We (Jordan and Johnnie) have been exploring ‘what is possible’ for Unhurried Design and in our work together. We’ve landed on some ideas we’d like to share with you.

Unhurried Practice Group

We’re developing an Unhurried Practice Group, which is for people who want to bring greater presence to their work - as leaders, designers, partners, parents, or friends. We believe the modern world often steals our attention and leaves us feeling fragmented, chasing short term goals and rewards, tempted by the next fragment of dopamine.

We are wondering: What if we learned to support each other in a way that creates an abundance, rather than a scarcity, of attention? Can we grow our ability to maintain a grounded presence, so that we experience a greater sense of aliveness and engagement with life around us? You can learn more here and register interest for the practice group by responding to this email.

Unhurried Design projects

With Unhurried Design, we’re now focusing on consulting with people who want to lead projects on challenges/opportunities they might be facing in their organizations and communities.

Across our combined 40+ years of experience, we have helped engineers, physicians, executives, teachers, and other practitioners unhurriedly design products, processes, and services. In addition to what’s actually created, we will seek to support you in developing a non-anxious presence for yourself, too, so you can share it with others, which we believe can have a powerful effect in creating a calm company where things don’t have to be crazy at work.

If you’d like to explore starting a project with us, we would like to get to know you and the challenge you are facing, and allow that to surface what’s needed, as opposed to bringing you a fixed framework or plug-and-play solution. If this sounds interesting, let’s talk about the challenge/opportunity that’s on your mind.

Unhurried Design - a definition and principles

Here’s a summary of how we think of Unhurried Design.

Definition

Unhurried Design. A life-centered alternative to design thinking that prioritizes relationships and reflection, going the right pace at the right time, to yield resilient solutions with less material waste.

Principles

Practice, practice. Design theory has its use, but we’re actually more interested in the practice: the experimenting, playing, and exploring that creates connections and lets something useful emerge. So we share stories, practice being half-a-shade braver, play with doubt and uncertainty and take the risk of sharing more of our feelings.

Context matters. We want design to contribute to a sustainable future. We embrace nature: we design in nature, noticing its patterns and rhythms. Allowing its biodiversity and vitality to enhance our experience. Taking into account context also includes designing alongside our local communities.

The body is intelligent. We move: we do work that involves our bodies, helps us notice our feelings and sensations as we do. In a society that prizes head-heaviness, we recognize that our bodies house most of our intelligence and are our greatest storytelling tool.

Leveling the playing field. Too often, design feels like it’s an expert skill for the select few, who then take on a role of designing for, rather than with, others. We believe everyone is creative and can be involved in the process of design, with an emphasis on those belonging to traditionally subordinated groups.

More than a process. We want to see humans design with greater calmness and presence, and find more meaning and relationship in their work. We invite people to tend their interior condition when designing, which we believe has an outsized effect on what’s created.

Avoiding the rush. Design often feels driven by anxiety. Often people and organizations rush the design process. A conventional approach to design incentivizes speed and efficiency as the pathway to success but these can end up leading to messier, less effective products and processes. We end up circling back to fix what was missed or ignored due to the pressures and demands of an urgent culture and race to be first, which burns people out along the way.

Thanks for reading, fellow traveler. Until next time.

J&J

Two months ago I (Jordan) decided to take a serious plunge into designing a lighter life for myself.

I bought a Punkt. phone, which strips out most of the attention seeking features of smartphones and ditched my iPhone.

The result? I've rediscovered on average five hours of attention per day that has been diverted - for years, since I first purchased the iPhone back in 2007.

So what am I doing with the attention I've gained?

Deep work.

Which I believe is less about filling my time with other things to do, and more about experiencing the present moment differently.

With more aliveness, or as the Punkt. founders have described it, more 'intimacy'.

This was way easier than I thought it would be, and more fun.

Sure, there have been some bumps along the way. Texting is harder. I can't call an Uber or use my navigation apps on my smartphone, but I've devised some workarounds.

Small inconveniences to manage. The reward?

More 'me'.

What might a more sober use of tech give us?

Recently, inspired by Jordan, I (Johnnie) began rationing my time with technology, stepping away from devices for a day, or least purposely choosing when to dip back into the world of ‘online’ and back out.

In an age where it seems we all have a screen at our fingertips, the two of us are wondering: What is the cost of our individual and collective digital addiction? And what might a more sober approach to technology feel like?

We thought it would make a good topic for our continuing series of Unhurried Design conversations. In our next workshop, we'll share experiences of feeling it, seeing it around us, and think about ways to encourage more human, analogue ways of relating when designing events, services, and products.

31 January at 4pm UK (that's 11am EST)

You can sign up at the link below. Price is $10 per ticket, or you can attend for free if you are a paid subscriber.

Reserve your place

Over the last few months we’ve been hosting online conversations to share experiences of emotions that often don’t get talked about. Many of us can be reluctant to explore negative feelings with each other, as the pressure to conceal them can be high when the prevailing culture champions positivity and professionalism.

Several people joined us for 75 minute sessions to explore how they might work with their negative feelings more creatively, with one session for each of the following emotions - despair, anxiety, and shame.

We deliberately did not offer any kind of advice or solution - partly because our instinct is that there is more value in staying with these kinds of feelings and seeing what’s there, instead of chasing them away or even trying to ‘transform’ them into something supposedly more useful or comfortable. We didn’t want to position ourselves as teachers, just as fellow explorers.

Each of us, at different times, thought this might be a bad idea. Would anyone come? What kind of pandora’s box would we be opening? Would the tone be too somber?

Instead, what we experienced in the sessions was rich, often enjoyable conversation through which we felt a deeper connection to one another.

A willingness to “face the shark”, as one participant put it, can sometimes be the experience we most need.

What if our negative emotions are taking us toward an otherwise unreachable experience of reality?

Our next guided conversation will explore our relationship with anger and how we might design more constructively with it in life and work.

You can sign up for the workshop at the link below. Tickets are 10 USD.

Sign up for workshop

If you are interested in using Unhurried Design to approach an opportunity or challenge differently, we are open to exploring what’s possible with you. You can book a call below.

Work with us

Last week we ran our August coaching workshop where we explored this question: What if we could use our anxiety, rather than running away from it?

It was a really satisfying experiment which has reinforced our enthusiasm on a couple of fronts.

First, we’ve been questioning the idea that designers are meant in some way to leave their own feelings out in order to ‘focus on’ the users. Human-centered design and design ‘best practice’ teaches that our feelings are capricious, biased, and not to be trusted. We wanted to explore what happens if we lower that particular boundary so that we’re not the rational experts fixing things for others, but human collaborators sharing a challenge. That’s the spirit in which we ran the first workshop, sharing our own fears and experiences as well as inviting participants to do so. We’re going to do more of this, as we think it creates a much richer sense of community.

Second, we want to keep going with this idea of taking supposedly ‘negative emotions’ and see if we can build them into design rather than trying to eliminate them. The intention of reducing them may be good, but we think it leads to a fantasy of a world without friction - that’s both unsustainable and actually quite dystopian.

So we’re running with a theme like Designing with Despair in September.

There are fifteen tickets available, five at $40, five at $20, and five at $5. You can pay whichever you would like, although we suggest leaving the $5 option for students and those not currently earning an income.

If you wish to join us, you can reserve your place below.

Designing with Despair workshop

What if we could use our anxiety, rather than running away from it?

Could we change our relationship to it, and even see it as a source of aliveness, instead of as a barrier to overcome?

What if we can allow anxiety to give us strength or to be more creative?

We (Johnnie and Jordan) have been exploring this idea for a while now - how to hold one’s own anxiety, to hold others in theirs, and create with what’s found there.

We think a great deal of unnecessary hurry is created by our rush to get away from anxiety instead of treating it as a potential source of energy and ideas.

The writers at The School of Life reflect, “[Anxiety] is no sign that that our lives have gone wrong; merely that we are alive. It is mostly a reasonable and sensitive response to the genuine strangeness, terror, uncertainty, and riskiness of existence”.

Maybe we do not need to be anxious about being anxious.

Starting in August, we are going to offer a monthly online workshop, and our first one will explore this theme of anxiety as aliveness.

Each month, we’ll use this gathering to explore ideas and activities and bring the wisdom of Unhurried Design to life.

The workshop will have two consecutive sessions of around 75 minutes on separate days in the same week. The sessions will be hosted by us and highly participatory in nature.

Monday, August 21st, 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK
Wednesday, August 23rd, 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK

The cost to attend per month is 200 USD, which gives you access to both sessions. If you happen to be a student, we are willing to offer a 50% discount.

There will be six spots available in the first month.

If you want to be a part of this, you can reserve your place with the button below, or call us if you’d like to chat about it.

J&J

Reserve your spot

Essentially, researchers use an algorithm that generates multiple variations of simple graphics. Participants select one of these and the program then evolves some new variations of that. Participants select again, and so it continues. Remarkably over time, people end up with pictures of sophisticated images of things we can recognise from the real world.

Thing is, people choose only on gut feel, and they don’t know where their choices will lead, but they do lead somewhere. Look at the final results and you’d assume (at least before AI became so trendy) that someone must have designed them.

The philosopher Patricia Churchland (quoted in Roger Lewin’s book on complexity) studied neurobiology and observed:

Nature is not an intelligent engineer… It doesn’t start from scratch each time it wants to build a new system, but has to work with what’s already there… the result is a system no human engineer would ever design, but it is wonderfully powerful, energy efficient and computationally brilliant.

She paints a picture of the brain as a kind of brilliantly effective mess. Its many parallel processes don’t remotely conform to the popular notion of brain-as-computer. 

And what may be true for our individual brains may also apply to communities of brains. Our conflicts and confusions may be part of a bigger, more impressive kind of intelligence. What we do together collectively is built not on some linear consensus, but emerges from our diversity.

From this perspective, what we call design is the serendipitous result of many thousands of choices, experiences, and conversations. If we take that view, what would change about the way we work?

Humans get attached to heroic narratives of rescuing and achievement. This often shows up as designing for someone else rather than with. Design thinking has been shown to unconsciously recycle white supremacy. Many alternatives to design thinking exist, but they easily fall into the same trap.

What might be possible beyond our tendency to bend people and things to our will? Can we instead participate in what’s already there?

Designers could become a little less like heroes and more like winemakers. Our role wouldn’t be pioneering a sexy new solution (a lust after the grape to disrupt all grapes) but positioning ourselves to notice and cooperate with nature - with less concern for who gets credit. What might be needed from us is more tending and pruning.

With our project on Unhurried Design, we want to explore the power of more social, understated human conversations as a field from which more satisfying design may emerge: an experiment in being more patient and curious about differences and disagreement, less judgemental about what is, and more open to life as it unfolds moment-by-moment. 

We might be tapping into a weirder but richer intelligence.