Next: Presencing
The most valuable design work today starts with interpretation.
There was a time when the brief framed the designer’s work. It assumed clarity about the problem, set the objective, and proposed the path.
Today, design has less to do with building and more to do with sense-making*. Shouldn’t we go back to seeking designers for perspective, rather than output? Asking them to sense and then frame possibilities? To design for emerging futures (rather than instructions?)
Observe, Experiment, Synthesize
A better approach would look like a three-part loop that starts with a quest:
Presencing This is when the designer’s human qualities come in. I borrow the term from Markus Peschl’s Theory U*, a blends of the words ‘presence’ and ‘sensing,’ to mean sensing the highest future potential to bring it into the now. It calls for the designer being in the space where they can sense what is emerging, and which the brief deviates us from. (Link below.)
Adaptation This is when we interpret what we’re sensing by testing, applying, reframing, and transposing essential ideas to new environments. Think of adaptation by mimicry in nature—selective, responsive, attuned. The result may be an object, a system, or an action, and what follows is more important: how that adaptation shapes understanding and behavior, and the new possibilities it opens.
Synthesis This is when new understanding generates frameworks, logics, and principles. Rather than closing a loop, the designer offers an opening: insight that can be carried forward, reused, and reinterpreted by others (even beyond the moment.)
This triangle is a cycle of emergence, and it follows context in real time, rather than plan for scenarios that will inevitably change.
Living Knowledge: The Noösphere
To design in this way is to contribute to something larger: a shared, evolving field of knowledge.
This field has a name—the noösphere.
I first came across this term reading Drucker’s Graphesis*, and it was originally proposed by Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin. The noösphere refers to the sphere of human thought. Just like the biosphere is made of living organisms, the noösphere is made of ideas, interpretations, understandings, a dynamic layer where human insight, memory, experience, and imagination circulate.
When designers observe, interpret, and synthesize, they’re contributing to the noösphere. They’re increasing what’s available for others to draw from and connecting knowledge, making it usable, more alive.
Designing Through Presencing
In Theory U. Otto Scharmer offers a model for this kind of work:
Observe → Retreat → Let Go → Presencing → Crystallize → Prototype → Perform.
In that sequence, presencing is the inflection point, where futures begin to form, to open ‘niches’ for future use or purpose. These spaces become essential progressively, with use.
Crucially, designer’s working at this inflection point don’t start with fixed briefs. They listen, sense, and act from what’s taking shape. Beyond fulfilling a brief, they define new spaces and shape the conditions for emergence.
The outcome is clarity, relevance, connection, offering new logic to emerging situations.
Bye Bye, Brief
To extract the full potential of design in the emerging world, we need to tap into humans’ diverse perspectives, interpretation, and decision making.
Let’s meet this moment by reshaping the role of design, grounded on the individual, guided by interpretation.
*Links to sources mentioned:
Theory U: From potentials and co-becoming to bringing forth emergent innovation and shaping a thriving future. On what it means to "learn from the future as it emerges", by Markus F. Peschl
Graphesis, by Johanna Drucker
yes, The Brief needs to die as it is the very proof / symbol of a handoff between ‘strategy’ and ‘design’ (in and of themselves imperfect snd often inaccurate terms / camps