ESS.003 — Design: What Design No Longer Could Do.

I have a disease that goes slowly. It wears heels. Elegant. Cold. The bitch never looks back. There is a chair in my living room that I learned to hate before I learned to look at it.

On the worst days I cannot get up from it without using both hands and pushing my body weight forward, with a choreographic precision that I wouldn't ask anyone to learn. I count the motion. Hands. Weight. Forward. On the good days I forget about it, and that is the whole difference between a good day and a bad one: whether or not I remember the chair.

It is not ugly. It is not badly designed according to the criteria with which it was designed. It is intended for a body that does not get tired, for an energy that does not run out, for someone who gets up without counting steps. For someone who is not me, and who one day you will stop being. The design didn't get it wrong. It designed it without us. That chair has taught me more about the discipline I have dedicated half my life to than fifteen years of portfolios, conferences, and case studies.

The chair didn't teach me that the design was poorly made. It taught me that the design had stopped having words to describe what was happening to me.

Design stopped talking about life

It has been telling us for decades that it improves life. How strange that it almost never talks about life itself. It talks about systems. It talks about friction. It talks about user journeys. It talks, with a fluency that sometimes makes me cringe, about everything that happens inside the room where design is decided. And it stays silent about what happens afterward: when the object goes out into the world and meets a body that gets tired, an afternoon that comes to an end, a person who one day can no longer do the same thing they did yesterday with the same energy.

Design was never completely mute. It had authors who wrote from outside the commission. Rams. Munari. Papanek. Hara. That voice existed. But it stopped occupying the center. It didn't disappear. It became peripheral. It didn't lose it. It sold it. Not the ability to write. The independence of its voice.

When a discipline begins to define itself as a service, it ends up writing budgets even when it tries to write manifestos. For too long we confused professionalism with obedience, and maturity with domestication. We put design in a zoo. It learned not to bite.

The words we lost

It does not write shame; it writes friction. It does not write fear; it writes uncertainty. It does not write exhaustion; it writes cognitive fatigue. It does not write love; it writes engagement. It does not write person; it writes user. A technical word can describe a phenomenon. But it can also prevent us from feeling what it describes. The day you call tiredness friction, you have already lost more than a word. You have lost a way of seeing.

My body began to get used to the profession

Parkinson's didn't give me a metaphor to explain design. It gave me something more useful: a vocabulary to recognize the loss of capacity. Because a degenerative disease has a cruel peculiarity. You don't always lose something.

Sometimes you can still do it, but it gets harder every time. You keep talking, but softer each time. You keep walking, but later each time. You keep writing, but smaller each time. You keep moving, but you need more effort to do the same thing. What happens when something keeps working, but begins to lose capacities.

A profession can also deteriorate like that. Not all at once. Through accumulation. My illness is not a metaphor for design. But its symptoms gave me a vocabulary to recognize forms of loss that can also exist outside a body.

Hypophonia

The voice lowers in volume and, sometimes, whoever loses it doesn't notice. A designer says:

«A few days ago, I closed a deep exploration cycle around the intersection between design systems, strategic thinking, and the materiality of impact. What emerged was not just another framework.

It was an ongoing conversation with uncertainty, a redefinition of perceived value, and an invitation to inhabit the liminal space between the tangible and the possible. Because design is no longer just a solution. It is mediation. It is listening. It is the ability to hold complexity without reducing it to a deliverable. We keep building. We keep questioning. We keep designing design.»

Design Thinking # Systems Thinking # Design Leadership # Impact # Frameworks # Case Study # Keynote Ready

Nobody outside the profession can repeat a single fucking sentence.
Not because they are foolish.

Why did the voice volume decrease.
And whoever was using it didn't even notice.

Freezing

The intention remains. The body knows what to do. But it cannot initiate movement. Everyone in the meeting knows the product has a problem. It has been researched. It has been documented. There is data. There are users saying the exact same thing. But no one changes anything because there is a lack of alignment. We have intention. We have knowledge. We have methodology. But our feet won't move.

Bradykinesia

Movement does not disappear. It becomes slow. It leaves late. It costs more. A designer detects a problem on Monday. On Tuesday, they prepare the presentation. On Wednesday, they run the workshop. The following week, alignment arrives. Then the stakeholder review. Then validation. Then the committee. When the decision finally arrives, the problem has already changed. We haven't stopped moving. We've turned movement into bureaucracy.

Stiffness

The muscle loses the ability to yield. A design system is born to prevent every problem from having to be solved from scratch. Then it grows. It adds components. Rules. Tokens. Governance. Documentation.

And one day someone finds a problem that doesn't fit into any of them. Logic says that something new must be done. The system says it doesn't exist. Then something strange happens: instead of changing the system to adapt to the problem, we change the problem so it can fit into the system.

The design system stopped serving the product. The product started serving the design system. The rules that were created to reduce the cost of thinking are starting to increase the cost of changing. A system is rigid when the logic has to obey the rule.

Micrograph

The writing gets smaller and smaller. The problem starts with: how should this service work for a person. It turns into: what feature do we need. Then: what component do we use. And it ends with: is the CTA 16 or 20 pixels. Precision increases. The question decreases. We haven't stopped asking questions. We have reduced the size of what we allow ourselves to ask.

Hypomimia

The face expresses less than what it feels. An experience is being researched in which a person lost their partner. They cry during the interview. They recount that they didn't understand what to do. That they were afraid. That they felt alone. Three weeks later, all of that appears on a slide as: Pain point 03: Information uncertainty. The work contained a life. The final document has the emotional expression of a washing machine.

Fatigue

Available energy does not always correspond to what has been done. Figma reduced a part of the cost of producing interfaces. Then we started producing more interfaces. Design systems reduced the cost of repeating components. Then we started producing more variants. Artificial intelligence reduces the cost of generating explorations. Then we expect fifty explorations instead of five. The tool saves time. The organization captures the savings. The designer gets more work. Efficiency didn't disappear. It shifted.

Tremor

Directionless movement. New framework. New methodology. New tool. New reorganization. New naming. New process. Everything moves. But moving forward is something else. You can spend a whole year redesigning how you design without getting a single centimeter closer to a better life.

A profession can continue to function while losing capacity

You can keep producing while losing your voice. You can keep moving while losing direction. You can keep writing while the questions become smaller and smaller. You can keep delivering while you no longer have the energy to change. Fragility has not given me a theory. It has given me a different resolve.

My body didn't give me a metaphor to explain design. It gave me a vocabulary to detect what design was failing to do. First it was my arm. Then my leg. Then my voice. Then my energy. One day I began to recognize the same pattern in the profession to which I had dedicated my life. I wasn't sick.

But there were things I used to be able to do that I no longer seemed capable of doing the same way. Speaking loudly. Biting. Making people uncomfortable. Saying this is wrong without first turning it into a business opportunity. Then I understood that perhaps the problem wasn't that design had stopped talking about life. Perhaps I had started losing the ability to do so.

Return his words

The evaluation system can consider excellent an object that, in a specific life, becomes a small machine of incapacity. That is not an execution error. It is a vocabulary silence.

Human Notes was born, in part, out of that silence. Not to invent an ornamental language, but to recover words that allow us to describe what happens when the object is no longer on the design table and encounters a real body.

The user was never a user. They were always someone trying to make it to the end of the day with a bit of themselves intact. Every design decision ends up written on a body. The body always sends the bill. Even if the PowerPoint says everything was a success.

Tomorrow I will get up from that chair again using both hands. Hands. Weight. Forward. The chair probably won't change. But now I know that what happens after using it also belongs to the design. And perhaps that is all I am trying to do here: give words back to a discipline before it forgets how to speak about life.

Capabilities do not disappear on their own. Someone sells them. Someone buys them. Someone stops practicing them until they can no longer be recovered.