Dispatch No. 10 - The Human Architecture of Design
Every system runs on people. Beneath the content maps and component libraries are the trust, negotiation, and relationships that hold it all together.
Design is often a dance of diplomacy: balancing interests, defining constraints, finding outcomes everyone can live with. Its success depends on whether we can look past our own win conditions long enough to build something that sticks.
Easier said than done. Most teams are rewarded for speed and visibility—the next launch, the next metric. It takes patience to resist those incentives and design for a long arc instead of a quick win.
When it does work, it’s rarely by accident. Someone is tending to the trust: keeping tension useful, helping the group stay centered, and letting momentum build at its own pace. Design leader Austin Knight says it well in his recent essay Everyone Must Win:
“The most effective designers act as diplomats, not dictators.”
He reframes collaboration as a systems problem. When one part of the system “wins” at the expense of another, the whole structure becomes brittle. Sustainable products and relationships come from distributing value, not hoarding it.
When you design for shared wins, you earn trust. When you argue for your own win, you invite defensiveness. Every cross-functional relationship (whether it be with Design, Product, Engineering, or the C-Suite) is an opportunity to design a better outcome, not just a better argument. If people leave a meeting with you feeling like they won, they’ll follow your lead next time. That’s how influence scales. That’s how teams compound instead of divide.
Design leadership isn’t about protecting design's slice of the pie. It’s about enlarging the pie. Everyone must win, or no one really does.
The systems we build, digital or otherwise, tend to mirror the diplomacy skills of the people inside them. Teams that can debate without fracturing, and balance competing truths, end up building systems that hold together.
The next frontier of good design may be less technical than emotional: learning how to disagree productively, negotiate with empathy, and find shared benefit in complex systems.
Related reads and thinkers
"Design for the Real World" by Viktor Papanek is a practical look at the ethical inflection points of product design—how small decisions ripple into behavior, access, and sustainability, and how better systems come from designing with care.
Sinead Bovell is a futurist and AI ethicist who connects big ideas to real people and choices with refreshing clarity. Amidst lots of hype/doom cycles, her perspective on the future of work and equity feels grounded, not alarmist.
Elsewhere
🌍 The Earth Day founders are back with Sun Day, a new global climate initiative brought to life by COLLINS through a vibrant, typographic identity. I really admire how the simplicity of the design invites participation and a sense of shared agency. (Found in a favorite newsletter, Dense Discovery.)
🎨 Remix everywhere. On her tour, Doechii flips between eras and genres, weaving samples from Missy Elliott to Donna Summer into one sharp, chaotic collage. Meanwhile, Wplace turned the internet into one giant pixel canvas. Both feel like fun snapshots of creativity as collective remix.
→ Watch Doechii’s performance
→ Explore Wplace
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
-MG