythms and habits—that lends itself to answering how to make use of them. The exceptions prove the rule, don’t they? When we lose that orienting, rhythm-creating structure, when we graduate, retire or lose a job, or when we go on vacation without a project list or without a book we forgot to pack or without the activities that got rained out, that’s when the question comes: “Now what?”
The discoverability of everyday coffee.
In this sense, we navigate our ordinary lives like someone using a familiar, everyday product. Few everyday machines require so much cognitive functioning with so little available as a coffee maker (coffee pods notwithstanding). Each morning, without thinking about the individual tasks we’re performing, many of us manage half-awake to navigate the multistep process of using this technology to deliver the desired end: liquid brilliance. This is because we know how it works.
Let’s imagine, however, you’re staying over at an Airbnb or someone’s house and needing to make coffee with a completely different machine—without instructions. Where do you start? Does it work the same way? How do you know? Typically, even if you’re going from a pour over to an espresso machine, you’d tackle it using at least some of the same principles you use to navigate your own coffee maker. The primary difference is that you’re now more (but not completely) conscious of how you’re using it, what it tells you about itself—the buttons and compartments and features—how it suggests or guides your actions to make a cup of coffee.
In terms of design, we call this discoverability. Discoverability is how the design of something guides us in using it well. Any given thing—a coffee maker, a car or a door handle—does this by presenting itself to us with certain attributes and aspects we can recognize, interact with and be influenced by, whether that comes from inspecting it or whether that’s instantaneous and unconscious.
As an illustration, let’s consider one of those generic coffee machines you’d find in any hotel room in terms of five major components that create discoverability for us. It has affordances, constraints, signifiers, mappings and feedback—each of which we’ll unpack in detail later (see “Key Terms” above if you’d like a working definition for now). Notice how some of these you might consciously register, some you wouldn’t even notice seeing and some you might just take for granted because you see it’s a “standard” coffee maker.
Affordances. You might notice it affords the ability to plug into an outlet, to add upwards of 10 ounces of water into a side tank, to insert a coffee or tea pod into the top, to place an object like a cup underneath.
Constraints. You might notice it constrains against adding much more than 10 ounces of water in it and against putting a full-size travel mug underneath. You may also encounter a designed constraint against turning it on when less than a certain amount of water is in the water tank.
Signifiers. You might notice some kind of color, symbol or text on a button that signals its function for starting the machine.
Mappings. You might notice markings in the water tank (also signifiers) probably map to the relative amount of coffee it’ll make.
Feedback. After pushing the button, you might notice the sound of water boiling and percolating feeds back to you that you’ve started the process successfully, and when it stops, it feeds back to you that it’s ready for you to take the cup.
Of course, none of this requires more than a moment of processing, because it’s all just there, as it were, in the machine itself. It has discoverability, some of which was designed and some of which was learned.
Every product, every thing, has discoverability. Well-engineered things are designed with discoverability to help clearly guide users through successful action with as little conscious work and as little error possible. Poorly engineered things may have accidental or missing discoverability, and we interact with these every day, from a car dashboard with too many buttons and indecipherable symbols to the bank door that, it turns out, no, actually you have to pull rather than push. You could even say that services, processes, people, cultures, church liturgies and more all have discoverability—every thing that someone interacts with, because discoverability is simply how we’re guided into interacting with it.
Everyday discoverability.
Our lives and, to some extent, even the desire that animates them have discoverability as well, unique and specific to us. They have capacities (affordances), limitations (constraints), pointers that orient us (signifiers), correspondences such as how our physical well-being affects our interior well-being (mappings), and indicators that tell us how we’re faring with respect to our created purpose and our truest self (feedback). And whether consciously or unconsciously, how we interact with our lives and our desire, how we navigate them and what we do with them is based on what we know about them: what they do, how they work and what leads to flourishing—that is, through their discoverability.
Why does the idea of discoverability matter for lives we’re already in the midst of? Surely (although it may not always feel this way), we know how our lives work and how to use them at this point. Firstly, our awareness of the design of our desire and of our lives may not be complete. In this way, your life may be like a device that has a whole hidden menu of features you never realized was there or just haven’t felt the need to explore yet. The problem is, if we haven’t yet played with these features, how can we know their relevance for our everyday use? What we need, then, is more than just an everyday functional awareness of ourselves—we need a maximal awareness of the complexities of our desire—because none of it is irrelevant or impractical with respect to our everyday lives. Searching, reflective examination of our innermost parts and motivations isn’t an extra add-on bonus part of our life for when the dishes are done, the bills are paid and the kids are in bed; it’s part of living our everyday life more truly, more awake, more in love.
Secondly, we would do well to be aware of the discoverability that’s already designed into our lives, along with its implications. We’ve already said that discoverability shapes how we interact with things; in turn, our everyday interaction with them also shapes us. This is true on several levels. First, interacting with my coffee maker creates and reinforces a “mental model” of how similar machines work, influencing how I interact with other objects. This is why the discoverability of other coffee makers can be relatively intuitive, including the idea that household objects like this should use a single-push button to operate it. But it also goes deeper. It creates and reinforces habits and desires oriented around the morning rituals that incorporate my kitchen, that create a space of quiet waiting while it brews, which become social rituals when I think to share coffee with them because of the kind of space afforded by the coffee machine I use. The time it takes for my coffee to brew may even become an unconscious unit of measure in my mind, after which I might start to find myself getting antsy while waiting for something. And if these are ways that how I interact with a simple coffee maker contributes to my formation just minutes at a time each day, how much more does how I interact with my everyday life shape me? If the “discoverability” of my everyday life and desire influences how I interact with it (that is, how I live), it also influences how I’m formed, which then influences how I live—in a big, deeply significant cycle.
Similarly, then, if we can also design greater and more intentional discoverability into our lives, this can shape how we live from them and how we’re formed by them. Specifically, we can look at design elements like affordances, constraints, signifiers, mappings and feedback into our everyday lives to help orient more of our lives around the cultivation of desire (ultimately for God) that leads us into greater life, faithfulness and love. Because if we are in actual fact designed to operate by the free flow of well-ordered desire, this refocuses the question from “What should I do with my life?” to “What turns me on?”
What am I for? How do I work? What turns me on?
Where do we begin looking at our lives in terms of discoverability? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question. Discoverability suggests to us what something is for, yet at the same time, first knowing what it's for in at least a broad sense makes it all the more discoverable to us. For example, knowing that a machine we’ve never seen before is for making coffee enables us to look at it through a particular lens, which then allows us also to discover how and what else it can do—perhaps grind beans, make espresso, boil water for tea, etc.
In a similar way, we can start with a basic working idea of what we’re for, just in the broadest sense of being human—and what we’re suggesting in these pages, very importantly, is that humans are fundamentally designed for desiring. From there, we can develop a greater, wider, deeper understanding (through something like these concepts of discoverability) of the shape of living you particularly, within your present moment and life context, are being made for and how your desire is designed to be giving a meaningful shape to your life. Knowing something of how you work and how your desire works, then, provides the understanding around which to design for the aim of capturing and cultivating desire to its greatest ends.
St. Ignatius of Loyola offers just such a picture as a starting point and a touchstone. Early on in his Spiritual Exercises—a 30-day intensive retreat he created in part for discerning God’s calling in one’s life—he suggests the retreat leader explain how each of us are created to love and serve God and to make use of absolutely everything else toward this end. So, Ignatius writes, we ought to be “desiring and choosing only what is conducive to the end for which we’re [being] created.” He calls this understanding our “Principle and Foundation” because whatever other understanding arises over the retreat’s unfolding, all needs to be tested against that fundamental truth.
Yet this is more than just a theological proposition we’re merely supposed to agree with. Ignatius expects over the course of the retreat that this truth will be experienced in us as we inwardly experience how your and my desires work. That is, as we unhook ourselves and our desires more and more from the disparate places they fix themselves (status, things we own, admiration, even the kind of people we want to be), we become freer to desire everything only according to the love Christ creates in us for himself. When we’re freed from the controlling, compelling, overriding pull of every other desire and our love is fixed on Jesus such that the Principle and Foundation becomes true for us, we find our desires run where they’re created to run—like a river following its natural course to the sea—desiring everything just to the extent that it leads us to the One our desires now center on.
All of this starts, however, with a working, living understanding of who God is momently creating me to be as a desiring creature. It starts with discovering my Principle and Foundation.
My principle and foundation.
Traditionally, directors giving the Spiritual Exercises retreat have one consider the “Principle and Foundation” as Ignatius himself wrote it; however, many directors today also have the retreatant go on to craft their own understanding of their own principle and foundation in their own words—or even in a visual or otherwise creative medium. This personal principle and foundation is meant to be an authentic expression that, over the retreat’s unfolding, can remind us and root us in who God is showing us to truly be beneath everything else. Only once that foundation is laid for our imagination, can we even begin to imagine the life we’re designed to desire as we journey alongside Jesus in our everyday.
Exercise: Noticing me.
Set aside some space this week to reflect on the following questions, one at a time. Try not to be in a hurry, but allow them to breathe as you sit with them. When you find some stillness in which to hold each question, you may have multiple responses that stir in you; simply notice whatever floats to the surface. If it feels like you’re finished holding a question, see if you can linger with it just a little longer, and patiently ask, “Is there anything else, God?”
- What does Jesus love about me?
- When do I feel God’s pleasure in me?
- When do I experience pleasure in God?
- When do I feel most myself?
If your attention wants to go back to one of the other questions, go ahead and let it—more than answering these specific questions, we’re looking to draw out some truths that they touch on. Jot down whatever answers or themes come up, even if they feel incomplete, insignificant or unsure.
Exercise: Noticing my design.
The following day, set aside time to review your notes from the previous exercise, and with at least as much care to enter into a still and unhurried space, bring the following questions into a prayerful conversation with God—beginning first by allowing yourself to imagine how God’s gaze rests on you, as One who loves you well and deeply.
- What does the life that makes me most alive look like?
- What do I want my life to be for?
- How might the story of my coming alive intersect with the story of God’s world-redeeming project?
- God, what have You designed my life for?
Again, jot down whatever you notice surfacing, trying not to worry whether it’s your mind speaking or God speaking. Take note of an important principle going forward: we can always discern later. Right now, you’re simply noticing.
Exercise: Writing my principle and foundation.
Again, reviewing notes from your reflections, take a first crack at expressing (writing or drawing or composing or . . . !) your principle and foundation.
If you’re writing out your principle and foundation, you might begin with the words, “I am being created in order to . . .” This being created is an important aspect to how we think of our creation—not as a once-for-all design we have to reverse-engineer and figure out how to become, but a momently creation into the life we’re designed for. You might continue your principle and foundation by adding, “. . . so that . . .” or, “. . . and to enjoy . . .” This can be a sentence or a page. It doesn’t have to be anything in particular, and it’s not a final once-for-all version. Our goal is just to begin with a basic but personal expression, meaningful to you, of how you understand your purpose as a carefully and thoughtfully designed creature.
I am being created to ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.