Original post on LinkedIn here.

Jean-Paul Sartre's essay ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’ briefly explores the concept of intentionality as proposed by principal phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. For Husserl, intentionality referred to the directedness or "aboutness" of consciousness itself; intentionality is the proposition that “All consciousness is consciousness of something.”

Sartre argues that intentionality allows us to understand how consciousness transcends itself and reaches out to the world. “Consciousness and the world,” Sartre tells us, “are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness.” Consciousness, in other words, is not a self-contained entity but is always engaged with things, whether they are physical objects, other people, abstract ideas or experiences. Through intentionality, consciousness creates meaning and significance by relating to these objects and investing them with value.

To designers and researchers, intentionality reminds us that our design audiences’ consciousness is always directed towards something, whether it's a problem they are trying to solve, a need they are trying to fulfill, or an experience they are seeking. Access to this directedness towards these ‘somethings’, however, cannot be direct—not for our research participants, and much less for ourselves and our stakeholders. Accounting and designing for meaning and significance in the absorbed involvements of our design audiences and the respective worlds in which they are immersed cannot adequately be done reductively - by numbers, surveys, statistics, quant data - as is assumed by the “digestive philosophy” of psychologism and positivism. We need rich, thick data—we need stories.

Intentionality is also a reminder for design researchers to adopt a critical stance towards our own thinking, questioning any tendency to adopt fixed or rigid positions. By recognising that our own thinking is not a fixed 'entity' but a dynamic and evolving process, we can remain open to new perspectives, challenge assumptions, and shift from a thinking that’s reduced to theories about knowing to a more expansive thinking of meaning—thinking as “ways of discovering the world.”