”Why [then] have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We’ve surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. I’m wondering how we fix that. And I’m not alone.”

When I read these words from Robin Wall Kimmerer in her beautiful essay The Serviceberry my heart almost stopped. These lines and the whole essay is a direct representation of how I mourn for our current state and long for a different future.

Our current system is one built on the economics of winning. From business school classrooms to startup incubators, we are taught how to compete, capture, and scale. Investors want proof of growth. Leaders want speed. Success is measured in revenue, reach, and returns.

In this system,

• Progress looks like: Faster deployment, higher efficiency, maximum disruption

• Success means: Beating others, capturing markets, optimizing for profit

• The measure is: Speed to market, revenue growth, technical superiority

• The hero is: The innovative company, the genius entrepreneur, the cutting edge algorithm

• The future is: Competitive, optimized, driven by growth at all costs

Despite this focus on winning, it often feels like we are losing. Loneliness is on the rise. Nature is begging us to stop producing. The social systems that used to support us have run out of money. At a closer look, it seems like what truly matters has gotten lost in a world that is pushing us to replace community and creativity with consumptions.

Design sits in this reality

In the middle of this system is a practice I love — design. Even though design has the power to create positive change, much of the practice today is in service of commercial interest — a trend that’s been on a steady rise alongside the Industrial Revolution.

It was during Industrial Revolution design became deeply intertwined with commerce, efficiency, and mass production, fueling the rapid expansion of consumer culture. It was then we lost of many of the craft practices that situated design in culture, place, and in the hands of the people. Digital technology then took this disconnection to an unprecedented scale—creating global platforms that extract attention and data while remaining invisible to the communities they impact. Today, design serves commerce, and everything, including our water, land, and emotions, is turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold with the help of design.

Our system and design solutions are built for commerce and — Like Wall Kimmerer says — harms what we love.

Shifting beyond commerce: Designing differently

What if we took a step back and considered the power of design IN SERVICE of something other than commerce? What if our practices could be in service of care, connection, craft, and contentment? If these were the goals, what would we make? How would we show up?

An invitation to practice:

In the midst of these questions, I invite you to shift beyond commerce towards practices of care, community, craft, culture, and contentment. In collaboration with the school of radical imagination, we’ll be tracing a weekend intensive that is all about shifting beyond commend.

The course asks a simple question: what if design could help create more than things to buy?

This course explores how we might shift the purpose of design beyond the market and toward five alternative values: Care, Community, Craft, Culture, and Contentment. Through conversations and practical activities during live sessions, we’ll question what design is for, who it serves, and what it could help make possible when commerce is no longer the starting point or the end goal.

Learn more and sign-up for updates

Questions we’ll explore together:

Together, we’ll examine how commerce has guided what we make, who we make it for, and what realities are seen as valuable. Then we’ll explore shifting beyond commerce, towards 5 new C’s: Care, Community, Craft, Culture, and Contentment.

• From Commerce to Care: How can design create relationships of care rather than transactions?

• From Commerce to Community: How can design strengthen belonging and mutual support instead of individual consumption?

• From Commerce to Craft: How can we value quality, slowness, repair, and making over speed and scale?

• From Commerce to Culture: How can design preserve, express, and evolve culture instead of homogenizing it for markets?

• From Commerce to Contentment: How can design help people have enough rather than always wanting more?

As systems built on endless growth show their ecological, social, and economic limits, this is an invitation to reimagine design beyond a tool for economic value, towards a practice that strengthens relationships, enriches culture, supports communities, and helps both people and the planet thrive.

This course is for designers, creatives, artists, strategists, educators, and anyone interested in questioning the role of design within capitalism. Like all Designshifts content, you don’t need a design title to join — just a desire for a better tomorrow.

A new narrative

If the current system is built on winning, a new narrative is one where we care for each other, the living planet, and our inner well-being. In this system:

• Progress looks like: Stronger relationships, deeper belonging, shared learning, restored balance

• Success means: Collective wellbeing, communities flourishing together

• The measure is: Quality of life, social cohesion, equitable access to opportunity

• The hero is: The community, the collaborative network, the caring relationship

• The future is: Regenerative, interconnected, grounded in shared flourishing

This is the narrative I want to build together with you as we continue to protect what we love.

Join me in the course.

DesignShifts started as a space to explore what it means to create a better future for and through design. Over the past 2 years, we’ve gathered online and in person to question the assumptions our work is built on. We’ve explored everything from technology and systems to nature, power, care, and relationships. More than anything, these conversations have reminded me that so many of us are searching for different ways to practice design. Ways that connects instead of competes. Ways that bring hope instead of dispair. Ways that regenerates instead of distracts.

Co-creating these shifts requires depth and attention, and that is what we want to do together with you all this September through our first DesignShifts learning cohort: Designing Otherwise. (learn more and sign-up)

Together with sahibzada mayed (صاحبزادہ مائد) we’ve created a seven-week journey where we hospice old, extractive ways of designing and instead start to cultivate a more relational, regenerative, and just design practice.

It is a space where we can spend more time with questions, challenge our assumptions, learn from each other, and practice new ways of designing together.

Navigating the current interconnected transitions of climate, economy, and social erosion requires us to rethink the systems, assumptions, and design practices that have shaped our world. We’ll meet in a space where the old models are breaking, and the next ones are not yet formed. Together, we’ll explore and build the practices needed for what comes next.

About the format:

Each week, we’ll meet in a small cohort. You will participate in 2-hour live sessions hosted by me and mayed along with guided personal design prompts for the self-exploration in-between. We’ll hold space for all that emerges and together with other people on the same path, you’ll be able to explore both hopes and fear and ways we can Design Otherwise.

Each week comes with a topic and many questions – from systems, to relationships, to nature, power, futures, and more.

Structure and key questions:

• (Re)Rooting Ourselves: What assumptions, stories, and habits shape the way we design, and what are we ready to release?

• Dancing with Change: How might we move with uncertainty and embrace emergence as a creative force?

• Weaving Possibilities: How can we hold multiple perspectives, ways of knowing, and possible futures together?

• Pause: What becomes possible when we slow down, listen, and create space for reflection?

• Re-membering Kinship: What shifts when we see ourselves as connected to the people and worlds our work touches?

• Tending Together: How do we cultivate trust, share power, and create the conditions for collective transformation?

• Freeing Futures: How do we imagine and design futures beyond the limits of what exists today?

The live sessions start September 17th and run through October 29th 2026 with pre- and post content and moments to connect.

Learn more and sign up

The hope is that we can create the space to move beyond design as a tool for productivity, extraction, and optimization, and begin practicing design as a way to cultivate healing, liberation, and deeper relationships with ourselves, each other, and the living world.

The goal isn’t that you’ll leave with a new methodology, but with new ways of seeing, new questions to carry, and practices that continue long after the course ends.

If you’ve been following DesignShifts and have wanted to go deeper, I’d love for you to join us.

Learn more and register here: https://www.designshifts.org/designingotherwise

(if you have questions, feel free to send me an email or leave a comment)

With gratitude,

Ida

Join the cohort

In June 2026, we hosted a DesignShifts event exploring what it means to shift beyond the dominant time narratives.

This event was a collaboration between DesignShifts and What Grows Between Us: Tending to Time, with facilitation by Ida Persson, sahibzada mayed, and Christine Flanagan.

About the gathering

We have inherited a story that time moves in one direction, at one speed, toward one kind of future. Progress. Growth. Optimization. That linear time is neutral and objective. But it never was. The dominant clock was built to serve particular interests, particular speeds, particular kinds of forgetting, and a specific kind of linear pace. We know this, yet most of us still plan, create, and measure our impact inside these dominant rhythms of time.

​But what if we didn’t have to? What if we could enter different, more generative timescapes? This is what we’ll explore together in this gathering.

This is what we explored together in Berlin. The event was hosted at Medulla — a physical space for turning shared urgency into collective resilience.

Session reflection and observations

For 3 hours, we entered a space of reflection, silence, processing, and responsibility. The space was fluid but a big activity we did was to explore the following timescapes in groups:

Bodies at the Threshold

To speak of time is to speak in the language of the body: breath, sensation, fatigue, safety, pause.

• If your body kept its own clock, what would it refuse to rush?

Lineages of Time

To speak of time is to remember that we are not singular beings. We are made of ancestors, memories, stories, and futures unfolding across generations.

• Whose time are you still carrying?

Time as a Living System

To speak of time is to learn from the natural world, where rest, renewal, emergence, growth and decay each have their season.

• What rhythms are you ready to let go of, so something else can take root?

What Grows Between Us

To speak of time is to speak of what becomes possible only when we move through it together.

• What becomes possible when you’re no longer keeping time alone?

The prompts were invitations to dive deep into the topics, but more importantly, the groups had time and space to share their own relationship, experiences, and feelings about time.

There is no way to summarize all themes that emerged, but some of the things I’m sitting with:

• The places and objects that keep us connected to the past.

• The moments where time stops without us knowing who or how.

• The fear of death, the feeling of time slipping away.

• And much, much more.

We entered spirals of time, rabbit holes, deep time, and flow states.

It was a session that danced with pleasure and pain, laughter and tears, the individual and the collective, the fast and the slow, all while moving between past, future, and present time.

Final reflection

As this reflection comes to a close, we’re reminded of where we started, with the realization that time is not linear, and trying to fit it into calendar blocks, quarterly goals, and a system that doesn’t stop for anything keeps us from experiencing loops and life to its fullest. It keeps us from listening when our bodies beg us to rest. It keeps us from connecting to the rhythms of the natural world, which doesn’t move at a constant speed of growth.

We’re encouraged to explore more in-person gathering moving forward, and we’re reminded of this quote from adrienne maree brown:

“Real time is slower than social-media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility.”

What if we used plants to replace our view of productivity?

Right now we treat productivity as something linear and constant. We expect growth to keep going upward, without pause, without rest, without decline. When nothing is visibly happening, we assume something is wrong.

But plants don’t grow like that. They move in cycles. They depend on conditions. They rest, they withdraw, they shed, they return. What looks like inactivity is often part of what makes future growth possible. In nature, growth is not continuous. It moves in cycles. It depends on the conditions. It slows, stops, withdraws, and returns.

and maybe… if we allow ourselves, we can see that we are just plants… growing, decaying, returning… Can we use this idea of Plant Productivity to our advantage?

Maybe I’m just a plant

Maybe I’m just a plant… is a 12-part plant calendar that invites you to use plants as a replacement for the current productivity narratives. Use it as a guide for rethinking our relationship to productivity. Use it as a prompt to find center or a way to embrace fluidity.

Maybe I’m just a plant:

1. Dormant seasons don’t mean I’m dead, they mean I’m preparing.

2. My roots keep me grounded when the winds begin to blow.

3. I lean toward the light, even when I don’t notice it.

4. I can’t grow at the same speed all the time.

5. I am shaped by those around me.

6. What falls away feeds what returns.

7. Too little water will dry me out, too much will drown me.

8. Growth takes patience. Forcing it only breaks the stem.

9. I cannot outgrow the container without changing it.

10. I can’t thrive in soil that doesn’t nourish me.

11. Even when cut down, I can grow back.

12. I don’t need to be the tallest to matter.

These 12-parts invites you to think of your life as a flourishing flower — a life with both the growth and decay. The spouting and the waiting. To acknowledge dormant seasons as valuable.

We live in a time where growth is treated as linear and constant. There is an expectation to keep expanding, producing, and improving without pause. Rest is often seen as interruption rather than part of the process.

The goal is not to grow bigger, but rather to learn how to deepen your roots and flourish when the time is right. Then to shed the petals that become nourishment for the next iteration.

Maybe what we call productivity needs to be rethought not as endless output, but as something more ecological, more seasonal, more alive. Maybe we need to look to plants as guides for how productivity can look different.

View a visual version of the post

Public domain plant illustrations by Robert Jacob Gordon

Signup here: https://luma.com/d7xkoe78

About the event:

We have inherited a story that time moves in one direction, at one speed, toward one kind of future. Progress. Growth. Optimization. That linear time is neutral and objective. But it never was. The dominant clock was built to serve particular interests, particular speeds, particular kinds of forgetting, and a specific kind of linear pace. We know this, yet most of us still plan, create, and measure our impact inside these dominant rhythms of time.

But what if we didn’t have to? What if we could enter different, more generative timescapes? This is what we’ll explore together in this gathering.

The space is fluid but some of the things we plan to do together is:

• Move through a series of different timescapes that explore what it means to design from time rhythms that have been erased, suppressed, and longed for.

• Imagine temporal possibilities that the dominant clock was never designed to hold — ancestral time, ecological rhythms, seasonal patterns, and the slow work of tending to relationships.

• Sit with grief and possibility in the same breath, composting what no longer serves and tending to what is still becoming.

This space is for the temporal wanderers, the ones who feel the pressure of the clock but long for another rhythm. Whether you’re working inside systems or at their edges, you’re not alone in sensing that something about the way we move through time in our practice is unsettling.

This is not a conventional workshop. It is an exploratory space to gather and witness. A collective wandering through time as a living, looping relationship: emergent and full of possibility.

Sign up for the event

About the hosts: Co-hosted by DesignShifts and What Grows Between Us: Tending to Time, with facilitation by Ida Persson, sahibzada mayed, and Christine Flanagan.

About the space: Medulla is a physical space for turning shared urgency into collective resilience.

The event will be in English and we’ll have some food and drinks.

Over the past few years, I’ve been working through a lot of interconnected questions about design: what it’s for, who it serves, what it keeps getting wrong, and what it could become. At some point, patterns started emerging from the research, the projects, the conversations, and the failures. I’ve started to see patterns and overarching themes that I’m calling the Seven DesignShifts Dimensions.

This post invites you to interact with these categories as a frame for how design can meaningfully respond to social, ecological, and systemic challenges. These dimensions address design’s current misalignments: in attention, complexity, systems-thinking, power, our relationship and cooperation with each other and the living world, and ultimate purpose. Practicing them together creates a map of where we might shift toward slower, more rooted, humble, and regenerative design.

7 DesignShift Dimensions of Transformation

1. Awareness and Attention

2. Emergence

3. Systems

4. Plurality and Power

5. Nature

6. Relations

7. Purpose

1. Awareness and Attention : Rooting Down

Asks you to slow down and pay attention. Invites you to examine how we perceive, where we direct attention, and how we help others see and choose differently.

Core question: What is grabbing our attention and how do we learn to pay attention?

We live in an age of manufactured distraction. Design has become complicit in fragmenting our attention, optimizing for engagement over meaning, and accelerating us beyond our capacity to metabolize experience. The attention economy treats human consciousness as a resource to extract rather than something sacred to protect.

But the crisis isn’t just about distraction; it’s about disconnection from meaning itself. When design prioritizes speed over slowness, novelty over depth, and metrics over mattering, we lose our ability to discern what’s worth our attention at all. We become unmoored from what gives life substance.

We must become stewards of meaning in a world that desperately needs it. This dimension asks us to choose depth, to honor embodiment, to design with care.

Focus: Centering attention, embodiment, and care. Choosing depth over distraction, and slowness over speed, to act as stewards of meaning and connection.

2. Emergence: Dancing With Change

Asks you to loosen your grip. Invites you to work with uncertainty, adaptation, and what wants to become.

Core Question: How do you relate to and navigate through uncertainty?

The old design paradigm promised control: define the problem, design the solution, deploy at scale. But complex systems don’t work that way. Climate change, social transformation, community resilience - these aren’t problems to solve but patterns to navigate.

We’re living through cascading transformations that exceed our capacity to predict or control and we need to let go of linear paths and fixed outcomes. This dimension a call to move with the natural rhythm and let go of the illusion of control and clarity.

Focus: Design as an invitation to move with transformation — navigating change with humility, curiosity, and adaptability rather than control or fixed expertise.

3. Systems: Seeing The Web

Asks you to see the web. Broadens how we understand interdependence, complexity, and root causes

Core Question: What lives at the intersections and crossroads?

Design has been taught to isolate problems, to draw clean boundaries, to optimize individual components. But nothing exists in isolation. Every intervention ripples through networks we can barely perceive. Every “solution” creates new relationships, new dependencies, new patterns.

We must learn to perceive relationships, patterns, interdependence. We must recognize that design is always nested within larger webs of life.

Focus: Perceiving relationships, patterns, and interdependence instead of isolated parts. Design as ecological and systemic, always nested within larger webs of life.

4. Plurality and Power: Expanding Views

Asks you to question power and look below the default. Questions whose knowledge counts, who has been excluded, and how we design with many ways of knowing.

Core Question: Whose perspectives shape decisions? Who benefits from the work we do?

Design has historically centered a very narrow set of voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing. Western, colonial, corporate, masculine, able-bodied viewpoints have been treated as universal while everything else has been marginalized as “niche” or “special interest.” This isn’t just unjust; it’s dangerous.

When we design from a single worldview, we design for collapse. We miss the wisdom held in Indigenous knowledge systems about reciprocity with land. We ignore the expertise of communities who’ve been solving problems with limited resources for generations. We dismiss ways of being and knowing that don’t fit our narrow definitions of “rational” or “scalable.”

Paying attention to the ‘marginal’ in the research ecosystem, as the eco-social design discourse emphasizes, means understanding that margins are often where the most vital knowledge lives. It means designing for hospitality, creating spaces where multiple truths can coexist. It means learning what situated knowledge means in a social context, and honoring the fact that all knowledge is situated, including and especially our own.

Focus: Honoring diverse perspectives, knowledge systems, and ways of being. Challenging universalist thinking by embracing Indigenous wisdom, local contexts, and community-led design, and shared power.

5. Nature: Breathing Earth

Asks you to remember that you are not separate from the living world. Looks at what we can move from extracting to belonging, and design within living systems

Core Question: What is our relationship to the living world?

Design has treated the living world as backdrop, as resource, as externality. We’ve designed as if we were separate from nature, as if the earth’s systems were infinite, as if our innovations could proceed without consequence to the air, water, soil, and creatures that make life possible.

This delusion is collapsing around us. Climate change, mass extinction, ecosystem collapse - these aren’t distant threats but present realities. And design has been part of the problem. Our addiction to novelty, our celebration of disruption, our focus on growth at all costs has contributed to the unraveling of the living systems we depend on.

We can no longer afford to design as if we’re outside of nature. We must reconnect design to the living world, moving from disruption to responsibility and repair. We must learn to design for cycles instead of obsolescence, for stewardship instead of extraction, for systems that breathe with life instead of systems that suffocate it.

This isn’t about adding sustainability as a feature or greenwashing our products. It’s about fundamentally reimagining design’s relationship to the more-than-human world. It’s about designing as if we’re part of the earth, not separate from it, because we are.

The earth is not a resource to manage. It’s a living system we’re embedded in, and our designs must reflect that truth.

Focus: Reconnecting design to the living world. Moving from disruption to responsibility and repair. Here, we design for cycles, stewardship, and systems that breathe with life.

6. Relations: Tending Together

Asks you to make space for others. Examines the connections between people, communities, and the social fabric that holds us.

Core Question: What can you do together that you can’t alone? How is competition holding us back from creating a better world?

Design culture has celebrated the lone genius, the competitive pitch, the winner-take-all market. We’ve been taught to protect our ideas, to move fast and break things, to optimize for individual success. We’ve built things instead of relationships, accumulated users instead of cultivating community, and measured value in metrics that erase the very connections that give work meaning.

But the work that matters cannot be done alone. Climate action requires collective coordination. Social change demands solidarity. Building futures worth inhabiting means weaving relationships of care, trust, and mutual support.

The emphasis on relationships over outcomes, on collaboration over competition, on critical connections over critical mass points to something essential: we need each other. The problems we face are too complex, too interconnected, too urgent for isolated efforts. We need to learn to work together differently.

This shift asks us to design infrastructure for collaboration, to create conditions for collective intelligence to emerge, to measure success not by what we’ve accumulated but by what we’ve nurtured together.

Focus: Centering connection and collaboration in how we design and work together. Moving from competition to cooperation, from critical mass to critical connections, and from building things to building relationships.

7. Purpose: Freeing Futures

Asks the hardest question: what is all of this for? It invites you to imagine and build toward shared futures, reciprocity with the earth, and life beyond extraction.

Core Question: What is this all in service of?

Design has been in service to the wrong gods. We’ve optimized for private gain, shareholder value, individual convenience, and endless growth. We’ve treated people as users to capture, attention as resource to extract, and the commons as territory to enclose. We’ve designed brilliantly for markets while the planet burns and communities fragment.

But there’s another possibility. Design could serve collective liberation instead of individual accumulation. It could nourish the commons instead of privatizing them. It could create conditions for shared flourishing instead of optimizing for the few at the expense of the many.

What would it mean to design for collective liberation? To center the commons? To prioritize care over profit, relationships over transactions, thriving over growth? What futures become possible when we align our work with what actually sustains life?

The future doesn’t need more innovation. It needs liberation. And design can either continue serving systems of extraction and control, or it can become part of the movement toward freedom.

Focus: Designing toward collective liberation: moving from individual success and private gain toward shared flourishing, the commons, and transformative possibility.

Join me

These dimensions are not finished ideas. They are working hypotheses shaped through practice, conversation, and ongoing unlearning. They will continue to shift as they are tested, challenged, and applied in real contexts.

I’m curious to know, what resonates with you? What are you currently working on?

(These dimensions will also serve as the structure for a DesignShifts book I’m working on. I’m currently looking for collaborators and publishers. Is that you or know someone that might want to publish this? Reach out!)

Leave a comment

As designers, we’ve been trained to eliminate friction at every turn. Don’t make users think. Make solutions invisible. Optimise for speed.

But what if friction isn’t always the enemy? What if, in our rush to make everything seamless, we’re removing the very pauses that create meaning, build trust, and help people make decisions they won’t regret?

Two weeks ago, I posted about ways to add friction to improve experiences. Since then, I’ve been thinking and getting a lot of feedback about how not all friction is the same. Some friction creates obstacles and frustration, while other friction can add value, reflection, and human connection.

In this post, I want to make a case for intentional friction, and give you a practical tool for knowing when and how to design it.

Understanding different kind of friction

How do you distinguish between different kinds of friction? I keep coming back to the idea of Friction Points vs. Friction Pauses.

Friction Points

Friction points are barriers that get in the way of what should be simple and straightforward.

Characteristics:

• Quick - Should take seconds or minutes, not hours

• Transactional - Focused on completing a task efficiently

• Low-stakes - The decision is reversible or has minimal consequences

• Fact-based - Requires information, not reflection

• Efficiency-driven - Speed and ease are the primary values

You’ll find friction points in repetitive tasks like refilling a prescription or reordering supplies, in information retrieval finding store hours, and in simple decisions like choosing a delivery time. They also appear in administrative processes like updating an address or uploading a document.

Your design goal here is to eliminate unnecessary steps, reduce cognitive load, and optimize for speed. When you add friction to these moments, you create frustration, abandonment, loss of trust, and competitive disadvantage.

Friction Pauses

Friction pauses are intentional slowdowns that create space for meaning, reflection, and human connection.

Characteristics:

• Slow - Takes time, can’t be rushed

• Relational - Focused on human connection and understanding

• High-stakes - The decision has significant consequences

• Feeling-based - Requires emotional processing, not just information

• Meaning-driven - Depth and care are the primary values

You’ll find friction pauses in first-time or rare experiences like an initial diagnosis or major purchase, in complex decisions like treatment plans or financial planning, and in emotionally charged moments like difficult conversations or grief. They’re also essential in learning opportunities and trust-building moments like consultations or negotiations.

Consider a cancer consultation with time for questions, a financial planning session, therapy appointments, or big purchase decisions. These moments need space.

Your design goal here is to create space for questions, reflection, and human connection. Build trust through care and attention. When you remove friction from these moments, you create regret, misunderstanding, broken trust, poor decisions, and people feeling dehumanized.

Friction can make experiences more memorable, create space for reflection, and slow down decisions that deserve care. It can surface consequences we would otherwise ignore, strengthen human connection, and turn passive consumption into conscious choice. It also plays a role in learning, resilience, and doing difficult things well. I reflect on these friction areas here

An invitation: The Point vs. Pause assessment

This chart below helps you decide whether a moment in a journey should be designed for speed (Friction Point) or meaning (Friction Pause). Use it in work or life.

How to use it

1. Choose a specific moment or experience you’re designing.

2. Work through the questions below.

3. Notice where your answers cluster — left or right.

(image as text below)

What’s at stake?

• Friction Point if: Low stakes, easily reversible

• Friction Pause if: High stakes, significant consequences

What does the user need right now?

• Friction Point if: Facts and efficiency

• Friction Pause if: Understanding and time to process

How urgent is this?

• Friction Point if: Time-sensitive

• Friction Pause if: Can’t be rushed

Is this transactional or relational?

• Friction Point if: Just completing a task

• Friction Pause if: Connection and trust matter

What happens if they rush through this?

• Friction Point if: Nothing significant

• Friction Pause if: Regret, harm, or misunderstanding

If most answers fall in the Point column: Reduce friction. What this looks like: Optimize for speed, clarity, and efficiency.

If most answers fall in the Pause column: Design a Friction Pause. What this looks like: Create space for reflection, learning, trust-building, or accountability.

Context is everything

Here’s where it gets interesting: the same moment can be a Friction Point for one person and a Friction Pause for another. Take finding a doctor. If you’re in acute pain and need someone immediately, every extra click is a barrier. But if you’re researching specialists after a serious diagnosis, you need time to read reviews, validate trust, and understand credentials. Same action. Completely different needs.

Urgency shifts what feels helpful versus what feels burdensome. Emotional state matters. So does where someone is in their relationship with you. A first-time user might need friction pauses to build trust, while a returning user just wants speed. The same person might need different things at different times.

This is why blanket rules don’t work. This is why tools require critical human assessments. The question is never simply whether to add or remove friction. It is whether this moment, for this person, right now, deserves to be fast or deserves to slow down.

A final note

Our job as designers is not to eliminate all friction or to add it everywhere. It is to be intentional. To know when speed serves our users and when slowness does.

Or like Danijel Duvnjak said in this comment “perhaps the deeper design question is not “should we add or remove friction?” It is: what relationship is this friction serving? Good design may not be frictionless or frictionful. It may be consequence-aware. It removes unnecessary burden while protecting the encounters where care, learning, responsibility, and trust are formed.”

Leave a comment

I recently saw a post from The Nap Ministry that said:

“Hey, here to say you don’t have to start a project, club, new invention or initiative as we focus on community, connection and the analog world. You can just hang out with your friends, say hello to your neighbor and spend more time offline.”

I felt this post deeply. I’m often the first to create a themed party or a logo for an event. I love a well-designed gathering with intentional activities and plans. But reading the post, it also made me think about all the times where I got stuck in the planning phase and never got to actually “doing” the thing I was planning in detail because I ran out of time or energy.

As much as curated spaces, planned interactions, crafted products, and intentional takeaways can enhance experiences and deepen connection, could too much design also stand in the way of us building and engaging in real communities?

What really happens when we overly design our communities?

1. When we overly design, planning halts action.

Planning the perfect event or building the perfect structure can feel productive, but it often becomes a stall. We wait until the idea is polished, until the branding feels right, until the schedule lines up, until we can justify gathering people around something that looks “enough.”

We often say that design is about iteration, but in practice, the planning and polishing can take over. The more we perfect something, the further we drift from the natural rhythms that actually allow community to form. Real connection needs space to unfold in ways we can’t predict. We don’t know what will happen — and that’s the point.

Community doesn’t usually grow from perfection. It grows from proximity. It grows from repetition. It grows from the very ordinary act of being around each other without needing a grand reason.

Sometimes a simple “want to grab a coffee?” is more powerful than a six-part series with a mission statement. Sometimes sitting on the couch while someone cooks dinner does more than any beautifully crafted activation. Sometimes an unplanned walk with a neighbor teaches us more about connection than a structured meetup ever could.

Starting small keeps the door open. It lowers the stakes. It reminds us that community isn’t something we architect; it’s something we practice. And the more we practice, the easier it becomes to move from idea to action without needing the perfect design as permission.

If we want more community, the answer is often simple: start where we are, with what we have, and with whoever is already nearby.

2. When we overly design, ordinary engagements can become exclusive clubs.

There’s a difference between creating supportive structure and shaping something so tightly that only certain people feel welcome. Over-designing can quietly turn everyday engagements into exclusive clubs, even when the intention is inclusivity.

I recently read the article We’ve Squeezed the “Life” Out of Civic Life by Sam Pressler for Connective Tissue, which explores how professionalism can stand in the way of true civic life. He writes:

“When we create ‘spaces’ or build ‘fields’ — as we’ve done throughout the social sector — we end up professionalizing and specializing sets of activities. And when we professionalize and specialize these activities, we signal that these activities are only for some people and not for everyone else. Professionalization and credentialization can help increase the ‘quality’ of practice within a field, but this is done by intentionally erecting barriers to that practice. These barriers show up through the training and credentialing activities themselves, and through the creation of insider cultures, languages, and networks.”

Pressler describes this as “professionalized management,” but it’s also another way of thinking about overly designed community spaces. We build structures to optimize and make things efficient, but when it comes to relationships, those same structures can quietly become obstacles for the dedicated people who were showing up and putting in time from the start.

He continues:

“The creeping professionalization of civic life has shifted the everyday democracy responsibilities of community membership and participation to the domain of nonprofit management. As credentialed managers assume the roles once held by ordinary citizens and neighbors, formal programs take the place of informal groups and activities, and participation and membership become experiences that are channeled and controlled rather than seen as holistic ways of being.”

When we professionalize or overly design the spaces meant to bring us together, we risk losing the informal, everyday participation that community depends on. Work shifts from ordinary neighbors to credentialed managers. We move from organic connection to structured programs and in the midst of it all, we loose sight on the natural rhythms of relationships. To keep engagement open and alive, we have to leave room for the unpolished, the unplanned, and the people who show up simply because they care.

3. When we overly design, we limit surprise and magic.

Many social clubs now have robust brands and curated activities that look more like shopping experiences than the social gatherings we used to know. In the article What We Lose When Optimizing Community, community builder Elise Granata explores what we lose when we “Shopify” our social lives.

Run clubs, social retreats, and book clubs use polished online presences to attract members and entice participation. These experiences are meant to support us in the loneliness epidemic, but Granata highlights how their branded, tightly designed nature can create a barrier. We start to feel like we need to know exactly what we’ll get out of something before we go. We scan social accounts and websites to decide if it’s for us. The element of surprise disappears, and we show up expecting an outcome — or as Granata says, “We lose the feeling that comes with a little mystery and a healthy amount of risk.”

“When we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, you know what happens? We get to be surprised.”

— Elise Granata

This focus on expectation can get in the way of simply being with what is and letting curiosity and surprise guide our next moves.

Priya Parker says every gathering needs a purpose. While I agree in some ways, there’s also a magic in the unplanned spaces that emerge from the natural rhythms of relationships. Reading a book while a friend watches reels. Crafting while someone is cooking. “Time together” might be the purpose, but does it really have to be predetermined?

Sometimes the purpose only emerges after the event has already happened. The people who show up create the purpose together rather than blend into a pre-determined one. Pre-determined purposes can end up placing expectations on what something is and isn’t.

Finding the balance

One of my guiding practices in design these days is to not only ask how might we but also at what cost. This helps mitigate unintended consequences. Sometimes the thing we want to design for becomes the very thing we design against if we’re not careful.

Community, relationships, and connection are messy, unpredictable, and unpolished — and that’s where the magic happens. If we want real connection, we have to leave space for magic to unfold as we just hang out with our friends, say hello to our neighbours, or spend more time offline.

In May 2026, we hosted a DesignShifts event exploring what it means to shift within and beyond the current system.

This session was prepared in collaboration with sahibzada mayed; a decolonial designer and researcher working at the edges of cultural and systemic transformation.

About the gathering

The current system is breaking, and a new one is not yet born. In that uncomfortable in-between space, we met to explore what it means to navigate current realities while shifting towards a different future.

During a 1.5 hour practice session we meet each other and the world in this messy middle through reflection, co-creation, and a shared presence. The session is fluid but some of the things we’d love to do together is:

• Reflected on the current system and realities we face and feel

• Imagined a better future that is just, caring, and liberated

• Co-created the shifts needed to move within and beyond the current system

The registation was guided by questions. What feelings are alive in you right now? If your design practice was a plant, what would it be? What tensions are you holding? What future are you dreaming of? The answers became the material we worked with together.

Session reflection and observations

These were the contradictions people carried in.

• Survival vs. meaningful work.Needing money to exist, while the work that feels true or regenerative doesn’t pay, or conflicts with the very economic logic we’re trying to dismantle.

• Inner capacity vs. outer demand.Exhausted, overstretched, grieving, neurodivergent. And yet pulled to do more, faster, at scale.

• The system I’m in vs. the future I want to create. Using proprietary tech, designing for consumerism, being part of capitalism while critiquing it. The awareness of contradiction is sharp and largely unresolved.

• Breadth of vision vs. depth of follow-through.Many ideas, not enough energy, focus, support, or time to go further than the surface.

• Knowing vs. doing. Information is abundant. The picture of what’s broken is clear. And yet the gap between understanding the world and being able to change it can feel vast, even paralyzing.

What struck me across all of these: nobody framed their tension as purely personal. Even the most intimate entries located themselves within structural conditions. The personal and the political arrived together, inseparably.

“The overwhelm is real. The feeling of being powerless. Sometimes it makes me want to try harder to shape change where I can, other times I want to dig a hole and hide from it all.” — session participant

I dream of a future that is…

As part of the pre-registration, we gathered every submission into a collective dream, which you can view here. Holding everyone’s visions together in one place gave hope for a better future.

But the activity also surfaced a real tension around dreaming itself. One participant noted that the leap from current conditions to a better future felt too vast, and that before we can dream forward, we need space to grieve what’s already lost or breaking. That observation is something I carry forward in my work. So much futures work skips over grief entirely. Grief should be named and practiced in its own right. Grief helps us become unfrozen.

View the dream scape

Community, connection, care in times of tensions

Something surfaced in this session that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

We are all carrying enormous feelings and enormous visions, often simultaneously. The weight of that is real. And increasingly, I wonder what it would look like to carry it together, not as a mailing list or a channel we slowly stop checking, but as something more alive. A space where DesignShifters share ownership, hold space for each other, and show up across the full range of what this work asks of us.

Not critical mass. Critical connection.

I don’t have the shape of it yet. But I’d love to think about it with you. What are you craving? What could it look like? Reply or send us an email, and let’s find out.

Leave a comment

​We’re hosting another DesignShifts event. This time together with sahibzada mayed, a decolonial designer and researcher working at the edges of cultural and systemic transformation.

Together, we’ll explore what it means to shift within and beyond a system that continues to push people and the planet to limit. We’ll explore tensions we hold and world we long for.

• Date: Thursday, May 21st

• Time: 6PM (CET)

• Online

Sign up: https://luma.com/akwoe48w

​About the session

The dominant system is rupturing, and a new one is not yet born. In that uncomfortable in-between space, we will meet to explore what it means to leverage design as a pathway to navigate our present realities while moving toward different futures.

We’ll meet each other and the world in this messy middle through reflection, co-creation, and a shared presence. The session is fluid but some of the things we’d love to do together is:

• ​Reflect on the current system and realities we face and feel

• ​Imagine future possibilities that are just, caring, and liberated

• ​Co-create the shifts needed to move within and beyond the current system

​We will hold the contradictions that many of us carry quietly: grief and hope, exhaustion and care, uncertainty and the stubborn belief that things can be different. And we will dream, together, of futures that feel worth building.

Sign up: https://luma.com/akwoe48w

Over the last few months, I’ve been recovering from back surgery.

It came unexpectedly, at a time when I was ready to start running. I had goals for the new year. Work plans, travel, routines I wanted to build. Some were long-term dreams. Others were immediate needs. All of them stopped when my doctor said: “You need surgery. As soon as possible.”

For the first few weeks, I was ordered to rest. Lying there waiting to heal, I tried to remind myself that “rest is resistance,” as Tricia Hersey said. I even pulled out her Rest Deck. I felt anything but liberated. Friends told me to “take advantage” of the break. I had reading to catch up on. I should have loved it. But I hated it. Not rest itself. The uncertainty. The lack of visible progress.

Around this time I received my copy of Meander Magazine, Volume Two, dedicated to rest and renewal. I read it flat on my back, unable to do much else. Even though I’d already read it (I designed the magazine), lying there in uninvited rest made me see it differently. I realized I’d been approaching rest the same way I approached productivity: as something to master, optimize, do right.

In trying to move from rush to rest, I’d turned rest into another achievement. Another box to check. I kept asking myself: Am I resting correctly? Am I recovering fast enough? Am I using this time wisely?

The external pressures: Our environment wasn’t made for pain.

The forced stillness made me think about how our world isn’t designed for unexpected pain or long-term pain that doesn’t go away for that matter. It doesn’t fit into a spreadsheet or quarterly goal planning. Even though I’d thought before about shifting from speed to slowness, this forced pause made me more aware of how linear time doesn’t allow for weakness, weather, or worry. It teaches us the illusion of a continuum. It pressures us to perform on artificial timelines.

Being sick reminded me of Crip time, a concept from disability activists and scholars. As Nina Mühlemann explains, referencing disability scholar Alison Kafer: “Crip time is a concept by disability scholars and disabled artists, and it means that disabled people relate to time differently, and also that time works differently for disabled people.” Kafer puts it plainly: rather than bending disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.

Our world of production is not built to accommodate different needs. Everyone is asked to perform the same, at all times, and if we’re unable to “bend” to the norms of society, we’re treated as a problem.

The internal expectations: Who am I when I am not improving or growing?

Three months post-surgery, I still didn’t feel recovered. My days were filled with physical pain that transferred into emotional distress. I kept thinking about worst-case scenarios. How I was falling behind. I kept measuring myself against my old self. When I couldn’t perform, I felt shame.

Nothing felt like rest even though I was doing very little. Almost no work. But every new task felt like a mountain. I kept telling myself I wasn’t dealing with a lot. That I should be able to handle more. I compared myself to others. I saw people getting jobs and opportunities. Cool projects getting finished. And every time, I thought: I couldn’t handle something like that.

This is my internal system telling me that I need to be doing more. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by our performance driven society. Maybe it’s part of my personality.

What I’ve started to notice is that this gap, between what we used to handle and what we can handle now. We (I) cling to “normal” and push to get back there. But the pushing makes us capable of even less. Our bodies and minds enter stress mode. Overdrive.

How do we make space for less in order to gain more?

Letting go of the pressure to progress means stepping out of a system that tells us to do more while also shedding the internal narrative of “not enoughness”. My swim coach used to say: if you stop getting better, you stop being good.” It used to motivate me to try harder, but now it invites me to think about life beyond progress.

Rather than solutions, I will leave you with a few questions that I am currently holding:

• What do we do when our capacity does not meet our expectations? When recovery doesn’t mean full recovery? When our new max isn’t what it used to be?

• How do I accept change that I did not choose? Can “good enough” actually feel like good enough?

• How can we choose slow when it’s met with so much resistance? Who am I without my performance?

• How do we build structures and societies that invite different rhythms and speed to exist at the same time?

• What does it look like to surrender to rather than push through pain?

Leave a comment

*Trigger Warning* suicide.

“Don’t move fast and break things when it comes to our kids.” These were the words from the mom of 14 year-old Sewell who ended his life after an ongoing chatbot conversation on Character AI. The story is heartbreaking on so many levels. It’s a story of a boy who died too young. It’s a story of a mom grieving her loss. It’s a story of loneliness. But it is also a story about how our current design and tech practices are causing irreversible harm.

For many years, the innovation, tech, and design industry has been guided by the motto “move fast and break things”. It’s been a way for us to try out new ideas quickly. It’s been a way for us to uncover new possibilities.

In theory, the idea makes sense. We want to limit the investment up front in order to ensure that we don’t head too far down the wrong path. It helps us make sure that we are solving the right problem.

However, when the things breaking are people, communities, and the planet, we must ask ourselves: at what cost?

Unintended consequences: Design today is causing harm

Over the past few years, I’ve realized that our work as designers is not just to spot and solve problems. It’s also to make sure we don’t create them. The story of 14 year-old Sewell is one example of an unintended consequence when new technology enters the market without considering what could go wrong. We don’t have to look far to find other examples.

The way we design our buildings is creating uninhabitable cities. The applications meant for connection are contributing to an expanding mental health crisis. And brands promise to “open happiness” while contributing to the rise in diabetes and related health problems.

As we find ourselves in the interrelated crises of climate change, food scarcity, energy depletion, global poverty, and loss of meaning (intersections often refered to as the Polycrisis), it’s easy to see that we cannot continue with design as usual. Moving fast and breaking things is no longer acceptable and as designers, we need to start considering both possibilities and the responsibilities we hold.

DesignShift: From how might we to at what cost

Background image by Drew Colins from Unsplash

I believe that “Good design is a dance between curiosity AND criticality.” In design thinking, we use the question “how might we” to encourage opportunities through curiosity. In the course Hello Design Thinking IDEO explains: The “how” is solutions-oriented, the “might” encourages optimism, and the “we” is collaborative. Having worked at IDEO, How Might We is close to my heart. I love the openness it brings. Many times, it’s helped me step out of my perfectionistic nature, identify problems and dream up new solutions through a curious lens. I love that.

However, throughout the years of trying to innovate in a responsible way, I’ve also come to realize something critical and that is as often as we ask “how might we” we also have to ask “at what cost.” Design can heal but it can also harm. These complementary questions create a necessary tension that leads to more responsible outcomes.

A tool for equitable outcomes

This image shows the framework in a comparative table where the positives and negatives can be visualized against each other.

So, how do we really balance these tensions of possibility and responsibility?

This activity is designed for you to reflect deeply and thoughtfully on an idea, project, or product you’ve worked on or are considering.

1. Start by imagining something you have created, contributed to, or are thinking about developing. Write it down or keep it in your mind.

2. Take a piece of paper or any other tool you want to use for notes. Create one section for “How Might We” and one section for “At What Cost”.

3. Review the questions below and start answering each of the questions from a possibility and responsibility lens.

Take your time with each prompt. This is your opportunity to think critically and honestly, helping you make more informed and responsible choices.

How might we (exploring possibility through the lens of curiosity)

• Outcome: What’s the intended benefit?

• Consequences: What are the expected short- or medium-term benefits?

• Ripple effects: What are long-term or wider impacts (e.g. social, environmental, ethical)?

• The price: Who gains?

• Reframe: How might we amplify the good?

At what cost (exploring responsibility through the lens of criticality)

• Outcome: What might go wrong? What risks or harms might emerge?

• Consequences: What are potential short- or medium-term risks or downsides?

• Ripple effects:Who might be harmed in the long run? What systems might be stressed?

• The price: Who pays for it (people, ecosystems, cultures, futures)?

• Reframe: How might we reduce the harm or rebalance the trade-off?

By asking yourself “How Might We” along with “At What Cost” you will gain clarity on who stands to gain or lose, what trade-offs might exist, and how you could amplify positive impacts while reducing negative ones.

As designers, we are responsible for the intended and unintended consequences of our work. Or like Kate Holmes says in the book Mismatch — How inclusion Shapes design, designers should be “making intentional choices, over risking an unintentional harm.”

Should we? Sometimes the best design is no design.

It’s profoundly challenging to tell a client “no,” especially when they’ve invested years of work and resources into a project. The traditional client-designer relationship often positions the paying client as our primary focus — we’re hired to execute their vision, not question it. However, I believe designers have an ethical responsibility to look deeper and expand wider. Our ultimate goal should be to serve the people who will use our designs. We have a responsibility towards them first and foremost. And then of course, we have a responsibility towards the planet that supports us all. Ideally, clients goals and the needs of people and the planet align. In the end, clients make solutions for people and we all need the planet to survive, but this is not always the case.

This perspective aligns with John Thackara’s critique of the risk management industry in his post Oil-Powered Thinking. He observes that despite the proliferation of risk management consultants, “the world is not, to put it mildly, a safer place.” Why? Because these consultants “do not, by and large, advise their clients not to take risky actions. On the contrary: their job is to make it possible for their client to take those actions anyway — but to make sure someone else pays for any negative consequences.”

This pattern repeats across industries: someone else — often the most vulnerable — pays for the consequences of our innovations and good intentions. We see this clearly in the sustainability sector, where electric vehicles may reduce carbon emissions in wealthy countries like Sweden, while the environmental and social impacts of mineral extraction are materialized in communities and climate disasters in distant countries. Sometimes we’re simply unaware of these consequences, but often our focus on short-term profits blinds us to long-term impacts.

A new, more responsible design future

Today, we’ve explored the unintended consequences of rapid innovation, the ethical responsibilities of designers and entrepreneurs, and ways we can account for harm before it happens.

As designers and creators, we stand at a critical crossroads. Our work has the power to transform lives, but also the potential to cause unintended harm. The question isn’t whether we should innovate, but rather how we can innovate responsibly.

The story of Sewell reminds us that the stakes are high. When we design digital experiences, products, or services, we’re not just creating things — we’re influencing lives, cultures, and behaviors. This is a privilege to design and something that we should not take lightly. The responsibility that comes with this power demands that we slow down, ask harder questions, and develop the courage to say “no” when the potential for harm outweighs the benefits.

I believe in a design future where like Arturo Escobar writes in Designs for the pluriverse:

“Might a new breed of designers come to be thought of as transition activists? If this were to be the case, they would have to walk hand in hand with those who are protecting and redefining well-being, life projects, territories, local economies, and communities worldwide.”

As we navigate interconnected crises — from climate change to mental health, from systemic discrimination to technological harm, let’s commit to this balance of curiosity and criticality. Let’s create solutions that don’t just solve problems, but do so without creating new ones. And let’s listen to Sewell’s mom and stop moving fast and break things when it comes to our kids (and anyone else for that matter). Let’s look at problems both with curiosity and criticality, asking not just “How might we?” but also “At what cost?”

Interested in running an unintended consequence workshop with your team/organization/community through DesignShifts? Reach out here or respond to this post.

Additional tools for harm assessment:

• MIT AI Incident Tracker

• Consequence Scanning — an agile practice for responsible innovators — doteveryone

• Responsible Engineering Overview — Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Learn

• A framework to help you account for unintended consequences.

• Persuasive Backfiring: When Behavior Change Interventions Trigger Unintended Negative Outcomes

• Unintended Consequences: Some readings on art, design, and gentrification.

• Consideration Cards — < DESIGN ETHICALLY >

• Futures Wheel — UNGP — Foresight Project

• Stories for Life

Download the workbook as a PDF

In April 2026, we hosted a special edition DesignShifts event in collaboration with Culture First Manila, Jen Horn, and Design Center Philippines and it was all about how we can move from Fixed Roles to Fluid Identities. It was a community conversation on rethinking our roles and approaches in designing towards more connected and hopeful futures.

About the gathering

For generations, we have been taught to answer the question “What do you do?” with a single, clear label. Teacher. Engineer. Designer. Writer. Lawyer. These titles give us legitimacy, help us find work, and make our value easy to understand.

As designers, we often go further. We define ourselves by our outputs. I design apps. I create visual identities. I build systems. Our deliverables become shorthand for who we are.

But what happens when you are asked to navigate a world drowning in things, but starving for meaning? A world running low on resources. A world changing faster than our titles can follow.

Together, we:

• examined the roles we currently hold

• engaged emerging design archetypes as lenses for action.

• explored how to move from static identities to responsive practice.

Reflections

The roles we hold and play

We started by examining our current roles. This meant answering questions about:

• what roles we hold at work and

• what roles we play beyond the professional space.

A few observations:

• It was interesting to see the range of participants and the many roles we hold outside of our professional titles. “Waterbottle Filler” playfully surfaced as a top role we play outside of work.

• Questions about work roles hit differently depending on where you find yourself professionally. For some, excitement and recent wins. For others, a reminder of what feels missing. Like when you’re between jobs and someone asks what you do.

• The phrasing of the question also surfaced the tension between “playing a role” and embodying an identity (or practice). Because of the phrasing, some felt resistance adding personal traits like woman, lesbian, or mother, explaining that these traits feel more like identities they embody vs. a role they play. This reflection touches on the importance of questions that I wrote about recently. The questions we ask shape the answers we get, and part of DesignShifting is learning to ask more open, exploratory questions. One workshop participant explained that instead of asking about work roles they ask “What are you excited about these days?” or “What do you focus your attention on these days?”

New Responses for change: DesignShifters framework

Most of the session was dedicated to the DesignShifter archetypes. We examined different responses through questions and found moments to see the overlaps, connections, and friction points.

One moment stood out: someone raised friction around the word “truth” in Truthteller. “I’m uncomfortable with “Truth” as a singular thing” they said. That observation led us to reflect on the subjectivity of truth and how One right way is one of the tenants of white supremacy culture.

After the session, I decided to rename the role to Transparency Tracer. Learning from the community is a big part of the work of DesignShifting. Since I started sharing these archetypes, a few of the words have been shifted and modified and I hope to continue evolving them together.

DesignShifter questions we explored together for each archetype:

1. From Architect of Distraction to Steward of Attention: How might I create spaces to connect more intentionally with myself and others?

2. From Manipulator to Transparency Tracer (originally Truth Teller): Who really benefits and who is disadvantaged by the current systems and structures we’re working in?

3. From UX Expert to System Explorer: What detrimental impacts might we unintentionally create when we ignore the system?

4. From Individual Contributor to Community Facilitator: How can we support communities to design the solutions they need?

5. From Solver to Supporter: What consistent practices and structures of care are needed to sustain support after a project ends?

6. How can we let go of outcomes and create experiences where we are truly present?

7. From Planner to Pathfinder: What openness and trust can I give to myself, those I work with, and the process, as we navigate change together?

8. From Commodity Creator to Care Crafter: How might I take responsibility for the resource use and end of life of the things and experiences I create?

9. From Extractor to Regenerator: How might my design and culture choices be different when I think about the wellbeing of future generations?

10. From Functionalist to Dream Guide: What might we allow ourselves to imagine when we come from a place of abundance rather than scarcity?

Where Do We Go From Here

This was the first time a DesignShift event took place in a larger format. This allowed for more people to join, but also didn’t give as much space for real-time co-creation as last time. We’ll continue to explore different formats that allow for both depth and breath.

Every time I host an event I’m reminded how much I learn from others, even when I’m the one mostly sharing. There’s never enough time. There is always so much to explore.

It also reminded me that many people are working on change. We need more space to come together.

Are you looking for spaces to build community? Tell us what you’re looking for here (even if you missed the event)

Leave a comment

Some Links and Resources shared by participants and hosts

• DesignShifter Archetypes (Tool)

• Culture First Community (community)

• How the Berkana Two Loops Model guides us through system change (framework)

• Wayfinding

• https://heybrand.de/design-ladder/ (Website)

• Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters more | Aeon Essays (article)

• Stolen Focus (book)

• Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (book)

• Book Review - The Practice of Not Thinking by Ryunosuke Koike — BookShelfDiscovery (book)

How many times have you been in a conversation that started with a question and ended with: “Huh, I don’t know the answer. Let me Google that (or ask ChatGPT).” We grab our phones, find an answer, and feeling like we’ve gotten what we needed, it’s the end of the discussion. Next topic. Moving on.

The internet has given us unlimited access to information. The answers to nearly every question we could imagine are literally at our fingertips. But often, what we truly need is not answers, but rather space to talk, explore, and have meaningful conversations with others.

The internet and many well-designed tools and products pride themselves on providing solutions. I’ve called myself a “problem-solver” many times—partly to demonstrate the value of design and partly to explain that what I do goes beyond making pretty things. Design is strategic and helps reach business objectives.

However, lately, I’ve been reflecting on how this focus on finding answers and “fixing” problems can limit us from exploring possibilities beyond our wildest imaginations.

The problem with answers…

Some questions, like “Where is the nearest coffee shop?” or “What’s the current price of gasoline,” are relatively straightforward. As humans, we’ve become aware of the algorithms at play, and when searching for these answers, we can evaluate search results objectively and decide which ones to use without much internal conflict. These questions are often tension-free, and searching yields reasonably acceptable answers.

However, bigger questions like “How do we solve poverty?” or “How do we battle climate change?” introduce complexity to our search. These are what we call “Wicked Problems.”

The term Wicked Problem was coined by Horst Rittel, a design theorist and professor of design methodology at the Ulm School of Design, Germany. Wikipedia describes a wicked problem as “a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and ‘wicked’ denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil.”

In essence, these are complex, systemic problems that require a systemic lens and collaboration across different beliefs and opinions. But in a world that moves faster every day, we’re conditioned to want quick answers without deep thinking or genuine collaboration.

With tools like Google or ChatGPT, we no longer take the time to talk things through and connect on a human level. Our discussions become debates where each side uses their online sources to support their own truth. Soon, we’re trapped in an “us versus them” mentality, and conversations become about winning rather than understanding all perspectives.

In the course We Will Dance With Mountains: VUNJA! produced by For the Wild, Bayo Akomolafe discusses the limitations of answers. He says, “It is often the case that the answer to a question preserves the economy of relations that gave birth to the problem in the first place.” He continues, “What would be more exquisite than an answer to a question? Bewilderment.” We need to acknowledge that the answers that come quickly to us are often based on the preexisting conditions we’re trying to move away from. Answers do this. We need to be willing to dance with the unknown and be with the questions.

DesignShift: From answers to questions.

These inquiries guide my desire to move from answers to questions in my design practice. Lately, I’ve been asking myself:

• Instead of seeing design as a tool to reach a destination (to find an answer or solve a problem), could it be an invitation for movement and exploration?

• How can we ask questions that are less about narrowing down to a fixed spot, and more about expanding beyond our wildest imaginations and our deepest roots?

• How can we embrace questions that encourage imagination, curiosity, and criticality?

In the book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira asks: “How might our desire to ‘fix’ and ‘solve’ limit what global social change we might imagine as possible?” She also asks: “How do we shift the action-oriented tendencies that currently dominate in education and social change discourses away from fixed horizons of certainty, and toward engaging with what is viable yet unimaginable?”

I invite you to embrace these questions and other as a way to explore new possibilities. Capitalism often limits us to questions like “what, how soon, how much?” (as explored in this episode from “On Being”). We are very comfortable with these kinds of questions.

The invitation: A new kind of questioning

I encourage you to open your heart and mind to a different kind of questioning. Questions that encourage imagination, curiosity, and criticality. Questions that are less about narrowing down to a fixed spot and more about expanding beyond our wildest imaginations and our deepest roots. Questions like: why, to what effect, how much is enough? Questions that invite movement and exploration.

What some of those questions might look like:

• From “what do you do for a living?” to “what makes you come alive?”

• What are you?” to “How are you becoming?”

• From “Where do you belong?” to “How are you arriving?”

Engage with questions as a tool to spark thoughts, examine tensions, and hopefully invite you to expand your mind, heart, soul, and relationships to others.

A piece of art from For the wild

When you encounter questions or statements that confuse or trigger you, sit with them. Feel them move through your body like waves of curiosity. Talk to someone else about them. Share the tensions you feel.

As we move through our lives, rather than focusing solely on resolutions or answers, make space for questions. There is so much that is unknown. And there is so much that is unknowable. And so many possibilities can be found in being with questions.

A practice:

In this On Being Episode, Krista Tippett shares shares an exercise that helps us embrace questions:

“Formulate a question that is rolling around in your life or in that boundary between what is personal and what is public or civilizational. Write it down, hone it, and make a commitment to it. Commit to having it over your shoulder, in your ear, as you move through your life. See what it invites you to see and to move towards and to move away from. I would start by writing this down and giving it a month, or giving it a year.”

Leave a comment

Resources

• About Wicked Problems

• For The Wild - The Art of Wandering Zine

• We Will Dance With Mountains: VUNJA!

• On Being - living the Questions

• https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/the-edges-in-the-middle-bayo-and-john

• Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism Book

I used to dream of having a job where I could be creative. I wanted to be paid to do the thing I loved. I had read about starving artists and struggling creatives, and I was happy and proud when I found a job in the creative field right out of college. After graduating, I became a graphic designer in the marketing field and from there, I worked my way up the corporate ladder.

For many years, I loved my job and the world of design. I got to create for others. It felt like an act of service. I prided myself on the sentiment that design was more than making something pretty. It was strategic, and it served business outcomes. It could also be used to solve complex problems and to help people and the world around us.

In my corporate job, I created campaigns, videos, websites, brands, and more. There was a lot of variety but it was also just a lot.I was paid well, but somewhere along the way, my creative inspiration started to fade. There was always more to do and never enough time to do it.

The dream I had to “get paid for my creativity” was starting to feel less like a dream and more like a nightmare. I was making at the speed of the industry — always pushing myself to a little more, try a little harder, making something new. The demands felt insatiable.

The time I had to actually “be” creative was always shrinking, and instead of imagining better futures or serving my creative vision, I was asked to prove my worth through numbers and fit my creativity into small spreadsheet cells.

The world of business was in fact paying me, but I often felt like I was paying with my creative fire. I went from creating with purpose to creating algorithms, sharing not because I had something to say, but because the system demanded content. More for the sake of more. More for the sake of clicks.

What are we willing to pay to get paid? Embracing non-commercial creativity.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself: as creatives, what are we willing to sacrifice to monetize our craft? Right now, it feels like we’re trading the joy of making just to “make it.” We’re more concerned with making reels than expressing what’s real, optimizing for engagement rather than genuine expression.

What would it look like to return to or remember what the joy of creativity actually looks like? In my search for meaning in my making, I started looking for non-commercial initiatives. Those projects or ideas that are there just to serve our happiness and joy vs. being guided by outcomes and measurements. What I came across was joyful examples from a rave at a middle school, a giant pencil sharpening event, an office drawer filled with confetti, and millions of stick reviews. Let me tell you about them.

1. A middle-school rave in Leicester.

Every Friday at Braunstone Community School in Leicester, something special happens: the halls turn into a full-on rave. Music blasts, students dance, and the entire school comes alive — all thanks to head teacher “Mr T,” who started the tradition to boost happiness, attendance, and energy.

The idea is simple: joy helps learning. When kids are excited to show up, they’re more engaged in class. And it works. Friday attendance is higher, test scores are strong, and students look forward to the weekly ritual. One child said, “The second we hear the music, we rush out to dance.”

Mr T’s weekly school raves have gone viral, and while some question the approach, he’s unapologetic: “We dance our way to the top.”

It’s a powerful reminder that connection, energy, and play are not distractions from learning but rather at the heart of it.

2. A giant pencil sharpening event

Every year in a Minneapolis neighborhood, something wonderfully unusual happens: residents gather to sharpen a giant wooden pencil from John and Amy Higgins’s front lawn.

The pencil was created from a 180-year-old oak tree that fell during a storm. John recalls how hard it was to see the majestic tree go, describing its severed trunk as “almost sinister” — like a broken skeleton in the night. Instead of letting the tree’s legacy fade, John and Amy teamed up with wood sculptor Curtis Ingvoldstad to turn the massive trunk into a replica of a classic Trusty brand №2 pencil. Amy explains why a pencil was the perfect choice: “Everybody uses a pencil. You see it in school, in work, in drawings. It’s accessible to everyone and can mean something different to each person.”

What started as a playful moment has grown into a beloved annual ritual where people come together to celebrate creativity, connection, and the joy of doing something completely unnecessary and completely wonderful. It’s not about the pencil; it’s about presence, weirdness, and the magic of making time for joy.

John said in an article with CBC Canada: “It’s fun. It’s joyful. There’s no agenda. It’s not a commercial event. There’s not a ticket or anything,” Higgins said. “But through word of mouth, I think, people come and they really have fun.”

Watch a clip about the story

3. A drawer full of Confetti (and joy)

One of my favorite creative people is Tina Roth-Eisenberg. She is the author of the design blog SwissMiss, and the founder of Creative Mornings and Tattly, among other things. She’s really creative. And through her social media channel, she shares a lot of the weirdness they use to make each team member at Tattly feel accepted. One example is the confetti drawer. Yes. A drawer full of confetti.

Why? Roth-Eisenberg explains how “Joy is at the core of Tattly. When you purchase tattoos on tattly.com, you can add confetti to your package during the check-out process. Funny enough, it’s our most purchased product.”

4. Stick reviews from around the world.

My personal favorite space for non-commercial joy and certainty is Stick Nation. It is a global internet community that grew from the Instagram account @officialstickreviews, where friends Boone Hogg and Logan Jugler began humorously reviewing ordinary sticks they found outdoors. What started as a joke has grown into a worldwide movement, with people from over 100 countries sharing photos and videos of sticks. It is not about selling or finding the best sticks. It is about sharing what is found naturally in nature. Submissions are raw and unedited, with people young and old sharing their finds from around the globe. Many ask what the point is. Among those were comedian Bill Mahr that mocked the initiative by saying “I don’t know what is more depressing.. That there is an Instagram page dedicated to reviewing sticks, or that it has 3.2 million followers who makes comments like ‘nice stick, bro.’” Mahr among others question that point of it all, but that is exactly the point of it all. Sharing a moment with others because you found it cool… Showing cool things in nature… being playful about life itself and finding joy in something simple and everyday.

Where do we go from here?

I can’t read about these examples without smiling. They show how pure creativity outside of commerce brings joy and hope to people. They are examples about how beyond tangible outcomes, there is a space of joy and excitement that can make 10-year-olds look forward to Friday class, communities dance and sing while celebrating a giant pencil, and people can lean into the messiness that confetti brings to any room while looking for their great next stick.

When I read these examples among others, I remember the power of creativity as a source of joy and connection. I’m reminded that the question isn’t whether we can survive the machine, but how we keep our light burning while it tries to dim us. Creatives have the power to bring joy to life if we have the courage to not let go of tangible outcomes and embrace the weird ideas that live inside of us.

What are your favorite weird and non-useful things on the internet and beyond? What have you made just because you wanted to make it?

Leave a comment

Other joyful things

• The World’s Most Interesting Characters 🌎

• This girl has portfolio where you can pet a cat

• Paola Mendoza, on how art creates culture and illuminates us in dark times.

• what the early internet can teach us

• Whimsicle websites on the internet

• Draw and fish and raise it with others

• A fish doorbell

• Tune into forest around the world

Join us on April 8th as we host a special DesignShifts event in collaboration with Culture First Manila and Jen Horn (@pagbubuo) and all about how we can move from Fixed Roles to Fluid Identities.

It will be a community conversation on rethinking our roles and approaches in designing towards more connected and hopeful futures.

Logistics:

• Date: April 8th

• Time: 11:00AM-12:15PM (CET) | 5:00PM-6:15PM (PHT)

• Sign-up here: https://forms.fillout.com/t/pDpm2sX9Xrus

About the event

For generations, we have been taught to answer the question “What do you do?” with a single, clear label. Teacher. Engineer. Designer. Strategist. Creative. These titles give us legitimacy, help us find work, and make our value easy to understand.

As designers, we often go further. We define ourselves by our outputs. I design apps. I create visual identities. I build systems. Our deliverables become shorthand for who we are.

But what happens when designers are asked to navigate a world drowning in things, but starving for meaning? A world running low on resources. A world changing faster than our titles can follow.

This gathering explores how we can design for a changing world by shifting from fixed roles to fluid responses. It invites us to reflect on who we are, how we are already fluid, and what the moment is asking of us.

Together, we will:

• examine the roles we currently hold

• explore how to move from static identities to responsive practice, and

• engage emerging archetypes as lenses for action.

The session is about deep reflection, community engagement, and embodied practices

Sign up via https://forms.fillout.com/t/pDpm2sX9Xrus

This event is created and hosted in collaboration with Culture First Manila and Jen Horn (@pagbubuo) in partnership with Design Center of the Philippines.

About the Host & Facilitator

Jen Horn (@pagbubuo) is a facilitator, ICF-certified coach, researcher and interdisciplinary creative, who channels her energy into creating experiences, tools and resources, like Ugnayan Cards, to bring us back into connection with ourselves, each other and the natural world.

She designs and delivers leadership, team development and culture-building programs that have connection and creativity at their core. She is the chapter lead of Culture First Manila and Culture First Creative Wellbeing, which are parts of a global community of culture-builders united by a vision of a better world of work. She also pursues her advocacy for more regenerative and just food futures through Hapag Ugnayan and Good Food Community.

She completed her MSc in Sustainable Development from the University of Surrey as a Chevening scholar, and her BA in Psychology from De La Salle University, and integrates that with her certifications in Expressive Arts Facilitation from The Arts and Health Institute, Human-Centered Coaching from Haraya Coaching, and Ecosystem Leadership from Presencing Institute. Learn more about her and her work via jen-horn.com.

“Life is about the journey. Not the outcome.” A somewhat cliché but also true statement that can be applied to both life and the work we do as creatives. “Creativity is about the journey. Not the outcome.”

But in a world that tells us to produce MORE and faster, the journey often takes a backseat to endless production in order to stay relevant. It is estimated that 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone (the numbers have most likely changed by the time this is published) and I can’t help but wonder… Is the speed of our industry forcing us to let go of the process and focus solely on the road to least resistance?

For the last 15 years, I’ve been working as a commercial designer. I’ve held many titles. I’ve designed websites, made videos, and crafted digital user-experiences. I’ve worked in advertising, design, and consultancy. And I’ve been working really hard. As a former semi-professional swimmer, “giving it my all” is ingrained in my bones, and the industries of advertising, design, and consultancies have been purposefully designed to take advantage of the Type-A drives of people like me — all in pursuit of defining “next big thing.”

A while ago, I heard someone say that they wish that they could just click a button and their idea would come to life. They were saying how much they like that this is now possible with Ai.

I remember thinking that this person is either overworked or does not like the creative process. If creativity becomes about clicking a button to turn our work into reality, haven’t we lost what creating is all about? The process of bringing something to life… The trial and errors. If want to skip the making part of “making” something, do we really want to make or do we just want to make it?

Making or making it

“There are people who create shit. And then these people are thrown into an environment and an industry where they’re chasing how many views you have, how many comments.” - Tim Bergling (Avicii)

This quote comes from the documentary “I’m Tim,” Tim Bergling, artist name Avicii. Tim was one of those artists who just wanted to create for the joy of creating. He was sensitive and intuitive. He was pure in his passion for his work. But along the way, the industry swallowed him up. His mental health started to decline and the pressure to produce for the sake of producing became hard for him to handle. It seemed like his work became more about doing work that pleased the industry rather than the work that lived inside of him. Like many other creative professionals, his vision was at odds with the industry.

Tim died in the middle of his successful career in 2018. In the documentary, you get to see how industry professionals pushed back when he wanted to try something new. The industry didn’t care about his creativity. It didn’t care about HOW he made his work. The industry only cared about clicks, likes, and responses. When Tim was doing well, his manager and record company praised him. When he chose to take a risk and lean into his process and intuitions, the response was the opposite.

But, what happens to us artists, writers, and designers when we lose the process? When work becomes all about the performance and product? Is that where learning stops? Is that where the joy is diminished?

DesignShift: From performing to process through presence.

One morning last year, I was journaling. It’s a routine similar to the famous Morning Pages from the book The Artist’s Way by author Julia Cameron. I just write whatever comes out, without a goal in mind. It’s incredibly freeing in so many ways, yet I often find myself stopping and thinking, “what if someone reads this?” “What if what I am writing does not make sense?” Cameron would tell me that that is exactly the point of Morning Pages. Morning Pages do not have to make sense.

The benefit is in the making. And that is when it all hit me… the benefit is in the processes, but the performance.

When we write for ourselves, we write differently. When we know that no one is watching us. When there’s no one waiting to evaluate or judge our work. When we’re not creating for an audience, the words flow differently. When we’re not focusing on what to post or what will resonate, we free ourselves and we open ourselves up to creativity. The process becomes the focus. Not the output.

The Telic vs. Atelic way of showing up

When we let go of the outcome, something in us shifts. We become free to move with the flow and embrace what is rather than what we hope to be. I love what figure skater Alysa Liu said after winning at the 2026 Winter Olympics: “winning isn’t all that. And neither is losing. It’s just something that happens. It’s the outcome. What matters is the input and the journey.” She speaks as an athlete but also as a creative who values the creative process itself. And I think that mentality allows her to enjoy her wins more deeply than someone who puts all their focus on the outcome rather than the experience of becoming.

As I was researching this post and admiring Liu’s mindset, I came across the distinction between Telic and Atelic mindsets. A telic orientation is goal-driven. It is about reaching an endpoint. Success is defined by completion, achievement, arrival. The project is valuable because of what it produces.

An Atelic orientation, on the other hand, is process-driven. It has no fixed endpoint. Its value lies in the doing itself. Think of walking, dancing, playing, conversing, learning. These are not activities that “finish” in the same way a task does. They are ongoing. The meaning is embedded in the participation.

This post is about an Atelic way of approaching our work. This does not mean abandoning goals. It means loosening our grip on them. Letting process shape us rather than forcing ourselves toward a fixed image of success. When we shift from performance to process, we shift from being obsessed with final deliverables to becoming devoted to the quality of our engagement.

Alysa Liu also said “I connect with everything, but I’m not attached to anything.” Not being attached to outcomes opens up space for true freedom. It allows us to care deeply without being consumed. To strive without tightening. To create without fear.

Finding Our Way Back

When we recenter process, we remember that creativity is not a race to the finish line but a practice of showing up. It’s about building a relationship with uncertainty, developing comfort with not knowing where we’re headed, and trusting that the act of making will teach us what we need to know. Yes, AI can tell us what a book is about or even write a book for us. We don’t have to take the time to read or write. But what about the benefits of reading or writing? What about the things we learn along the way, or the joy we experience when reading or writing? AI can make beautiful illustrations… but as designers, we’re left without the happy accidents and the learning as we go. In a way, Midjourney takes away the journey.

To honor the process means giving ourselves time to metabolize experience. Time to reflect before reacting. Time to let meaning emerge rather than forcing it into form.

Because in the end, the work that matters most isn’t the work that performs best. It’s the work that transforms us in the making of it. It’s the work that teaches us something we didn’t know before we began. It’s the work that connects us more deeply to ourselves and to others.

At the end of the Barbie Movie, Barbie says:

“I want to do the imagining. I don’t want to BE the idea.”

And maybe that is it.

Both as a human and as a designer, I want to be part of the imagining. I want to enjoy (and struggle with) the journey, not just get credit for the outcome.

Leave a comment

I’ve always loved water. I started swimming when I was 7 and didn’t stop until I was 27. Twenty years of early morning and late nights mostly under the surface. Swimming taught me the strength and softness of water, and more than anything, I think it taught me the rhythms of seasons.

Every athlete knows that you can’t run far, swim fast, or jump high all the time. You have periods to rest, and you have periods to race. In swimming, I had one BIG race for the year. National championships, college competitions, or important qualification meets. This was our time to swim fast. In athletics, it’s easy to accept that we have peak competitions where we’re supposed to be at our best. But between those peaks, we have slower seasons focused on building, recovering, and reassessing.

Swimming taught me that we rest in order to race. But it also showed me that all seasons matter equally. Some are for rest, others for rehab and recovery, and then of course, the seasons for racing and reward.

Even though swimming showed me the beauty of the seasons, when I entered the work force, it seemed like I was entering a world that was always in race mode. The rushing to get things done didn’t seem to pause for reflection. There was no seasons for slowness, and no schedules showed me when I was allowed to take a break (beyond lunch and holidays)

In every job posting I see, we’re asked to “thrive in fast-paced environments” but I have yet to meet a person who truly thrives in environments where they’re always running. Most people can thrive (or manage, maybe that’s a better word) in a fast-paced environment for a shorter period of time. But after a while, they too need to rest and recover.

DesignShift: From Force to Flow

As I’ve been reflecting on swimming and my work experience, I’ve been thinking about the many states of water as a guide to meeting the moment we’re in. What would it look like to embrace flow instead of force?

Below are 9 states of flow that invites you (and me) to embrace water as a tool for accepting the phase we’re in. Instead of trying to calm the ocean or rush toward clarity, we practice recognizing the state we’re in and finding ways to respond to it with care. Sometimes the water is murky. Sometimes it’s stormy. Sometimes it’s a quiet ripple. Each state carries meaning. Each state offers guidance. Each state of water reflects a different relationship to energy, clarity, and motion.

How to use this framework

1. Notice your water. Take a moment to feel your current state (the states below is a guide but free to to think of others too).

2. Name it. Identify which state best fits your experience.

3. Choose your rhythm. Ask: What action, rest, or reflection matches this state?

4. Move with it. Align effort and attention to your current state, without forcing.

5. Trust the cycle. Flow includes all states. This one will pass, and another will follow.

The States of Water

Murky Water

A state of uncertainty and low visibility, where direction is unclear and patience matters more than action. Pause and reduce noise. Let clarity settle on its own. Resist the urge to force decisions or outcomes.

Steady Streams

A state of balanced flow, where things move forward reliably without strain or force. Maintain rhythm. Keep progress steady without overcomplicating or overdoing.

Big Waves

A state of heightened energy and momentum, where effort multiplies and progress accelerates. Commit fully. Use the energy while it’s here. Take bold action without losing presence.

With the Current

A state of ease and trust, where movement feels natural and effort is met with support. Receive the ride. Stay present. Allow momentum to carry you without forcing it

Floating Free

A state of weightless presence, where effort dissolves and you simply exist without agenda or direction. Rest without purpose. Be held by the water. Let buoyancy do the work while you remember what it feels like to just be.

Stormy Seas

A state of disruption or overwhelm, where stability comes from endurance rather than control. Prioritize safety, rest, and recovery. Endurance matters more than productivity. Let the storm move through you.

Clear Reflections

A state of clarity and insight, where alignment and self-understanding emerge naturally. Observe carefully. Adjust gently. Translate insight into thoughtful action.

Free Fall

A state of surrender and release, where you let go of what you were holding and trust the descent. Stop grasping. Allow the fall. Trust that you will land differently than you left, and that’s exactly what needs to happen.

Relational Ripples

A state of interconnected influence, where your actions and presence affect people and systems around you. Notice how you move others and how they move you.Your impact is both more subtle and more significant than you think.

Being and becoming

At work, I kept trying to force myself into the water I thought I should be in, pushing for clarity when I was foggy, demanding productivity when I was depleted, apologizing for needing rest. In swimming, I learned to pay attention to how the water was flowing and when fighting against it made things worse.

Now I’m trying to stay with the actual state, without fighting the wave, without rushing toward clearer water, without romanticizing rest or intensity. It’s about recognizing that the same intelligence that guided me through seasons of training can guide me through seasons of work and life. Not by controlling the water, but by learning to move with it.

What state of water are you currently in? 🌊

Leave a comment

We live in a world built on the economics of winning. From business school classrooms to startup incubators, we are taught how to compete, capture, and scale. Investors want proof of growth. Leaders want speed. Success is measured in revenue, reach, and returns. This is the world of commerce. It’s a world where our earth is exploited beyond its capacity, where we are pushed to keep up until we break down, where systems serve a few while extracting from many. A world that prizes private interest over public good. A world where everything; time, talent, even care itself, comes with a price tag.

In this world, our work sits within a market that only recognize what can be bought and sold. Something that Nate Hagens explores In Myth 10: Price = Value. There, he uses he example of a forest that protects a village from flooding to illustrate this. To the market, the forest has no value until the trees are cut down and sold as timber.

This exposes a deep flaw at the heart of our commercially focused system: the market does not exist to improve our lives but to sustain itself. It rewards whatever can be sold while ignoring what truly sustains us, such as clean water, stable communities, or protection from disaster. As Hagens puts it, “this is a kind of blindness that economists refer to as externalities, but these externalities are often the foundations of life. Breathable air, drinkable water, a stable climate, ecosystem, functions of a forest. And the markets measuring stick in today’s economy of value doesn’t see them at all.”

Design sits in this reality

Much of design today is in service of commerce. The commercial practice of design started alongside the Industrial Revolution. It was during this time that design became deeply intertwined with commerce, efficiency, and mass production, fueling the rapid expansion of consumer culture. In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar (support your local bookstore) critiques the Western, market-driven approach to design, stating that “modern design has largely been about designing for capitalism, reinforcing ways of being, doing, and knowing that privilege efficiency, control, and economic growth over other values.”

Escobar also highlights how the strive for mass-production and efficiency shifted design or “making” away from traditional, place-based forms of making into a focus on standardized solutions meant to serve industry and economic growth. As a result, design became disconnected from place, culture, and ecology. Digital technology then took this disconnection to an unprecedented scale—creating global platforms that extract attention and data while remaining invisible to the communities they impact.

Fast forward to today. We are facing ecological harm, social erosion, and spiritual numbness. We have created a world where design fuels desire and optimizes for consumption. We create or improve things so that companies can sell more of them. In design thinking, the focus is on desirability, creating things that people want and that meet their needs. However, in a world of commerce, desirability often translates into sellability. Today, design serves commerce, and everything, including our water, land, and emotions, is turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold with the help of design.

DesignShift: From Commerce to Care, Connection, Contentment, Craft and Culture.

What if we took a step back and considered the power of design IN SERVICE of something other than commerce? What if our practices could be in service of care, connection, community, contentment, craft, and culture ? If these were the goals, what would we make? How would we show up?

While this is the reality in a capitalist society, I can’t help but wonder what it would look like to shift design away from commerce. This series will explore 4 areas for design beyond commerce. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring how beyond commerce, we can:

• Center care: What happens when we design to nourish rather than extract?

• Nurture connection and community: What does it look like to design for real connection when time moves slow and outcomes are unpredictable?

• Find inner contentment: What if design could help us learn our triggers, see things more clearly, and maybe even make us feel more satisfied with what we already have?

• Return to craft and culture: How do we honor place, skill, and the integrity of making?

Join me

In this article, Eunji Kang, Head of Systems Change and Experimental Products at Dark Matter Labs, poses the following provocation:

“Consider the boundless economies of solidarity, knowledge, and care; they possess distinct properties and requirements compared to the finite economies of the material world constructed over the past century. In the post-industrial era, the interconnectedness of living systems will yield heightened value around these intangible qualities.”

We need to reimagine design as a tool for collective well-being rather than corporate profit. We need to move beyond the borders of industrialization and imagine the post-industrial era that Kang describes. We must dream beyond the question, “Who is going to pay for it?” and instead ask: “How can we create systems where care is valued, sustained, and shared?”

I invite you to follow along and share if you’re working on any of these topics. Question what you’ve been taught. Imagine what else is possible. And consider: What would your work look like if it served care, connection, cotentment, and craft and culture instead?

The alternatives are already here, happening in communities, studios, and movements around the world. They’re just not the stories the market wants to tell.

Leave a comment

A quote by Oscar Wilde

I didn’t click it, but it made me think…

If Oscar Wilde was alive today, would he too have been lured to change his words with AI? Would he have trusted AI more than his creative intuition?

AI would most likely have edited Wilde’s voice by removing “unnecessary” words and simplifying sentences. But would it have been an improvement? If his work is no longer in his voice, how can we say it’s better?

Our authentic voice is our work

As creatives, our authentic voice is our work. Whether we’re writers, singers, designers, painters, or sculptors.

I’ve realized lately that I wish for us all to become less concerned with being perfect and more concerned with developing our unique voice and following our own intuition. When we read poetry, we learn that a sentence might not be perfectly correct but it speaks directly to our hearts. It breaks grammatical rules but it’s also able to break us open in ways we could only imagine.

With our computers constantly prompting us to change and “improve” our writing, thinking, and making, we have to ensure we don’t lose our unique expression. We must make sure that we don’t lose touch with our creative intuition, that we continue to lean into courage, and that we don’t edit away what makes our work distinctly ours.

DesignShift: From artificial to authentic

1. Keep developing your own voice

When I use AI for my writing, I often find myself questioning if the AI’s version is really better than my own. I’m frequently confused about “why” it changed something, and even when I ask about the rationale, I find the explanation isn’t that convincing.

Some would tell me that I’m just not prompting AI well enough to get the best result, but I keep asking myself what this tool is in service of.

However, I’ve noticed how our tools encourage perfection, and doubt can start to creep in when AI suggests one thing and our intuition tells us something different. This happens to me on days when I show up to work with self-doubt — days when I’m deep in uncertainty about my own abilities. On those days, I trust AI more, and the prompt to change my words makes my swaying confidence even more rocky.

On days like these, I remind myself of poetry. Through poetry, we learn that a sentence might not be perfectly correct but it speaks directly to our hearts. It breaks grammatical rules but it’s also able to break us open in ways we could only imagine. One such powerful voice is Maya Angelou, whose words “just do right” have stayed with me.

In her wisdom, she says:

“You know what’s right. Just do right. You don’t really have to ask anybody. The truth is, right may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy… your soul.”

Image from https://bookstr.com/article/10-writing-quotes-from-maya-angelou-to-inspire-you/

These words move with rhythm, but they also remind us that we DO know what’s right. No one knows our voice better than us. And that is what people want to hear. We don’t always have to ask someone else or ChatGPT for a better way to say something. Trusting our own voice makes all the difference.

The same way that a design that breaks the rules sometimes becomes more impactful, I remind myself that embracing my unique voice will take me further than a perfectly crafted bullet-style post powered by a robot.

2. The courage to be seen

The other day, I read a quote that said “creativity is the courage to be seen.” While writing this post, this quote kept surfacing in my mind. As creatives, it takes courage to show up as our unique selves. It takes courage to show both the good and the bad. It takes courage to be all that we are. The reward for showing up vulnerably and authentically is connection.

How we connect to topics. To someone’s story. To each other. When someone speaks from their heart, unedited and unfiltered, it helps us feel something.

Connection happens when someone truly sees us for who we are and embraces all of it. That is true connection.

There’s a difference between the desire to be seen and the courage to be seen. The desire is often rooted in external validation — wanting to be liked and wanted. Much of our online world is crafted this way. We edit (with or without AI) in order to be liked and followed. We make sure that our voice matches our brand and we craft one-minute elevator pitches to ensure people understand exactly who we are and what we have to offer.

However, the courage that helps us connect to others lies beyond the poses and the polish. The courage to be seen is about showing up as our full selves.

3. Connection happens in the cracks

Connections and feelings are found in the cracks. They are discovered between the lines. In the awkward pauses and the unpolished thoughts. They exist in unedited, real expressions rather than perfectly written, bullet-pointed lists generated by a robot.

As Joshua Schrei said on the Emerald podcast:

“Art dies when culture decides that there is a certain way you have to say certain things. Then you don’t have art. You have a press release.”

Poetry, art, and also the human experience thrive in its willingness to not make complete sense. For example, the raw, uninhibited expressions of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat show us that perfection isn’t necessary for profound impact. When we share our authentic selves, we invite others to do the same. We often think that the world expects and craves perfection. We’re taught rules… but the human experience is flawed. The cracks make us able to connect with others.

Creativity is about connection, and connections are formed in the cracks. When someone shows their weakness or vulnerability, we get permission to show ours.

At the heart of it all are feelings. Creative work is about feelings, and even though ChatGPT can act empathetic, it’s not the same as real feelings. Because real connection is built through brokenness. It’s in the cracks that connections are formed.

In times of robots

If Oscar Wilde lived today, would AI have given him prompts? Would AI suggest “improvements” to the works of literary and artistic icons? Would Midjourney have offered to enhance Jean-Michel Basquiat’s expressive style?

Would these creative icons have been lured to edit their unique expression to appeal to the masses at the creative direction of a robot? My intuition tells me that they would have resisted the prompts and leaned into their uniqueness even more — and that is what I hope for all creatives today. With our computers constantly prompting us to change and “improve” our own writing, thinking, and making, we have to ensure we don’t lose our unique expression. We must make sure that we don’t lose touch with our creative intuition and that we don’t edit away the uniqueness and the cracks that breed connections.

In times of robots, I hope we can lean into our humanness even more. In times of robots, I hope we will remind ourselves and each other that our unique voices matter. In times of robots, I hope you will connect through your cracks without editing your uniqueness.

Leave a comment

Links and resources:

• Maya Angelou: Just do right (video)

• Trickster Jumps Sides: Disruption and the Anatomy of Culture (Podcast)

• DesignShifts: a better future for and through design (website)

• The Power of Poetry | Shayna Castano | TEDxLSSC (TED Talk)

• Burning Questions — James Victore is an irreverent prophet for the creative industries (article)