Over the past 20 years I spoke at venues all around the world, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, Berlin to Hyderabad, London to San Francisco, Sao Paulo to Chicago, Amsterdam to New York City, Montreal to Taichung, Tel Aviv to Copenhagen. ✈️🌍
During those events I was fortunate to share a myriad of topics that I care deeply about, and which might seem unrelated at first, from maps to art, design to philosophy, history to psychology, visualization to religion, evolution to architecture.
Of all experiences, perhaps the most rewarding and nerve wrecking of all was speaking on the main TED stage, in Vancouver, Canada, in 2015. You can find a link to my talk “A visual history of human knowledge” in my bio above.
I feel immensely grateful to be able to share my passion, curiosity, and research with so many people around the world. It’s an enormous blessing and privilege I don’t take for granted 🙏❤️✨
The past 10 months have been a remarkable journey of self discovery. I’ve sought numerous challenges to test my inner and outer limits, and through that process I’ve grown in incommensurable ways.
Amongst the things that have been more rewarding: weightlifting 💪, yoga 🧘, meditation 😌, tai-chi 🫷, sound healing 🔔, cold plunge 🧊, breathwork 🫁, estatic dance 🎶, and social therapy 🤲.
Thanks to my friends @paulovascoxavier and @pmncamara who have helped me opening that door and leaving me wanting for more every time.
Last year I published my fourth book, this time with MIT Press. If someone would have told me years ago that I would have published four books, I would have had a hard time believing them. Now that I know the amount of work and discipline required to put together a single volume, the feat seems even more unbelievable. So why go through this effort one more time? Well…
Design is at a crossroads today. It is not just failing to deal with its responsibility in an eminent ecological disaster and its unethical behavior in support of addictive technology, but also quickly realizing it sits on top of a system that is prone to social injustice and exploration, where instead of lifting the poor and oppressed, we continue to contribute to their disenfranchisement.
This happens in part because designers continue to be shackled by hidden forces shaping design today. Forces that are no more than ingrained ideas, sometimes even stereotypical fallacies, that are out of touch with contemporary challenges and continue blinding designers from seeing what truly matters—in other words, design myths.
If design wants to become a force for good, we must abandon such myths. We must be open to a deep introspection of what design is and what it ought to be. This is the goal of the book—to debunk deep-rooted design mythologies, shed light on our modern-day sightlessness and moral failing, and provide a frame of reference for developing a thriving, conscientious, and ethical design practice.
“The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change” is the book I wish had been available when I was venturing into the design world, filled with hope and expectations. I hope this book will encourage new and senior creative professionals alike to take a deep look at design from a different angle, and ultimately, lead them to realize a much-coveted positive impact in the world.
#book #design #thenewdesigner #themitpress #myths #impact #technology #environment #society #personal #change #designer #personaldevelopment #thankyou
✨How do humans visualize knowledge✨
From Visual Complexity to The Book of Trees to The Book of Circles
A journey through 3 books and a thousand years of visualizing knowledge
And my own obsession with mapping the invisible
From networks to trees to circles
Across cultures, disciplines, and centuries
Around the world, and back again
Still searching for better ways to see
#DataVisualization #InformationDesign #HistoryOfScience #Mapping #VisualCulture
Data visualizations offer a unique perspective, not absolute truth. It can make the invisible visible, yet it comes with an important caveat. Any representation is only a single angle on the data available at any point in time, not the full depiction of a given subject.
#DataVisualization #Meteorites #ScienceFacts #DataAnalysis #InformationDesign
One of the biggest shifts I’ve noticed with age is how much less certain I’ve become.
When I was younger, the world felt clearer. Arguments were sharper. Positions more defined. Things were either right or wrong.
But over time, that clarity gave way to something else. Not confusion, but nuance. A growing awareness that most perspectives are incomplete, and that certainty is often just a shortcut we take to avoid the discomfort of not knowing.
Psychology has a name for this. The Dunning–Kruger effect shows how those with the least knowledge often feel the most confident, while deeper understanding tends to bring more doubt, not less.
And maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe that’s the point.
As I often tell my daughter, there are only two ways to learn. By asking questions, and by making mistakes. Both require letting go of certainty.
In a world that rewards strong opinions and quick answers, choosing doubt can feel uncomfortable. But it might also be one of the most honest positions we can take.
Because certainty closes the conversation.
And curiosity is where everything begins.
What about you, are you feeling more doubtful as you get older?
#PersonalGrowth #Curiosity #Learning #Philosophy #DunningKruger
This was meant to be my 2025 mantra, but it soon became my life-long pursuit. I love this sentence so much because it speaks to the importance of acceptance, which together with gratitude, form the two pillars of my own tranquility of the mind. Two pillars I try to exercise every single day. 🧠😌✨
Popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid-20th Century, the Serenity Prayer is an incredible invocation 🙏 with strong roots in Stoicism and Buddhism 🕉️
It expresses the major challenges of daily life in such an elegant and succinct way, while also focusing on three important life pursuits: serenity, courage, and wisdom.
#mantra #invocation #philosophy #stoicism #buddhism
We often assume AI is neutral.
But it reflects the people who build it.
Many voice systems still perform better with male voices. Not by accident, but by design decisions and data gaps.
When teams lack diversity, products inherit that bias. And small gaps at scale become real inequalities.
Design shapes who gets heard and who gets ignored.
We can do better by widening the lens. This is the only way for us to design with inclusion in mind. The only way for us to design a better world. 🌍✨
Where have you seen bias in everyday tech?
#InclusiveDesign #AIEthics #GenderBias #DesignForAll #TechBias
We tend to believe that adding more features leads to better design. More control, more options, more flexibility. On the surface, it feels like progress. But there is always a trade-off.
Every layer of flexibility introduces complexity. And complexity, if not carefully managed, slowly erodes usability. What begins as empowerment can just as easily turn into friction.
The TV remote is a simple but telling example. Over time, it accumulated buttons, functions, shortcuts, each one added with intention, yet collectively creating confusion. Most of those buttons are rarely used, but their presence increases cognitive load every time we pick it up.
I saw this pattern play out at a much larger scale. I was working at Nokia when the Apple iPhone was introduced. I remember vividly how it was dismissed internally for its lack of features, its lack of flexibility.
That was quite the mistake.
Because what looked like limitation was actually clarity. It didn’t remove capability, it reframed it. A deliberate reduction that made the product radically more usable.
This is the tension at the core of many design decisions. Flexibility versus usability. Power versus clarity. And often, the hardest part of design is not deciding what to add, but what to leave out.
Because in the end, simplicity is not about having less. It’s about making room for what truly matters.
#DesignPrinciples #UXDesign #Usability #Apple #Nokia
Sitting here, between them, watching the sun disappear into the dunes, I’m reminded that time doesn’t slow down… but somehow, it deepens.
Not long ago, they needed my hands to walk.
Now they sit beside me, watching the same horizon, each in their own world… yet still close enough to lean on.
Fatherhood is this constant unfolding.
A slow letting go, wrapped in love.
And maybe that’s the real work…
To be present for these in-between moments.
The ones that won’t ask for attention, but will one day be everything.
🌅🙏❤️✨
#fatherlove❤️ #fatherhood #growingup #sunset
This Women’s History Month has me thinking about the stories we place in front of our children, and how early they begin to shape what feels possible.
In our home, one of those quiet influences has been the work of Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara, through the Little People, BIG DREAMS series. It started with Coco Chanel. I must have read that book dozens of times to Chloe. At some point, I didn’t need the pages anymore, I knew the words by heart.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the story, but the structure of it. Every life begins in the same place. A child. With curiosity, with doubt, with a small and fragile dream. It brings these extraordinary women closer, not as distant icons, but as something more human, more reachable.
And that matters. Because the stories our children grow up with are not neutral. They quietly shape identity, ambition, and belief. When girls grow up surrounded by female creators, leaders, thinkers, not as exceptions, but as examples, something shifts. The horizon expands.
There’s also something I deeply respect about this project. It’s not just about women, it’s built by them. A female author, and a global community of illustrators, many of them women, shaping these narratives together.
In the end, these are the stories that stay. The ones repeated at night, over and over again. The ones that slowly become part of how a child sees the world, and themselves within it.
What stories shaped you?
#WomensHistoryMonth #RepresentationMatters #LittlePeopleBigDreams #RaisingGirls #Storytelling
We like to believe that music is universal, that it belongs to anyone willing to learn it, practice it, and feel it deeply.
But even music carries hidden bias.
The modern piano keyboard was never designed for everyone. It was standardized around the average male hand. When you compare composers like Rachmaninoff, who could span nearly 12 inches (30.4 cm), with the average woman’s hand span of 7 to 8 inches (18–20 cm), the gap becomes more than anatomical. It becomes structural.
It shapes what can be played, how it is played, and who gets to succeed.
For many women, this is not just discomfort, it is limitation. Stretching becomes strain, and strain often leads to injury. And yet, instead of questioning the instrument, we question the performer.
This is how bias hides in plain sight, through standards we never revisited.
And this is not just about music. It is about design.
Because design defines possibility. When we design for a narrow slice of the population, we exclude everyone else, often minorities and marginalized groups. We design for the dominant, and in doing so, we exclude without ever saying so.
As we reflect during Women’s History Month, this is a reminder that inclusion is not only about recognition, but about redesign, about questioning the systems, objects, and standards we’ve long taken for granted.
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What has been your experience living in a world designed for men?
#InclusiveDesign #DesignEthics #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInMusic #EquityByDesign
