Future Design Inquiries. July 2025

Hello from ENSO, a future design company. We’re sharing the things that make us think, bring us joy or shift our perspective. 

What we’re reflecting on

It’s time to redesign everything

There are two major forces underway right now: 1/ many longstanding societal systems are failing, crumbling and/or being dismantled, and 2/ AI is about to change every facet of society. So the scary news is: we have to redesign everything. And the exciting news is: we get to redesign everything. We are excellent at imagining catastrophic scenarios. We are less good (or maybe just less trained) at imagining the scenarios where we get it right. But we can’t build what we can’t see. So it’s time to start imagining at scale. Gideon Lichfield imagines how AI could improve democracy, by making civic engagement an easy and automatic part of anyone’s day. It’s worth the 15 minutes he takes to explain it, but the real genius is that he both fundamentally reimagines a system (democracy), while imagining that AI leverages existing progress in various areas to actually create change. In other words, it’s transformative, but it also feels doable. Which seems like exactly what we need. (HS)

AI's first date

The industry that promised us NFT economies and metaverse friendships has earned our skepticism about revolutionary claims. Yet with AI, the revolution may be under-hyped. At a similar inflection point decades ago — the dawn of personal computing — Steve Jobs delivered a charming talk to the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen. He did two remarkable things: he explained what was coming in simple terms, and invited the world’s creative community to help shape it. “We need help. We really, really need your help”, he said, describing that moment when “computers and society are out on a first date.” The stakes of that first date? Whether we’d create “great objects”, or “one more piece of junk.” Today, AI is on its first date with society. Unlike Jobs’ era of optimistic invitation, this time feels different—more like corporate maneuvering than collaborative design. But his challenge remains: beauty or junk? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently acknowledged this tension: “the thing we have to most worry about — and most work on as a tech community, is how do we earn that social permission?”
The answer requires the tech industry to stretch beyond its usual priorities of utility and growth, towards something greater — like optimizing for human flourishing. (SB)

Magic before metrics

There is such a thing as the LEGO Professor at IMD Business School, and I hope you’re as delighted by this fact as I am. Howard Yu occupies that wonderful perch (though best I can tell, his expertise is in management rather than building Tuxedo Cat — he leads the Center for Future Readiness). His recent post crystalized something useful: every business must master two distinct games:
1/ Captivate: Create desire from nothing. Build mythology. Make people feel something before they buy anything.
2/ Convert: Harvest existing desire. Optimise the funnel. Turn intention into transaction with efficiency.

Some companies benefit from existing desire, so their job is chiefly to convert: Booking.com is unlikely to create your desire to visit Barcelona, but can smartly convert you after Googling, ‘Barcelona hotels’. Most companies, though, need to work harder on the former. Nike under ex-CEO John Donahoe missed this: he oriented the company around converting, not captivating — with disastrous results. But Nike’s genius has always been captivating: starting with deep human insights into the athlete mindset, translated into remarkable design, and transcendent brand moments. We’ve been in an era that’s fetishized data, where lower-funnel marketing is labelled as ‘smart’, ‘efficient’, ‘optimized’. But most companies need to do more captivating — and frankly, people are thirsty for something to be excited about. There’s a magic that has to happen before metrics kick in. (SB)

Care as a foundation

You probably know B Corporation, the movement of business as a force for good. Its co-founder, Andrew Kassoy, passed away recently. In a moving final message to the business community, he said, “In a time when so many people are careless, and so many people lack moral courage, it’s up to us to double down on care and courage. And that’s a hell of a lot more powerful if we do it together.”  John Kay’s new book, The Corporation in the 21st Century makes the case that, “the main thing [that has changed] about business is dematerialization. Modern businesses are all about people. The relationships between people are not primarily transactional, they are largely social. And managing these relationships is key to running a successful business in the 21st century.” It’s probably fair to say care has not been central to capitalism (as Careless People demonstrated in excruciating fidelity). But for both the moral reasons that Kassoy left us with, and for the economic reasons Kay highlights, care isn’t just a fluffy afterthought: it’s what determines whether customers and employees return tomorrow. Starbucks has realized this; its new strategy: invest in people. (SB)

From relationships as a value to relationships for value

I have a friend who was an avid Facebook-er, especially good at keeping up with people online – even the ones she barely knew in real life. Over the years, she traded birthday messages, comments and likes with an old high school classmate and the digital exchanges were successful enough to earn her a wedding invitation. Flattered, my friend went to the wedding. But when she arrived, she found that the digital bond didn’t translate – not when that was the only thing binding them together. They had nothing to say to each other. My friend realized she didn’t actually know this person at all. As we move deeper into the digital world, we’ve moved further away from one another – by now, this is well known. Our relationships have changed – in both medium and in meaning. Connection used to be a value in itself. Now it’s often a tool. We network to get jobs. We comment to gain reach. We connect to get access. There’s even an entire economy built on parasocial relationships – influencers make millions of dollars off of your attachment to them. Relationships have become about lucrative transactions rather than meaningful connections. The algorithm knows who we “know.” But it’s the relationships that we nurture that are the most valuable. (HS)

These nuggets are curated by ENSO partners Hanna Siegel (HS) and Sebastian Buck (SB).

9 things that made us think, gasp, share and laugh:

• Flow is for everyone
• How an architectural gem emerged from Jim Cutler’s ideal that, “teaching people to love the living world is the highest quality that any human being could have”.

• Stanford Professor Jennifer Aaker on How to create a meaningful life in the age of AI
• You can now browse Pentagram’s archive
• The surprisingly awesome impact of sharing nature photos
• “Attention is a moral act” — intuition is how we live with flow and ease; attention is key to being connected to intuition
• What the f**k happened to being excited about the future?
• Kingmaker, about Pamela Churchill Harriman’s life, from Winston Churchill sidekick during WW2, to US Ambassador to France under Clinton, and countless adventures in between 
• Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts, and engaging 3.5% or more of the population has almost never failed to bring about change.

What we’re working on

ENSO is a small, senior team so that we can work on just a few initiatives at a time. This allows us to go deep on some of the biggest challenges/ opportunities. Recently, we’ve been working on a few main missions with our partners:

1. Defining how the world’s most dynamic ecosystem can be harnessed to fight climate change: Finding a way to turn the incredible research, education and innovation into a new future for the planet, and for us. 
2. A brand to radiate optimism: We think restoring optimism in the world is essential. We're working on a book and content series, while also exploring product and community approaches.
3. Changing the world of work: the labor market is the engine of prosperity, but ~80% of people are not engaged or thriving. We’re working to change the system. 

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Reach us at news@enso.co

See you next time.

ENSO • 115 W California Blvd #9101 Pasadena, CA 91105