Showing in Design
Every design review contains a moment where someone says something that cannot be converted into a specification. It doesn't feel right. The flow is off. The hierarchy is aggressive. These are pointings at qualities of experience. They do not describe properties of code. The code might be entirely correct and the design might still not feel right, because feeling right is not a formal property. It is a quality recognizable to practitioners who have trained their perception. For fifty years, the formal interface was structurally deaf to what was shown. The language interface begins to close this gap — not by making the unsayable sayable, but by allowing the showing to enter the communicative channel between human and machine.
In the AI Story
The designer who tells Claude I want this to feel spacious but not empty; the text should breathe, the hierarchy should be obvious without being aggressive is not specifying. She is showing. She is pointing at a quality of experience by evoking it — using language to gesture toward a region of design space she can recognize but cannot fully articulate. The machine's response to this gesture is remarkable and philosophically ambiguous. Trained on millions of instances where designers described qualities and implementations followed, the machine has absorbed something about the statistical relationship between quality-language and implementation-decisions. It can generate approximations.
The approximation is imperfect and will always be imperfect. The thing being pointed at is, by its nature, resistant to perfect reproduction. But the imperfect approximation may be closer to the designer's intention than the perfect specification ever was. The specification could not capture the intention because specification excludes showing by design. The approximation at least addresses the dimension of intention that specification systematically missed.
This creates a new iterative process — one neither the Tractarian interface nor ordinary human collaboration quite prepared us for. The designer shows. The machine generates. The designer evaluates: does this capture what I was pointing at? If not, she shows again, more precisely — the spacing is right but the typography is too heavy; I want something that recedes, that lets the content come forward. The process converges through successive approximation, each cycle narrowing the gap between what was shown and what was produced.
The gain is access to the dimension of quality that formal specification excluded. The risk is the confusion of recognition with understanding. The designer recognizes that the machine's output feels right. The recognition is genuine — the exercise of her trained perception. But the machine's production of right-feeling output is not an act of showing. The machine does not show spaciousness. It generates implementations statistically associated with the language of spaciousness. The designer shows. The machine matches patterns. The output may look the same. The processes are categorically different. This difference is where the new ascending friction lives — harder than the old friction of saying, because it requires judgment that cannot be formalized and develops through practice that cannot be accelerated.
Origin
Developed in Chapter 9 of the Ludwig Wittgenstein — On AI volume, extending Wittgenstein's saying-showing distinction from the Tractatus into the domain of software and interaction design.
Key Ideas
Quality as showing. Spaciousness, responsiveness, rightness — these are pointed at, not specified; they belong to the domain of showing.
The iterative approximation. The designer shows; the machine generates; the designer evaluates; the cycle converges through successive approximation.
The machine's statistical response. The machine has absorbed the association between quality-language and implementation-decisions; it generates approximations, not recognitions.
Gain and risk. Gained: a channel for showing where before there was only saying. Risked: confusion of pattern-matching with participation in showing.
The new ascending friction. Judgment — the capacity to evaluate whether the machine captured what was shown — cannot be formalized or transferred; it is the human's irreducible contribution.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.12–6.522
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part II §xi
- Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1977)
- Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (1983)
- David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968)