The Hello You Experiment.
This is not a manifesto against business.
It is a manifesto against the idea that business as usual,
is the highest form of organization humans can imagine.
Design has never been the loyal servant of “business as usual.”
It has always been the quiet rebellion,
the human insistence that our systems can stretch wider,
reach deeper, mean more.
And sooner or later, every designer has to make a choice.
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I. The Red Pill
To one side lies the Management of the system.
You know the rules.
The craft of keeping the architecture standing
when the environment wants to shake it loose.
Here live consistency, definitions, and continuity.
The work is steady, necessary, grounding.
There is meaning in honoring the structures
that allow others to build.
It takes commitment,
the kind that doesn’t vanish
when pressure rises
or when the work stops being easy.
But structure is only a template for probable success,
not a heartbeat that makes it worth it.
⸻
II. The Blue Pill
To the other side, Invention lies.
The disorderly frontier where collaboration fractures into possibility,
where ideas sprint ahead of language,
where intuition leads and explanation follows.
This is the terrain of leaps.
Of experiments.
Of believing that something greater is possible
even before it has a shape to hold.
It’s a full commitment to design meaningfully,
where we reach for problems that matter,
where we learn to sort what is essential
from what is merely familiar.
Here, you move because something in you insists:
I can’t imagine doing anything else.
But imagination, untethered, can burn out
without something to anchor it.
⸻
III. The False Choice
Most designers are told to pick a side.
Red or blue.
Steady or bold.
Protect the system or break it open.
But the binary itself is the illusion.
We are no strangers to empathy, and the love of design requires both.
Dada reminds us that everything overlaps:
structure bends,
chaos patterns itself,
and no creative act survives in a straight line.
Contradiction isn’t a flaw, it’s the spark.
Evolution amplifies the lesson:
species endure not by over-optimizing one instinct,
but by carrying multiple strategies at once.
Variation is resilience.
Rigidity is extinction.
Adaptation doesn’t require abandonment,
only the courage to change shapes
without losing your core.
We are built to evolve, not to choose a single mode of being.
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IV. The Invisible Choice
There is a third choice — the purple path.
Not the midpoint.
Not the average.
Not the compromise.
The refusal.
The refusal to reduce yourself
to one role, one identity,
one sanctioned definition of design.
The refusal to walk away
when the work becomes difficult
or when the system forgets why it exists.
The refusal to give up on the future
you still quietly believe in.
It is the ability to carry structure
and imagination
without tearing in half.
To maintain what works
while questioning what doesn’t.
To support the team
while reshaping how the team thinks.
To bring reliability and originality
in the same breath.
This is not indecision.
It is evolution.
Purple itself is a kind of rebellion,
not a wavelength on the spectrum,
but something our minds invent,
a composite of red and blue
born when the straight line of color
is bent into a circle.
An adaptation to see what others might miss;
the fruit hidden in plain sight,
the signal tucked inside the noise,
a possibility that only appears
when you refuse to choose just one way of seeing.
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V. AI Compression
And in this moment,
with AI now woven into everything,
the stakes rise.
AI cannot become the machine
that shrinks meaning into summaries
and rolls human experience up into metrics.
That is the old pattern, the one we are trying to outgrow.
AI must make us see more, not less.
Prototype faster, not narrower.
Understand each other more deeply, not more generically.
Expand possibility, not collapse it.
Strengthen variation, not erase it.
We must use AI to visualize futures
our organizations can’t yet imagine,
to collaborate in ways we haven’t learned,
and inspire those around us to see hope.
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VI. The Call
And so this moment, this choice, is yours alone:
Red: Manage.
Blue: Invent.
Purple: Collaborate.
Collaboration is shaped by loyalty to the future,
not loyalty to the system,
by the courage to show up when it matters,
and the willingness to commit
when others step back.
It is the choice that says:
I’m here.
I’m not turning away.
I’m staying until the future we prototype
stops being a feeling
and becomes something real.
Because some futures, the best ones,
are created by people who refuse
to walk away from each other.
Never give up on the future
you came here to design,
or on the people
designing it with you.
Welcome to the Hello You Experiment.
Invent
Collaborate
Management
