26 Jun 2011 1508H

What is your kung fu?

Had a conversation with another martial artist the other day who is also a UX practitioner, which got me thinking about the relationship between UX and martial arts.

Gung fu (功夫), as we pronounce it in Cantonese, is not literally a martial art, but a kind of euphemism, literally meaning, “a skill,” or perhaps more subtly but accurately “an achievement.” To “know gung fu” therefore refers to someone possessing any kind of skill, only achieved after long, grueling hours of repetitive sacrifice and training: a cook, for instance, possesses a skill, as do any number of artists, craftsmen, and skilled workers. One must keep in mind that martial arts in imperial China used to be practiced almost exclusively by the military, the police, and by people who had to use force for their living: private security forces, mercenaries, the criminal underworld, and those who dwelt at the interstices of society. Given the difficulties of living in old China, everyday people had little free time beyond meeting basic needs, and learning a martial art was not one of those needs. In the procrustean logic of the authorities, this potentially meant a “skilled” person could be a criminal or a political threat, which were often one and the same (one can see how this has carried over to modern Chinese legal thinking), and so one had to mask and talk about one’s true abilities, if one talked at all about them, through codes: He knows a skill. He dances with skill. His skill is quite good.

For many years, gung fu has shaped my thinking, and become a metaphor for life. But over the years as my study has deepened, and as my thinking has evolved, a new understanding of gung fu has been emerging: it’s not enough to know only the individual movements of gung fu. The learning of our system, like all martial art systems, is not recorded in writing, but in these dance-like forms that dictate the movements of the body, passed on by oral tradition, inscribed in the body’s muscle memory, in the physical postures and delivery of the practitioner. These forms consists of individual movements: a punch, a kick, a block, a stance, timings, executions, transitions.

To recite the form’s movements from memory — which is no small feat, some of our forms consist of more than a hundred movements — is actually only the first and surface level of understanding. But that itself is not true gung fu. It is like memorizing the words of the poem, or notes of a piece of music, and reciting them plainly without understanding of the relationships between the words and notes, only understanding the individual words or notes. That is where most beginners remain.

But the next deeper level of understanding becomes building relationships between the basic elements, that is, line-level meaning. One understands not only words, but how they fit together into sentences, phrases. Each sentence has its own meaning, and each section of a poem has its own meaning. The sections of the piece have their own relationship to each other and to the whole. Now the practitioner has attained basic understanding and can interpret in a way that is unique to them.

Perhaps the next level of mastery is that one understands at last the spirit of the form, and then one can transcend the form itself, so that the user refines it or can build something new from it. Or perhaps one comes to believe there is no need for that form at all: one realizes there was never any form at all, that this was only a structure that was placed and shaped in such a way to facilitate learning, but over time, the form itself, a collection of structures, became the art, instead of the study, interpretation, generation and testing of new ideas, a prison and not an agora.

Perhaps when we talk about user experience, we really should be asking, what is your gung fu?

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