The Relevance of Goethe to Modern Design Practices
By: Simon Robinson
Tags: Theory Of Colours, Henri Bortoft, Design Thinking, Holonomics, Goethe

Design thinking may have democratised the modern design process over the last two decades, but what it has not achieved is the democratisation of the way of seeing of the designer. This is because when people attend design thinking workshops, Google sprints or any other forms of agile or startup design methodologies, the quality of our seeing and the relationship between our intellects, our observational capacities and our lifeworlds is all but barely addressed.

The notion of lifeworld comes from the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl who introduced the term in 1936. Once the concept has been fully grasped, it can transform our approach to design by changing the way we think about understanding, observing, analysing, and interpreting behavioural and attitudinal research. It does so by engendering us with a subtle yet powerful form of empathic understanding which opens up new avenues of insights and ideas for exploration.

All of us have experiences, sensations, feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas. We are conscious of the world around us, we explore it in many different ways depending on our upbringing, culture, education, and talents, and yet we often do not give much thought to exploring the way in which the world appears to us. This is the essential aspect of the lifeworld; when we explore the world using the techniques of phenomenology, we do not separate the objects from the meaning ascribed to them — the meaning of an object lies in appearing to us as meaningful.

An example of working with lifeworlds comes from an in-depth case study which is presented in our book Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design. I was asked to design a communications event for Hospital Sírio Libanês, one of the largest and most important hospitals in South America. The brief was relatively straight forward. The senior management team wanted to communicate the strategic map which had been created in order to help the hospital develop plans for their evolution and growth to take them forward for the subsequent five years. Most ideas that had been suggested were based on the senior team presenting the strategic map from a stage in the hospital’s main auditorium.

But here is the question. When you think about the lifeworlds of each collaborator in the hospital — porters, nurses, security staff, nutritionists, receptionists, cleaners — the question to ask is would a strategic map make any sense to them and how would they be able to relate this management tool to their own realities at the hospital? A strategic map may be an obvious communication tool to those who work with them day in day out, but is it really the most effective way to communicate complex senior management plans to every single person working at a hospital?

Credit: Holonomics

My approach was different. I would use storytelling and gamification to bring surgeons and medics together with other collaborators at the hospital, and in this manner, the strategy of the hospital would begin to make sense in a way that would lose none of the complexity and which could be fully understood and embraced by everyone.

Credit: Holonomics

Working with the concept of lifeworlds can be powerful. The impact of this event surpassed the senior management team’s expectations. By designing an event from such a perspective, new strategic insights emerged which had not previously been thought of, and so the communications event turned into a strategy development initiative that helped to refine the strategic plans for the hospital in an iterative manner.

Credit: Sustentare Business School

One of the most difficult aspects of the phenomenological approach to observation is to grasp the essential insight of the coming-into-being of appearance — that moment in which phenomena in our worlds appear to us as meaningful. The practice of phenomenology, doing the philosophical work, as philosopher and physicist Henri Bortoft used to say, can enhance our own design practices by developing our abilities to contemplate and describe the lifeworlds of other people.

Goethe’s symmetric colour wheel with associated symbolic qualities (1809), source Wikipedia

Because this takes training, time and effort, one practice that Maria Moraes Robinson and I have developed is a methodology which integrates Goethe’s theory of colour into our strategy, customer experience, leadership and organisational design workshops to help executives develop a more dynamic form of thinking, expand their level of consciousness and take then into an artistic appreciation of the world.

This can be a little unnerving for participants as we found when replicating Goethe’s colour experiments with a number of managers from an engineering background, but it is remarkable just how much of an impact exploring the phenomenon of colour, rather than the theory of light can have on people.

Credit: Holonomics

The reason we work with Goethe’s theory of colours is that within his scientific works we find the same dynamic form of thinking that is found in the phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophies which led to the development and evolution of lifeworlds. This dynamic form of thinking is described by Henri Bortoft in Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought in which he explains the following:

By practising active seeing (which means directing attention into the sensory, instead of just passively experiencing a sense impression), the verbal-intellectual mind is ‘suspended, so that attention is brought back into the phenomenon itself instead of being trapped in verbal-intellectual generalities. Goethe puts the phenomenon at the centre of attention and he keeps it there (it’s hard work because it reverses the habitual direction of experience). By redirecting attention into sensuous experience he plunges into the sheer phenomenality of the phenomenon. This reverses the usual direction of the process of habituation from experience to generality, and thereby promotes the process of de-automatisation and hence a renewed encounter with the phenomenon itself.

While Goethe is known as a poet and a writer to many, his extensive studies in many different scientific fields are much less well-known and little appreciated in the scientific community. This is because it is extremely difficult to discern any recognisable practices relating to modern scientific method. But when you understand that Goethe was working phenomenologically, developing a highly refined and structured approach to scientific observation, you start to realise the power of his delicate empiricism and the manner in which his qualitative scientific studies can complement more quantitative approaches which codify the phenomena under investigation.

Goethe did not comprehend light in terms of a single spectrum. He understood colour as consisting of two more basic phenomena, warm colours and cool colours, with Newton’s spectrum being thought of as a complex phenomena arising from these two more basic phenomena.

In order to explain what is meant by this, I took these two photographs to give you an idea of what Goethe experienced when he began his famous colour experiments when he first looked through a prism. On the computer screen, you can see two areas, which we will call light and dark.

Credit: Simon Robinson

Goethe was interested in the colour phenomena which appeared at the boundaries between light and dark. So in this photograph below, which replicates the experience of looking through the prism, you will see two simple spectrum, one with warm colours and one with cool colours.

Credit: Simon Robinson

By staying with the qualities of colour, Goethe was trying to understand the relationships between dark and light and in doing so he achieved a sense of how colours belong together within a spectrum in a way in which is missing from Newton’s explanation. There is nothing in Newton’s theory of light which explains why the colours appear in the order in which they do.

Credit: Southern Cross Review

Goethe carried out many different experiments, for example creating thin slits of white and black lines to see what would happen when these two different basic spectrums met and combined. However, Goethe also explored the light spectrum, and this contains one colour, a light pink magenta which is not found in the dark spectrum. This is a naturally occurring phenomena (seen in the photo above) which Goethe was able to create by looking at a thin black strip on a white background.

Credit: Holonomics

I am extremely grateful to one of our clients who have given Maria and I permission to share photographs from a leadership workshop from 2017 where we explored the Theory of Colours with their most senior team of seventy executives. These are the first photographs in the world showing Goethe’s colour experiments being carried out in a corporate context, and they are particularly useful in that they demonstrate the way in which the experiments are carried out by using prisms and cards to investigate boundary conditions. These experiments are fully described in our book Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter for those of you wishing to replicate them.