Foreword

Design is not a job. It is not a tool or a strategy. Design is a way of being in the world.

 

It is how we choose to see — with empathy.

How we choose to listen — with curiosity.

How we choose to act — with imagination, courage, and care.

 

When I first encountered the ideas behind Designing the X, I didn’t just read them. I recognized them. They resonated deeply, not because they were familiar, but because they revealed something I had always felt.

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This book speaks to the designer in all of us — not the one who sits in front of a screen sketching icons or products, but anyone who wakes up each morning and tries to make something better. A conversation. A company. A society. A culture. A future.

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Design is not just a discipline. It is a way of seeing — and of feeling — the world. It is how we respond to complexity not with fear, but with an open mind. It is how we move from reaction to intention, from function to meaning, from isolation to co-creation.

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Designing the X was conceived in that fragile and fertile space between ambiguity and action. It emerged from conversations across continents and disciplines, among designers, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists who shared a single belief: that design has the power not just to solve problems, but to reveal them; not just to improve systems, but to reimagine them; not just to answer questions, but to ask better one.

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The “X” in the title is deliberate. It represents the unknown — the emergent, the unformed, the space of possibility. It is the variable that can only be defined through experience, through process, and through synthesis. 

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That “X” is both a mystery and a promise. It stands for the space where our intuition begins. It is the blank canvas, the leap of faith, the trembling silence before the music starts. And it is in that space that the beauty of design — and the truth of humanity — comes alive.

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I’ve spent my life exploring this mystery. From a small town in Italy, drawing with passion in the margins of notebooks, to boardrooms in St. Paul, New York and Seoul, leading global teams across brands and borders — I’ve seen firsthand what design can do when it’s guided not by ego, but by purpose. When it becomes a dialogue, not a monologue. When it welcomes diversity and contradiction and still finds harmony.

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Designing the X captures this beautifully. In that sense, this book is not a map. It is a compass. It doesn’t offer a single path forward — it offers a way to navigate the future.

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We live in an era of supercomplexity — where the pace of change is accelerating beyond the reach of any single method, model, or mindset. Traditional disciplines, even when combined, often fall short in addressing the entangled crises of our time: environmental collapse, social fragmentation, technological disruption, and economic inequality. In the face of these challenges, design offers something essential: a means to think and act in conditions where cause and effect are opaque, where the outcome is uncertain, and where the stakeholders are many.

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Design invites us to engage the full spectrum of human experience — rational and emotional, analytical and intuitive, scientific and poetic. It demands that we hold paradoxes without resolving them too quickly. It asks us to remain open, adaptive, and humble. And it insists that we do so together.

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The future cannot be designed in isolation. It must be co-created.

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This is the deeper argument of Designing the X. Drawing from decades of work across industries, cultures, and academic institutions, the authors propose a vision of design not as a set of tools, but as a mindset: a human capacity for synthesis, meaning-making, and transformation.

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In this vision, the designer is not a solitary genius. The designer is a conductor — a guide, a translator, a connector of humans and ideas. They are “people in love with people”, as I like to call them. With care and sensitivity, the design conductor orchestrates the voices of many: users, stakeholders, scientists, business leaders, artists, policymakers, citizens. They do not impose harmony; they make space for discord and diversity to coexist productively. They give form to dialogue. They turn friction into fuel.

 

The process of design, as this book reveals, is not linear. It is fluid, recursive, embodied. Like a vortex, it gathers insight, energy, and tension as it moves. At its best, it is both grounded and visionary — capable of engaging reality as it is while imagining what it might become.

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Designing the X takes us on a journey through this process. It offers frameworks grounded in practice and illustrated through case studies that span the globe — from urban innovation and affordable housing to sustainable development and speculative futures. It introduces us to polymathic teams and radical thinkers. And it reminds us that design is not about perfection. It is about progress. It is about participating in the ongoing evolution of the world around us.

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What makes this book so timely — and timeless — is that it does not celebrate design as an isolated act of creativity. Instead, it positions design as an integrative force, one that can bridge the artificial boundaries between disciplines, between people, and between present and future.

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Design is not just a response to crisis. It is a rehearsal for what comes next.

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In that spirit, this book invites us to reframe design as a form of hope — active, critical, and courageous. It is hope not as wishful thinking, but as intentional action in the face of uncertainty. Hope as strategy. Hope as infrastructure. Hope as method.

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There is, of course, an urgency to this invitation. We are living through a moment of profound transition — cultural, technological, ecological. The stakes are high. But the authors of Designing the X do not succumb to despair. Nor do they fall into naïve optimism. They choose what I would call “creative optimism” - a belief that we can and must imagine alternatives, not in spite of complexity, but because of it.

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They remind us that design is not neutral. It always reflects choices — about who is included, what is valued, and what future we are building toward. Design can be extractive or regenerative, exclusionary or inclusive. Which is why ethics, empathy, and equity must be at the core of any design process.

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The book makes a strong case for design literacy — for bringing design into education, into leadership, into systems thinking. Not because everyone should be a designer in the traditional sense, but because everyone is already shaping the world around them in ways big and small. If we are all participants in shaping the future, then we all need the tools and mindsets to do so wisely.

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Above all, Designing the X is a celebration of plurality. It honors complexity without collapsing it. It respects expertise without fetishizing it. And it elevates the lived experience of people — users, communities, collaborators — as vital sources of insight and innovation.

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This is a deeply generous book. It gives us language to describe what many of us have long felt: that design is not a luxury, not an afterthought, not the “last step” in innovation. It is the connective tissue — the means by which ideas become actions, and actions become impact.

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It is a book that dares to ask big questions, while offering practical pathways forward. It does not offer quick fixes or silver bullets. Instead, it gives us a richer, deeper understanding of what it means to design in an age of complexity, change, and interconnectedness.

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To read this book is to be reminded of something essential: that we are all designers, whether we call ourselves that or not. That every choice we make — what to build, what to change, what to protect — is a design decision. And that the future is not written. It is designed.

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To the quiet leaders and bold visionaries,

To the strategists, artists, engineers, and activists,

To the rebels who lead with love,

To the teams who argue, laugh, and create together,

To the teens drawing spaceships on their notebook,

To my daughter and son, and their generation, who already design their days with wonder — 

This book is for you.

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And if you, like me, believe that ideas are seeds and design is how we help them grow — then welcome. You are exactly where you need to be.

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