The Diner not the Cook
The Philosophy of Building Better: Chapter 4 - Building is Fundamentally Contextual
There are tasks of which the actual doer will be neither the best nor the only judge, cases in which even those who do not possess the skill form an opinion on the finished product. An obvious example is house-building: the builder can certainly form an opinion on a house, but the user, the household-manager, will be an even better judge. So too the user of a rudder, the helmsman, is a better judge of it than the carpenters who made it; and it is the diner not the cook that pronounces upon the merits of a dinner.
Aristotle, Book 3 of The Politics
Hi friends! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season! Today, we continue our series of outlining the Philosophy of Building Better:
Chapter 2 - The Purpose of Building is to Further Human Flourishing
Chapter 5 - The Builder Must Learn from the Great Builders of the Past
Chapter 7 - The Better Builder Refuses to Ethically Compromise
Chapter 10 - The Building Better Checklist
In our previous post, we discussed the nature of objectivity and how better patterns could be discerned within the field of architecture.
The critical insight from this exploration is that there is a discernible and correct way to build for a given context. In today’s post, we will explore that latter qualifier, context.
Context is the “circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”
The context of a given situation is critical to understand if one hopes to build the right thing for it.
Aristotle, who hails from the same school of philosophy that championed objective truth in our last chapter, acknowledges that, while truth is objective, the way in which it expresses itself can vary depending on the context. The virtuous course of action in one circumstance may be very different from that of another situation.
Last chapter, introduced Christopher Alexander and his Timeless Way of Building. He places significant emphasis on an exploration of context. In his view, a deep understanding of context is required to build places that come alive.
Alexander uses the example of building a bird feeder:
The example of the bird feeder does a great job of showing the criticality of context. We cannot properly fulfill the aims of any building effort until we understand its context. Haphazard attempts to build without properly understanding context will leave us with nothing but hungry birds.
Whether it is a bird feeder, a mobile app, or a government policy, the same principle applies. Building without proper account of context is a surefire way for ineffective outcomes and, more often than not, unintended consequences.
There are four categories of context that the better builder must take into account: The physical, personal, societal, and temporal context.
The physical context is the tangible physical setting for an act of building. For a home or a chair this context is immediately obvious, though its being immediately obvious does not mean it isn’t important . For a software application this would be the context in which a user may interact with your product. For a book it may not only be the book itself but the physical location in which it is being read.
The personal context is the various conditions surrounding the people interacting with what you've built. This personal context can be direct. The users of your product or the customers who buy your service. But it can also be indirect. The family members of your users or the neighbors of the home that you just built. A key to remember with the personal context of any act of building is hinted at in the word personal. It is critical for the better builder to remember that their users, customers, clients, etc. are people. Abstracting flesh and blood human beings into simple numbers like “daily active users” or “low-engagement customers” may be helpful for analysis, but it runs the risk of blinding our ability to actually think through the implications of how the things we build impact the people we build them for.
The societal context takes those indirect personal relationships and extrapolates them outwards. What impact does what you are building have on society at large? Are there things that may be positive for individuals, but become more destructive when supercharged through network effects? A prescient example is social media. On a micro-level, it may be a net positive for individuals, but extrapolate it across society and the benefits become more dubious. You may think of the societal context as the broader stakeholders and environment. In a similar vein to personal context we must do our best to consider society not as an abstract, but instead as a collection of the tangible.
The last type of context I will highlight is the temporal context. We must consider the effect of our buildings not just in the present context but their context through time. Are we building things to last or to decay? Temporal context is not only forward looking, but must consider the past as well. How does history inform our efforts? Have others built similar things in the past? What can we learn from them? There is much more to be said on this topic and I will go into more detail about the importance of this oft overlooked piece of context in our next chapter.
Taking into account all four types of context is absolutely critical if we are going to build anything that will fulfill our ultimate aim of helping people flourish. Just as the bird feeder needed to take into account the height and the presence of clothes lines, if we don't properly understand the context, we won't be able to build in a way that resolves for the warring forces in a particular setting.
In my job as a product manager, we call this exploration of context “discovery”. We go through a variety of exercises to try to understand our users, their needs, and how we might solve them. This can take up a lot of time and effort, but the difference between good products and bad products often comes down to neglecting discovery. Discovery is so important because, no matter how good of a builder we are, we will never be able to judge the quality of our efforts through the same lens of the person we are building for.
A challenge with discovery is that it is not always easy for users to articulate their needs. The skill of product discovery comes, in no small part, from the ability to decipher what the user actually needs versus what they may be say they want. By developing a robust understanding of a product’s context, great product managers are able to discern that when their users say they want one thing, but are really trying to solve for something else. Someone may say they want a pocket knife, but what they actually desire is to feel prepared for any potential eventuality.
A product manager who is also a better builder needs to take this a step further. Even if we understand a user’s true desires, the better builder must ask, is that desire really good for them? Does it lead to their long term flourishing?
The better builder aspires to a higher ideal than simply trying to understand what a user really wants at the moment. They must seek to understand what a user really needs over the long term. Whether they may want it or not is a different story. We may love the convenience of ecommerce in the moment, but a better builder should ask whether fueling someone’s most impulsive purchases makes them better off over time.
The only way to understand these true needs that lead to long-term human flourishing is by immersing yourself in the context of your buildings. Once you have a developed understanding of the context and the forces within them, you will be able to design the correct solution to resolve the conflicts of those systems.
This is what will allow you to truly improve the lives of the people you build for. To make them more integrated. More whole. And through them, a more integrated and whole world.
Now there is a Sisyphean aspect to this task.
We can never perfectly understand 100% of every facet of every type of context for a given act of building.
It is an impossible task, but that doesn’t mean it is a futile one.
The more context we understand, the higher the likelihood of us getting it right. Of building better. This philosophy presents an ideal for us to strive towards, but we must be realistic that we will get it wrong. Part of being a better builder is admitting when a mistake has been made and doing our best to rectify it.1
There will be times where we think we understand the context but we later realize we were operating off of an incomplete picture. Maybe another group uses our product for a purpose we didn’t intend. Maybe the house we are building has an ecological impact that was missed in our early analysis.
We will miss things.
We will mess up.
But as better builders, we must be able to pick ourselves back up and try to fix the things we have broken.
And it is only through understanding context to the best of our ability that we can ever hope to succeed.
Let’s build better,
Erik
1 - More to come on this in Chapter 8
Erik keep up the great work! I appreciate the nuance in everything you’ve said. There is an objective (“better”) way to build, but it isn’t enough to be right; we must also understand context and people’s impulses in order achieve that outcome.
Loved the arts you’ve referenced as well. Claude Monet is one of my favorite painters of all time, and the Timeless Way of Building and Aristotle’s “The Politics” seem like great reads!