Every day, we experience the fragility of the systems we’ve been generating: lockdowns, meltdowns, breakdowns, collapses, inequalities, shifts, and a large variety of interrelated crises.

As if these signals were insufficient, we keep crossing boundaries and threatening the fragile stability of the entire system we live in, risking entering a state we haven’t experienced before, drawning us into a reality constructed only by a few where most of us will lack the tools to thrive moving forward.

All these situations have in common that they result from deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing and doing. A tangible expression that our wellbeing is profoundly affected by the people and the world around us.

Language is the tool we use to shape the world through relation and collaboration. —If we aim to act differently, we must review our intentions and change our conversations.

First, we frame.

Achieving a good, beneficial, durable and pleasant life is not only a matter of individual performance; it is all about collectively constructed meaning.

I am not privileged enough to access the forefront of knowledge, but I can definitely sense certain things are not working. The cultures we generate are full of blind spots.

If we can’t see things, we can’t interact with them. If we can’t interact, we can’t make sense of it. If we can’t make sense of it, it’s impossible to propose alternative courses of action.

Suppose we aim to be aware of how we live in these artificialities of our making. If that’s the case, we need to add a sharper consciousness of how language construct us: once we frame a complexity within the boundaries of a recognizable word, we cannot see beyond it, nor what is left behind —Design, business, and technology are just words.

What matters more than the system of beliefs we choose to make sense of the jumble of experiences we call life is to realize that we have one; only then will we have the power to challenge, question & change it.

If we can frame meanings into words to have a conversation around them, we can also look beyond that frame and broaden our perspectives.

Then, we fill.

All these realities are presented throughout our lives as timeless truths—conventions, practices, and traditions that are widely understood and standardized —The exercise requires deep structural reforms, not more ideas.

Aware of my own limitations. I find myself scaling down complexity until I reach a nested frame small enough to impact within my agency: The tradition, the disciplines, and the practice of the mainstream business of design and its products, which is the substrate that regulates my relationship with labour, has a social validity & defines and mediates my recognition.

And here I am, facing a conjuncture that does not meet my goals and purposes. Entering a state I’ve never encountered before and looking for conditions that could take me to explore an alternative path to current linear models of exchanging value, steering towards a proposal more respectful to myself and the world I live in.

Because there are no signs ahead guiding the path forward, and this territory is entirely new to me: I intend to use reality to drive/move the spread/extend of a thought I do not plan to formalize. A batch of guiding conditions to describe alternative thinking sequences, taking me to draw a model capable of generating new constructs. A capability on which we would be able to rethink how I approach the profession.

Reality is the sole outcome of design; there is no subject, no object and no problem to be solved.

All the mindsets, approaches and methods surrounding the so-called discipline can be left behind. There is a whole that can’t be understood by only looking at the parts.

Moving forward:

**❏ I manifest: **

  • I am part of a nested reality. There, I am not looking at things from the outside.
  • I am not alone; there are limits and boundaries I should not cross when pursuing my well-being.
  • Regardless of circumstances, we should be all sitting here in identical conditions.
  • As a living being, I am constantly self-producing.
  • As a human, the only thing I am by nature is incapable of doing things by myself.
  • I am here because somebody took care of me, I am in debt.
  • Many people have protected, nurtured, guided and provided me with the bare necessities for survival before I could even think for myself or communicate.
  • They gave me conditions, not ideas.
  • The knowledge I treasure grants me the ability to generate artificiality.
  • I do it following the traditions, cultures and schools of thought I’ve been educated and taught. I don’t know what I don’t know.
  • I use those skills to run processes allowing me to acquire the knowledge I need to mediate my relationship with the environment.
  • I can not think or express anything on behalf of anyone else.
  • Context defines the shape and not the other way around.

△: From here I am exploring the unknowns to find paths and directions moving forward, expecting to uncover something allowing me to expand the frame I follow to facilitate and orient decision-making.

This is all about goals & meanings and actions to be taken over time.

Maybe I’ll get somewhere.

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