Preface

Industrial designers were born out of a marketing realization that more beautiful things sell. Even before the dawn of algorithmically-driven hyper-mass marketing movements online, the human psyche has evolved to like shiny objects. Oftentimes, even at the expense of the user’s own long-term health, wealth, or planet.

In 1934, Industrial Designer, Raymond Loewy streamlined the once clunky, dirt-catching icebox into a smooth, easy-to-clean form. This furthered the promotion of modernity in the kitchen. Sales jumped more than 300% in a year, and Time later reported a five-fold growth by 1936.

In 1956, Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams designed the Braun SK4 (‘Snow White’s Coffin’. They turned a cabinet-like radiogram (radio and record player) into honest, minimal machine with a clear lid celebrating the tech instead of hiding it. It was recognized at the 1957 Triennial, a MoMa piece and was widely cited for kicking off modern hi-fi aesthetics.

In 1985, Michael Graves designed the Alessi 9093 kettle. What was once a mundane stovetop kettle became a playful post-modern sculpture (the bird whistle!). It became Alessia’s best-selling product and remained a long-running company bestseller.

James Dyson reinvented the vacuum cleaner with the DC01 bagless vacuum. He made the “guts” visible with a transparent bin and upright, engineered stance. Ultimately, turning a chore device into tech you show off. It was a best-selling vacuum in the UK for over eighteen months and took about 47% of the upright market by 2001. A monumental chunk as a newcomer to the once-sleepy category.

Lastly, in the 2010’s, Sarah Krauss elevated the humble reusable bottle via fashion-forward finishes and silhouette, turning what was once just a simple vessel to carry your water into a status “hydration symbol.” Revenue surpassed $100 million by 2016, pushing the whole category upscale.

Across these examples, four distinct patterns emerge, core veins through which industrial design exerts its cultural and commercial power. First there is Signal Shift. This is where the redesigned object broadcasts a new cultural meaning (tech, pride, fashion, eco-status). The second is, Interface Clarity. Industrial design simplifies the use (Round thermostat, iMac handle, RAZR’s thinness telegraphing portability). Thirdly, Form = Marketing. The object becomes its own ad (Coldspot’s streamlining; transparent Dyson bin). Lastly, we have, Category Resets. This is where competitors follow aesthetics/UX, expanding the market (think Walkman, OXO, Nest).

The role of the industrial designer in today’s marketplace is largely defined by differentiation and innovation within a given category, often serving the financial objectives of organizations accountable to their shareholders. Our task, in many cases, is to make the act of purchasing and the use of an object more engaging, pleasurable, and desirable, fueling cycles of consumption in the pursuit of growth. This has long been the prevailing model. But what if there were another lens, one that invites us to reimagine our work as a service not only to markets, but to humanity itself?

We live in an era where raw material extraction is responsible for over 90% of global biodiversity loss. That alone should halt us in our tracks. But it doesn’t. Design is in need of a desperate evolution, not simply to create, but to reclaim, repurpose, and regenerate. It is time for us to move from linear systems of waste, to circular, regenerative loops of stewardship.

Beyond the data, there is something even more severe: our severed connection to place. To soil. To story. In this age of extraction, what’s being pulled from the earth isn’t just material, it’s meaning. The linear systems we’ve built don’t just strip resources, they strip purpose.

This book has been growing inside me for over 20 years. It began as a gut instinct, an itch of contradiction, while designing a biomimetic wind turbine for my thesis as an undergrad in industrial design. Back then, I was devouring books in philosophy, ecology, engineering, and systems thinking. Patterns began to emerge. Patterns that echoed through the voices of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the same warnings about overproduction, overconsumption, and the dangerous delusion that humans are separate from or superior to the very systems that allow us to exist.

Books were one of two forces that expanded my perspective. In my life, there are two moments that left me in a lasting state of indignant acceptance. The first would come on the heels of quitting design college my first year in. I was enticed by Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael. Quinn is an excellent writer of parables. Ishmael, being the 600 pound gorilla orator he was, had a way of telling mankind’s story in such an etic, onlooker way that moved me to question my own story. The story of modern man followed. What kind of designer did I want to be? Did I even want to become a designer? Now that I was able to see and connect the dots around what myth was and the power it holds to shape entire civilizations. His parables moved me to leave college and take a cross country trip to Yoncalla, Oregon. I had moved back to St. Louis, Missouri and heard through a friend of a gathering. It was called the, Eco Raw Tribal Gathering. Yea. I know…and yes, it was exactly the hippie, tree hugging, back-to-the-earth kind of event you’re picturing.

After seven days of gleaning lunches and dinners from neighboring gardens, bathing in streams, sitting in fields talking about intentional communities, natural-material building techniques, and many others, I awoke. I breached my tent to the crisp morning air, noticing that the sun hadn’t quite peaked over the hilltop edge. As I meandered down the path towards the meeting area I picked wild blackberries the size of golf balls for breakfast…and it hit me. An epiphany of sorts.

I was out there because I had quit design school and needed perspective. After reading Viktor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, I took to heart his charge that industrial designers bear much of the responsibility for the waste we produce, and I didn’t want to be part of that. But that morning, as the sun peeked over the valley ridgeline, I thought, “I can change it from within!” If the profession’s status quo was to design with little regard for a product’s end of life, or what implications of the mind and by extension, cultural myth, then I would make it my mission to use my degree to enter organizations and rebuild the scaffolding of design logic from the inside out.

Looking back, I realize that this is just the kind of ultimate naivety that drives a twenty-year-old toward a contempt for change. This book is somewhat of the culmination of that naivety and over twenty years working in the design field, turned into actionable insight.

The second part of my story broke my logic into a never-ending spiderweb of philosophical debate. For any philosophy geeks or majors reading this, you get it. For the rest of us, just know philosophy is like chasing your own shadow with a flashlight, you never catch it, but you learn a lot about the light.

It was the summer of 1998. I was seventeen and staying with my mom at her lake house on Buckeye Lake, Ohio. In my youth, I was quite the explorer. My grandparents had just passed, and there were new places to roam, one of them a sixty-by-thirty-foot pole barn stacked floor to ceiling with the artifacts of their lives.

One bright summer afternoon, I wandered into the barn as I often did, searching for some forgotten treasure to amaze and bewilder. Resting on the hood of an ancient John Deere tractor were a few cardboard boxes labeled Mauve’s Library. Mauve was my great-grandmother, who had lived to the remarkable age of one hundred and four.

When I pulled the boxes down to investigate, I discovered within them the writing from Emerson, Kant, and Thoreau, each bearing original copyrights from the early to late 1800s. They were exquisite, gold-leafed volumes, pressed shut for so many decades that I could open them only partway, as I would risk cracking their time-tortured spines.

I spent my entire summer on the dock rifling through them. The mental gymnastics that the great philosophers required of their readers is profound. It changed me forever and put me on a path to question everything. To uncover the underlying premise behind everything we know. Systems thinking critiqued and unbridled.

Intent Continuum isn’t a linear manifesto, it’s a systems-thinking meditation on design, a looping dialogue about how we might rediscover connection through the practice of creation. Inside, you’ll find essays that trace the hidden feedback loops driving design decisions, the infrastructures that entangle industry and ecology, and the emerging languages of regeneration. It weaves together biomimicry, culture, myth, and material intelligence to propose a living design ethos, one grounded in reciprocity, resilience, and meaning. Ultimately, it invites a shift from today’s user-centered paradigm toward a human–cosmos–centered practice: a meta-design framework where every form, process, and narrative is evaluated for its resonance with human flourishing, ecological balance, and spiritual integrity.

If at some point it feels like I’m taking the long way through these topics, it’s because I am. That’s how ecosystems work. That’s how real change works. Complex. Interwoven. Nonlinear. With that, I invite you to flip to the subject matter that excites you the most and invokes curiosity, or simply read straight through.

Design is not an isolated profession; it is a wholly implicated process woven through the global economy. Every sketch line tugs on a supply chain that starts in a mine or field and ends, far too often, in landfill. Materials, manufacturing, finance, transport, marketing, use, disposal: the designer’s hand is embedded in them all. Design is the operating language of modern society, and like any language it can console or colonize, regenerate or exhaust.

For the past two centuries that language has been conjugated to serve a particular sentence: make more, faster, cheaper, finance it with debt, tell a story called growth, and bury the consequences “elsewhere.” The products that shape our days are drafted inside that sentence. They carry the myths baked into our debt-based economies, myths about endless extraction, about convenience as virtue, about self-worth measured in upgrades. And because objects become scripts for living, those myths ripple outward, shaping how we treat friends, neighbors, strangers, and the planet that hosts us all.

Intent Continuum is written to challenge what we think we know about that sentence, and to arm designers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and forward-looking citizens with practices that write a different one. In this manifesto, the designer becomes a translator, not just of user needs, but of planetary thresholds, material memory, and generational ethics. We no longer speak for one audience. We speak with the world, on behalf of the future.

The False Neutrality of the Brief

Traditional design briefs read like moral blank pages: list the target market, meet the cost, hit the launch date. Yet every brief is already a story in motion. Specify virgin aluminum and you conscript open-pit mines; choose overnight shipping and you endorse airborne freight emissions; build “just strong enough” and you guarantee landfill within the decade. Neutrality is an illusion: to design is to legislate matter, energy, labour, and time.

The Debt Engine Behind the Drafting Table

Money enters modern economies as interest-bearing debt; servicing that debt requires ever-expanding throughput. Design studios, eager to prove relevance, solve for speed, scale, and novelty, comfortably aligned with quarterly clocks. But debt-fueled design seldom asks whether a future generation will inherit an asset or an invoice. One generation’s convenience becomes the next generation’s clean-up budget.

Myth as Operating System

Step back and the economic machinery reveals deeper software: cultural myths. I consume, therefore I am. New equals better. Ownership is freedom. These stories animate UX flows and billboard taglines; they seep into the psyche as common sense. Objects whisper them a thousand times a day: a disposable coffee lid says time is too scarce to wash a mug; a glued-shut battery says your curiosity is not welcome inside.

If design helped encode those myths, design can help rewrite them.

From Line to Loop

The alternative sketched in this book begins with a radical but ancient question:

Will this still be welcome, seven generations from now?

That question flips the industrial diagram from a line into a loop. It demands that every gram borrowed from Earth has a planned return path; that every feature serves a genuine human need; that every act of making leaves a trace of regeneration, soil restored, skills shared, stories enlarged.

What This Book Offers

Origin Futures is divided into six arcs:

Diagnosis – Why speed, extraction, isolation, and scale became virtues, and what they cost.
Ethic – A call to intentional design, replacing “move fast” with “move wisely.”
Myth – How debt and consumerism script behavior, and how animistic counter-stories reclaim relationship.
Material & Circular Practice – Tools to choose, loop, and steward matter.
Future Methods – Biomimicry, glocal sourcing, studio micro-guilds, and AI collaborators that amplify care instead of churn.
Capstone – A seven-generation design challenge that turns theory into community inheritance.

Each chapter pairs critique with experiment, narrative with worksheet, so that reflection converts swiftly into action. You will meet rituals (or, if the word jars, intentional pauses) like the Intention Circle, and metrics like Return-Rate KPI that reward circular flow over unit churn. AI appears not as a savior but as a co-worker, extracting hidden bias from briefs, scouting regional materials, simulating century-scale impacts.

An Invitation, Not a Prescription

This book does not pretend to own the future; no single discipline or author could. Instead it invites you into a conversation that is already underway, from repair cafés in Nairobi to biomaterial labs in Helsinki, from coastal communities re-seeding kelp forests to venture studios swapping “hyper-growth” for “regenerative yield.” You hold in your hands a field guide to that conversation.

If you are a designer, you will find new metrics and maps.

If you are a business leader, new models that turn take-make-waste into borrow-use-return.

If you are a citizen wondering why your goods travel 30,000 kilometres (~20,000 miles) before you touch them, new questions to ask and new cooperatives to build.

Why Now

We live in a decade with multiple curves. Climate risk, resource depletion, social isolation are turning exponentially together. Yet so is our collective capacity to imagine otherwise. The same tools that once accelerated extraction can be aimed at regeneration. The same networks that pushed sameness can propagate place-based diversity. The hinge is intention.

Permanence was a myth; continuity, life passing life forward, is the achievable reality.

May the pages ahead help you design for continuity.

May every object you touch become a better teacher.

I look forward to offering you more in the Spring of 2026.

Rob

INTENT CONTINUUM

PREFACE

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