Future Design Inquiries. August 2026
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
Working for fun
“Fly fishing is wildly stupid. It is the dumbest way to catch a fish … It is stupidly hard. If you want a fish, almost any other method is easier.” Philosopher C Thi Nguyen is nevertheless an avid fly fisherman, and he uses it to reflect on something surprisingly elusive: what actually separates work from play. It’s not difficulty — play can be maddening, and Nguyen’s winter fishing sounds close to miserable. Not practicality — you can knit, garden, or create pottery as play. Building on Bernard Suits, who defined a game as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, Nguyen lands here: to work is to pursue outcomes set by something external (a boss, a need to eat). In play, the goals are up to you. “You can change the points, because the points aren’t what matters. Your own joyous action is.” Which is a useful definition, because it makes work and play a spectrum — how much say do we have over what we do? — and that is a design choice. By Nguyen's definition, some people's work looks like play: founders, artists, researchers who set their own terms. If work can be play, why isn’t more work designed that way, when ~80% of people aren’t engaged or thriving? More work should give people more say over how it's done.
One caution, from Tim Harford in the same FT series: the answer is not 'gamification' of work — leaderboards, points, prizes and all — it’s handing people more authority over their own goals. (SB)
The brands of the present and the future
There is a new survey that asked people to name a brand that “feels like it was made for someone like you” and one that they wished they “could buy more of, but feels like it’s meant for someone with more money.” Nike topped both lists, somehow making millions of people feel like it’s truly for them while retaining an aspirational sheen as well. In fact, ten brands managed to make both lists: Nike, Apple, Gucci, Adidas, Jordan, Polo Ralph Lauren, Coach, Samsung, Levi's and Amazon. One way to think about what these brands have done is to say they have created a narrative that bridges from someone’s present self to their future one. In contrast, the pure identity brands, like Ford, Kraft and Walmart, offer utility and accessibility, but do they offer a path forward? And the pure luxury brands, like Chanel, Rolex and Ferrari, offer fantasy but one that’s largely unattainable. At a time when more people want to live in the past than the future, I think we need as many brands, organizations and leaders inspiring plausible aspirations as possible. (HS)
The Third Thing
Conventional wisdom now tells us that we have to get better at connecting with one another but the question is how? In a beautiful essay by the poet Donald Hall about his marriage to fellow poet Jane Kenyon, he describes how they always had a ‘third thing,’ which is to say a thing separate from the two of them that they shared. “Third things are essential to marriages,” he writes, “objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment.” For them, it was poetry of course, but also afternoons by the pond near their house, ping-pong games with no score and a dog named Gus. In a world that is constantly pulling us from each other, I like the idea of nurturing a third thing in all relationships. (HS)
Graceful growth
You know the story: person becomes wildly rich, ditches their earlier idealism and moral compass, and becomes kind of terrible. It’s a pattern so consistent it can look like a law of physics. Which makes the exceptions so intriguing. Yvon Chouinard is the one usually cited; I may be even more fascinated by Brunello Cucinelli. Born in Umbria in 1953, he grew up in a house sheltering 22 people — no electricity, no running water — and the farm animals too, in winter. That he built a fashion empire and, more than anyone, defined ‘quiet luxury’ as a global trend is remarkable. That his moral arc grew alongside his financial arc is rarer still: a poor student who became a serious reader of history and philosophy. And unlike Chouinard, who has a complex relationship with his business and success, Cucinelli seems to love his business and its people. Where Chouinard is singular in his reverence for nature, Cucinelli is equally obsessed with human dignity.
He hasn’t just advocated values, but built and built means of putting them into action. He regenerated his village, built a school for craftsmanship, paid his people above market, insisted they stop working at 5.30pm, and told his IPO investors to expect only ‘graceful’ growth that wouldn’t overly stress his people. Each of those makes it harder for the business to stray from its stated values; his moral compass may not scale, but those structures can. The stock has grown ~1,000% since its IPO in 2012, regardless. And by building the brand around ‘humanistic capitalism’, he has invited scrutiny others may not be subject to — including, recently, allegations of residual business in Russia during sanctions, all denied by the company, with internal and external reviews finding no breach. Many see the added scrutiny that leading with values brings as too great a price to pay. It’s a real cost, and it’s worth paying, because the alternative is leaders and companies that promise nothing and can’t disappoint anyone. (SB)
These nuggets are curated by ENSO partners Hanna Siegel (HS) and Sebastian Buck (SB).
7 things that made us think, gasp, share and laugh:
- How we win in November, by our own Brian Hardwick
- Ordinary Abundance, a beautiful website with quotes from past leaders, writers and thinkers daydreaming of the things we have today.
- When they turn the internet off, this is the last thing they should leave up
- Write love letters to people who need them
- Moral courage in action
- The best venn:
- The case against AI’s being conscious, and the (compelling) ethical arguments against suggesting otherwise
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:
- Reimagining the future of the seas, and exploring what a new frontier in maritime might mean for the world.
- Building awareness and new behaviors for childhood safety, when there's already too much to do.
- Helping artists sustain an artistic life over the long term, and designing the space and tools to help artists everywhere thrive.
- 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.
Thank you for being part of the network that fuels our optimism and expands what’s possible. We’re grateful for you, and we’re committed to creating positive futures together.
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Reach us at news@enso.co
See you next time.
ENSO • 115 W California Blvd #9101 Pasadena, CA 91105
