How did we go from building cathedrals to building trash? When did "built to break" become our business model?

Our great-grandparents built houses that stood for centuries and tools that outlived their makers. Today, the average smartphone dies in two years, fast fashion dissolves after a dozen wears, and appliances break the day after their warranty expires.

We live on a planet drowning in our creations, yet we can't stop creating. Every factory churns, every 3D printer hums, every assembly line rolls forward, adding to a world already choking on abundance. The old answer was built to last: make it once, use it forever. The current answer is built to break: make it cheap, toss it quick: planned obsolescence. When "disposable" stopped being a convenience and became a catastrophe, neither approach worked for a finite earth with infinite appetite.

So what if the future of making isn't about lasting longer or breaking faster, but about returning home? hashtag#DesignShift: from build to break to built to compost.

What if we started designing like nature does—where nothing is waste, everything feeds something else, and the end of one thing becomes the beginning of another? We can keep creating, but only if what we create knows how to die well. Built to compost means built to complete the circle, to honor the cycles that sustain life itself.

In a world that doesn't need more things, maybe we need things that know when to become something else entirely.

The world is on fire, and our interfaces are still asking people to “swipe to buy.”

For decades, we, designers have been the architects of distraction. We've optimized for convenience, for frictionless experiences, for the path of least resistance. “Good design,” we’ve said, “doesn’t make you think.”

But in an age of interconnected crises—ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and spiritual emptiness—we must ask ourselves:

• What if the ease we've designed for has made it too easy to ignore what demands our attention?

• What if the design we've celebrated has accelerated our collective crisis?

• What if the metrics we've optimized for have measured everything except what truly matters?

Humans (and organizations) are not simple, targeted, linear, or one-dimensional. We're layered, complex, confusing, and our depth and breadth shouldn't be confined to a one-minute elevator ride. Yet, we live in a world obsessed with packaging people into consumable niches, push out short-form content, and make up our minds based on simplified stereotypes.

In design, this shows up in the way we craft personas, design simple icons, or try to summarize things on simple post-it notes, we often simplify narratives to a point where they become useless or even harmful.

DesignShift: How can we shift design practices away from reductive single stories toward more nuanced, layered narratives?

I pasted an Oscar Wilde quote into Notion the other day. As soon as I did, the Ai symbol popped up with the “improve writing” suggestion.

I didn’t click it, but it made me think…If Oscar Wilde was alive today, would he too have been lured to change his words with Ai? Would he have trusted Ai more than his creative intuition?

Ai would most likely have edited Wilde's voice and words by removing “unnecessary” words and simplifying sentences. But would it have been an improvement? If his work is no longer in his voice, how can we say it’s better?

DesignShift: from artificial to authentic