Fire is also, of course, one of design’s oldest tools. Perhaps the oldest. Before it was metaphor, before it was atmosphere, before it was the golden centre of a room around which people gathered, it was a medium. A method. A way of changing matter from one state to another. Design has always understood fire as both danger and possibility. It smelts. It casts. It anneals. It tempers. It hardens and softens, blackens and brightens, destroys and reveals. To work with fire is to accept that making is not always a polite activity. It is not always a clean pencil line, a neat sketch, a smooth prototype, a tasteful mood board pinned to a wall. Sometimes making is heat. Sometimes it is pressure. Sometimes it is the controlled violence of transformation.
Part XI - I, Belong Come see Louise and I speak at #3daysofdesign in Copenhagen on June 10th on the role of fire in our lives and our need to belong. www.curiositychronicles.io/i-belong
The best designers I have known are not really in the business of making objects at all, though they may produce them. They are in the business of cultivating better relationships between things. Between person and place. Person and service. Person and institution. Person and person. They notice friction the way a gardener notices wilt. They understand that the health of a system is often revealed at its edges, in the places where something tender is trying to emerge and cannot. They are suspicious of brilliance that exhausts the soil. They know that growth forced too quickly can be weak and that anything living needs maintenance after the unveiling. There is humility in this way of working, because it shifts the emphasis from authorship to stewardship. Part X: I Grow.
I think often about what design does to the human nervous system. Long before we have language for it, we feel our way through the world somatically. A room either lets the shoulders drop or it does not. A street either invites wandering or it does not. A hospital either amplifies fear or softens it. A digital product either makes us feel clumsy and surveilled or graceful and at ease. Design enters the body before it enters the mind. It tells us, without words, whether we are safe here, hurried here, welcome here, visible here, alone here. The older I get, the less interested I am in design as spectacle and the more interested I am in design as emotional climate. What weather does it make possible? What version of ourselves does it call forth? Does it harden us, or does it allow us to loosen into our own humanity?
With monumental gratitude to all my colleagues past and present at IDEO Shanghai. Thank you for waltzing with me all these years, eyes closed together.
I, Waltz. https://lnkd.in/eaxPaxqq
Because design at its best is not really about objects or interfaces or even aesthetics, not in any final sense. It is about care translated into form. It is about shaping an experience so that another human being can move through it with more ease, more dignity, more possibility. Good design knows how to support us. It can hold us in moments of confusion. It can reduce needless friction. It can make us feel considered. It can say, without saying, I thought about what it would feel like to be you. I thought about where this might hurt. I thought about where you might get lost. I made a place for your hand to rest.
My mum would have turned 100 this last week. I miss her.
Something for the long weekend. https://curiositychronicles.io/i-son
There is another kind of pause that feels even harder to take, because it asks not for a moment, but for a stretch of time. A pause not between thoughts, but between efforts. Between projects. Between cycles of output. We live in a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with these longer intervals. Our collective expectation, spoken or not, is of continuity. To keep going. To stay visible. To produce, release, respond, repeat, publish, broadcast, post. There is a subtle fear that if we step away, even briefly, we will be forgotten, overtaken, replaced. That momentum, once lost, cannot be regained.
Part VII - I, Pause.
https://curiositychronicles.io/i-pause
Good design does not attempt to eliminate emotional weather. That would be impossible, and perhaps undesirable. Instead it acknowledges that the inner climate of human life is complex and shifting, filled with storms and sunlight and long gentle seasons of change. It offers us tools for navigating that landscape with a little more awareness. I worry that as digital technology endlessly smoothes out the bumps and eases the journey, we lose the nuanced emotional wayfinding that reminds us that we are alive, imperfect and sometimes lost.
Part VI - I, Feel
www.curiositychronicles.io
Love is biological. Even on a cellular level we do not want to be alone.
Because so many of you have asked, here is a second animation from my collaborator on this piece, @forside_art . Her poetic response reads thus:
This series continues the exploration of the pre-cardiac state introduced in the first set, shifting the focus from cellular clusters to the membrane structures that surround and shape emerging biological bodies.
Inspired by the conceptual themes of the I-Heart project, the work investigates a speculative moment before the heart becomes recognizable as an organ. Instead of presenting a defined anatomical form, the images depict translucent membranes that fold, stretch, and suspend themselves around empty centers. These structures evoke biological tissue while remaining abstract. Their surfaces behave like delicate envelopes of matter - gathering particles, holding potential structure, and slowly suggesting the spatial conditions from which an organ might emerge.
The presence of a central void is intentional. It represents a space where rhythm has not yet begun, where biological coordination is still forming. In this sense, the work reflects on the threshold before synchronization: the quiet stage in which life prepares its architecture before the first beat.
The story of the heart, told from the heart, opens the heart.
This is not sentimentality. It is synchronization. Just as cardiomyocytes align through microscopic currents, human beings align through shared vulnerability. Emotion is infrastructure. Poetry compresses meaning. Humanity anchors strategy to consequence.
Something for the weekend. Part V - I, Heart
www.curiositychronicles.io
In business, in government, in our institutions, we have built cultures that celebrate the head goose. The outlier. The solo genius. We have mistaken prominence for purpose. Yet the skein tells another story. It says that leadership is a flow field. It says that power is generated in relationship. It says that the front only exists because of the wings behind it.
Something for the weekend: Part IV - I, Honk
www.curiositychronicles.io
Paper remembers where it has been folded. So do we. Every life carries creases: moments of loss, of recognition, of becoming. We like to imagine ourselves as smooth narratives, but we are closer to origami, complex forms shaped by repeated folds, each one altering what comes next.
Part III - I, Fold
www.curiositychronicles.io
AI is useful. But it doesn’t replace human imagination.
On #SparkingGenius, I shared how combining analog inspiration with the right AI tools can lead to deeper thinking, but the idea still needs to come from within. Tune in: /sparking-genius
