Every year, trends show up in a new outfit. Experience. Then wellness. Then quiet luxury, community, nomadic living, green travel… and every year they’re chased as if they were new. Add tech and AI, and the chase turns urgent.
It isn’t new. Look at what those “trends” all reach for — presence, the body, nature, encounter, belonging — and the same thing hides under each: a human thirst, simply changing clothes. Whoever follows the trend spends their life running after it. Whoever understands the thirst underneath can stop running because they finally know where all of them are born.
I’ve spent decades designing both sides of that: what nobody sees, the invisible logic under a brand, a business, a decision, and what everyone sees and experiences, the visible and tangible thing it becomes in the world. They were never two jobs; the invisible one decides the visible one. And the longer I looked, the more one pattern kept surfacing: we’ve been designing mostly for half a human being.
I mean that almost literally. The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist spent much of his life on a deceptively simple finding: the brain’s two hemispheres attend to the world in two different ways. One narrows in to grasp, measure, and control the parts. The other opens out to the living whole: context, meaning, relationship, the sense that you belong somewhere. (Not “logical left, artistic right” — that pop myth is the one he set out to bury.) A sound mind runs on both, in constant conversation. Good design is the synapse between them.
Now look at what we build. Products, companies, cities, entire digital worlds — tuned almost entirely to the first mode: what can be counted, ranked, optimized. And quietly starved of the second: what is felt, what is meant, what makes someone stay.
So we end up thirsty in a very specific way. The thirst is for meaning, connection, presence, and the water we’re handed is more stimulus, more metrics, more screen. We dig the well deeper, we optimize the well, we put AI on the well, and the well is simply at the wrong address. The thirst never passes, because the answer never arrives where the question lives. Call it a geographic problem.
And it’s built this way on purpose. In Addiction by Design, Natasha Dow Schüll shows how slot machines are engineered around one number — “time on device” — until the player dissolves into the mechanism. Most of our digital life now optimizes for that same number under softer names: engagement, retention, watch time. Herbert Simon predicted the bill back in 1971: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Run that architecture for decades and something atrophies. A capacity you never use weakens, like a muscle. The capacity to symbolize, to be moved, to hold a silence, to belong: you can watch it thin in people, in companies, in whole cities. We aren’t only thirsty but forgetting how to drink.
Here is where I plant my feet — and it’s why I still love this work. All of it is design. Simon handed designers the way out in one line: “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” What was designed can be redesigned. I’ve seen it up close: a company that chooses to measure less and mean more; a brand that stops selling through the lack and builds a home instead; a person who redraws their week until presence fits inside it. Balance can be designed, and so can happiness. That, perhaps, is the project and the thirst of our era.
How all of it actually weaves together — attention, meaning, and where the thread runs after that — is the longer work I’m writing. For today, this is just the shape of the question, thought out loud.
Written and designed by humans, for humans. 💜
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Sources:
• Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009.
• Herbert A. Simon. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” In Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, 1971.
• Herbert A. Simon. The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press, 1969.
• Natasha Dow Schüll. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Zorzo, L. Independent researches, classes and ZORZO® proprietary materials.