If you’re new here, I’d suggest starting with these five posts.

They’ll provide a little context for everything else.

1. What is design anyway?

Some people think it’s how something looks. Jony Ive says it’s how something works.

I believe design is a quality we imbue in the things we create with intent.

If something we’ve made serves a clear purpose…

If it benefits a defined group…

If the details at every scale align to support a common goal… Design is in its DNA.

Of course, design is a noun, but it’s also a verb. The practice of design is about defining the kind of future we want to build. The process begins with establishing our values.

Good designers know that local interventions affect global systems. Their proposals reflect this regardless of scope.

Designers who take their work seriously illuminate both a vision worth pursuing, and a pragmatic strategy for bringing that vision to life. This anchor in reality is the quality that distinguishes design from fantasy — though I’m certain that fantasy is the place from which all great designs emerge.

2. Are you a designer?

The answer has little to do with your job title.

Designers are people who make a point of interacting with the world in a way that creates deliberate change.

If you’ve ever planned a meeting, watered your garden, or helped someone smile, you’ve engaged in design.

These may be examples of small interventions, but they’re distinct from the random consequences of everyday life because they were motivated by a subjective belief about how reality might be improved.

Regardless of your profession or the scale of your work, you’re a designer if you contribute with a sense of intent and a desire to make things better.

In today’s highly specialized world, most educational pathways don’t offer exposure to the patterns of thinking that enable design success. This is a tragedy because design is an essential part of so many roles on which society depends. 

The good news is that designing well is probably more a matter of skill than talent, and that means we can all get better at it.

3. Breaking the circle of blame

Citizens blame architects for designing lousy buildings.

Architects blame developers for prioritizing profit.

Developers blame lawmakers for creating market conditions.

Lawmakers blame citizens for supporting short-sighted policy.

So where does the buck stop? 

In complex or circular systems there’s often no clear answer — and this creates an opportunity for people who care to step up and lead.

When nobody’s in charge, leverage belongs to those with the courage to evaluate the whole situation, and communicate a vision for a better way forwards.

If your work provides people with a plan behind which to rally, the circle of blame can mature into a sphere of cooperation.

Lousy buildings are far from our biggest problem, but the patterns that cause them are mirrored in most truly pressing issues. When no party has the power to spur change alone, designers can create possibility by facilitating consensus. 

In the face of global challenges, that’s a great source of hope.

4. Will you embrace the human project?

Ecologists love to praise nature’s design genius.

“If only humanity would stop screwing things up” many of them think — with a certain degree of self-loathing.

When your line of work primes you to interpret human history as an unyielding desecration of paradise, that’s an understandable point of view.

There’s no question, we’ve caused enormous harm to this planet’s natural systems. What warrants some skepticism however is the romanticized vision of earth’s recent past as some kind of garden of Eden. 

Nature has many remarkable qualities, but universally enjoyed hedonism is not among them. After all, the natural environment wasn’t shaped by a benevolent deity, but by the frequently cruel forces of evolution which relentlessly, mindlessly, optimize for survival — and nothing more. 

Nature isn’t here for joy. Nature isn’t here for beauty. Nature is merely here to be here —a meaningless default masquerading as a purpose.

If design is a quality of things made with intent, it seems that “design genius” isn’t actually what nature does. Evolution’s talent for problem solving is tremendous, but for all of life’s history, it’s been applied without any consciously chosen objective — that is until recently, when something surprising transpired.

After 3.5 billion years, living things (in the form of humans) acquired both the mental capacity to set their own goals, and the physical dexterity to transform their environment. Design was born. The human project (at least that’s what I call it) began.

Alas, the journey has been fraught. Like teenagers trapped between childhood and adult life, we’re eager to take charge of our destiny, but we’re still building the maturity needed to do it safely. It’s plain to see we’re making a lot of mistakes. As parents of adolescents know, this struggle comes with the territory — and it’s often the only route to growing up. If left entirely unchecked however, risk-taking behaviour and errors in judgement can result in catastrophe. This is why smart parents create sturdy guardrails.

Unfortunately for us, we’ve been left to raise ourselves. With the planet beginning to bake, and a slew of new technologies we can hardly control, it appears our inexperience has endangered not only our own species, but the tree of life as a whole.

And so, as designers seeking to make positive change, we’re faced with a difficult decision about the best way to engage with our troubled civilization.

For those looking to obtain a sense of moral relief, there’s probably no easier route than disconnecting your life from the modern system. After all, if you can avoid entanglement with society, you won’t be an accessory to the destruction it continues to cause. The downside is that you’ll miss out on the chance to be part of something larger than yourself.

The more thrilling alternative is to jump on board with humanity’s crazy endeavour to achieve more than existence for existence’s sake. Buyer beware, this path comes riddled with compromise. Pragmatism will be the name of the game, and for some, this may prove ethically uncomfortable ground.

My point of view? Human wrought transformation of nature is both well underway and decidedly irreversible. Rather than try to isolate our way to moral purity, let’s have the courage to seize the opportunity before us. Let’s do what we can to secure the success of this bold new chapter in the story of life.

Will you embrace the human project?

I’m all in.

5. The Universe doesn’t come with an instruction manual

This post gets pretty existential. If you’re willing to indulge me, read on…

Science can illuminate the laws of physics and the facts of matter and energy, but as philosopher David Hume points out, there’s no way to extrapolate this knowledge into a set of moral truths. 

We can measure what the universe is, but that doesn’t tell us what it’s for.

Qualities like purpose, right and wrong, and good and evil, aren’t attributes of physical reality. They exist only when conferred by something with a subjective point of view — something that’s conscious.

Religious believers accept their god’s perspective as a definitive source of meaning and truth. For the rest of us, much remains unresolved. If nobody created the universe, and nobody controls the universe, who possesses the authority to decide its goals and the best uses of its resources?

Just as the mind creates purpose for the body, I believe our civilization’s destiny is to create purpose for the cosmos. I think we’ll do it through the act of design — a word that means deciding what ought to be, and doing something about it.

If this seems arrogant (and I’m sure it will), consider that humanity isn’t merely a visitor in the universe, but a part of the universe itself. As conscious beings, we are the organs through which the universe may determine its values and reason for being. Our convictions and the universe’s convictions are one and the same — at least at some local level.

While designing the universe may sound like science fiction, we’ve actually been doing it for as long as we’ve been making deliberate changes to our environment. After all, the universe is everywhere. The difference now is that we’re on the cusp of technology that will exponentially increase the scale at which we work. With artificial general intelligence “AGI” as partners or successors, who knows what we might achieve?

If you’re horrified by the prospect of our civilization seizing control as the sole form-giver of reality and designator of values, rest assured — the universe is big enough for a variety of visions. In fact, physics itself puts a hard cap on the extent of our reach. I’m not suggesting we’ll assume the role popularly assigned to god, but perhaps our future will entail joining a diverse pantheon of creators and purpose makers. 

In any case, without a source of consciousness to bestow meaning, and craft the raw materials of the universe into something worthwhile, the cosmic endowment will simply be an unrealized opportunity. Due to entropy and cosmic expansion, the scope of possibility that remains is ever-deteriorating — and thus we have an incentive to get a move on.

As humanity gears up for a technologically empowered future, it seems our primary occupation as a species will be the enterprise of design. Success will require answering questions about our values, our goals, and the limits of our imaginations. We’ll also need to get much better at skills like systems thinking and cooperation in order to implement the visions we dream up. Embracing our current existential challenges as a form of training would be a smart move.

The universe doesn’t come with an instruction manual, but the time has come to write one. Let’s prepare ourselves to do an outstanding job. Let’s prepare to design.

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This post owes a great deal to two excellent books: Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, and The Big Picture by Sean Carroll