An easy way to communicate hard things, in 2 min
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What is product design? What is enterprise software? What is reality? Sounds like a big jump, but I don’t think it is. The communication coach and author Danny Slomoff says that communication is taking something from inside your head and putting inside someone else’s head. You can’t control the outcome, but you can shape it by shaping the picture in your head and/or how you choose to share that picture.
But some things are harder to have a picture of. The work you do can be hard to explain to someone who lives in a different kind of social, cultural, or technological world.
The language philosopher J.L. Austin came up with a term I really enjoy: the trouser-word. The idea here is that to understand something, you have to understand the criteria for it. So to know whether something is product design, if you work in tech, you’d look at things like: what kind of work is being done, who’s doing it, what tools are they using, and what are they building? If you don’t live in the world of tech, that doesn’t quite work.
A trouser-word, as per Austin’s work Sense & Sensibilia, is something that can only be understood by what it isn’t. You could say trousers aren’t a skirt and they don’t have fabric in the middle, and that what makes them trousers. So product design is not fashion design, it’s not interior design, it’s not graphic design, and it’s not web design. And I’ve actually defined product design that way for people many times, because it helps them understand it.
Communication is hard and it’s important, especially when its attempting to take a picture from your world and put it into someone else’s head when they happen to live in a really different world. And that can apply even for differences as small as from product design to engineering. I like the trouser-word concept because it applies so well to the moments where things cannot be quickly or easily understood and communicated based on what they are.
Now Austin specifically used the term trouser-word to describe reality. He pointed out that you can’t define what is ‘real’ against its own criteria, you have to define what isn’t real to get at the definition. So you can think of the trouser-word concept as being like a sieve: you let everything that isn’t fall out and you’re left with what is.
Sometimes, in order to connect with each other in the moment, I think we’re better served by communicating what isn’t. I’ve found this incredibly useful as a tool in my toolkit, and I hope it helps you as well. Thanks for listening.
Sources: https://archive.org/details/sensesensibilia00aust and https://www.slomoffgroup.com/book