How Large is the Spirit?
Posted on November 10, 2021Open Interpretation, Missy Elliott & Me
Alan Greig’s “Sites of Shaping, Sites of Change” framework was introduced to me around week four of the semester and I haven’t been able to stop thinking of it since. The individual is centered in the middle of consecutive layers of influence that name how that person is impacted by greater forces (i.e., family, community, institutions). That said, the most outer layer of the framework is the “spirit/landscape.” That felt partially wrong to me in week four and it still feels partially wrong to me now.
Landscape maybe makes sense as a far-off site of influence, but the spirit feels like a very personal force; it feels like something that should exist at the very heart of the individual. If we were to put the spirit at the center of the individual, then the tiniest most centered layer of this framework would also be the largest. What does that mean? Does the system collapse? Or invert? Or ever end? I don’t know.
Maybe the framework should be set in motion. If it were to operate like the Erik Soderberg animation seen above, the small would become large and the large would become small in less than a second. In translation, the human spirit would transcend these sites of shaping to…communicate with other spirits? Meet a higher being? Lose itself? I don’t know.
I don’t like not knowing. However, since the beginning this program I have heard many times and in many different ways that that might be ok. Donella Meadows asks us to use systems thinking to “lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond – to what can and must be done by the human spirit” (Meadows 185). Jamer Hunt argues that the exactitude in science might not be that exact and that “the journey toward finer and finer precision in measurement also reflects a drift of knowledge away from our bodies, away from our senses and just a little further away from the messiness of who we are” (Hunt 44). Steven Johnson plainly asks us to give up control, and to lean into “letting the system govern itself as much as possible” (Johnson 234). It appears that the great scholars of systems design are comfortable embracing the unknown and leaning into interpretation and intuition – in fact they seem to encourage it. The smallest thing you can think of can very well be the largest, because why not? Maybe the rules can change. Maybe they need to!
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My lingering question from first half of the semester is this: How might the human-centered designer who is still searching for herself effectively design for others? I don’t really know, but I can guess: maybe my personal search for purpose and meaning in life mirrors the aspirations and goals of the many. The questions, especially those that are difficult to answer, might be the answers that I’m looking for…and that everyone is looking for. The small might be able to act like the large if it emerges in multiplicities: “the human spirit” can be both singular and plural.
I wonder what Greig would think about my inquiries about his framework. I could have interpreted it completely wrong! That said, I have enjoyed dancing with his system, even if I may have taken missteps in existentialism here and there. I look forward to the day I can invite others to dance with the systems that I have identified, drafted, or designed. My only request will be that they queue Missy Elliot’s Lose Control for the first dance – the rest I’ll leave up to their interpretation.
-EE