Parable of the Redesigner

For the past week or so, a phrase has been knocking around in my mind that I cannot shake, so I share it with you now: There will come soft rains.

“There Will Come Soft Rains” is the name of a beautiful short story by the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, which he published in 1950 in response to World War II. (It also appears as a chapter in his beloved novel, The Martian Chronicles.) It tells the tale of a smart home set in California in 2026, a land now devoid of humans after a nuclear war.

Miraculously, the house has survived, and automatic systems continue to attend to it, attempting to serve the humans they don’t realize now exist only as burnt silhouettes on the wall. The housekeeping is fastidious; the hospitality is gracious. I will let you discover the end for yourself, but I will say this: As a teenager growing up facing the existential terror of a deadly arms race, it haunted me then as it does now. 

The phrase itself is an homage, taken from a 1918 poem of the same name by the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Sara Teasdale as her response to World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. It is the deceased home-dweller’s favorite poem, and the mechanical voice recites it in the evening on schedule. Teasdale’s message, now intertwined with Bradbury’s, is equally poignant: Regardless of what humans do to the world or each other, nature will re-emerge, indifferent to our many violences.  

Rains, both soft and hard, have come to California to help extinguish the fires that still rage in a neighborhood similar to one imagined by Bradbury and, perhaps more famously, by writer Octavia Butler, who — almost to the day — predicted the exact Los Angeles zip codes to be devastated by climate change, racism, misogyny, late-stage capitalism, authoritarianism, and wildfire in her novel Parable of the Sower.

“We had a fire today,” reads a Feb. 1, 2025, diary entry in the book, marking the beginning of the end. Since the fires in Southern California began, many passages from her work have been shared online, one of which stands out as both a touchstone and a lifeline: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you.”

Humans have touched so much and have been changed so little, at least, so it may appear to anyone alarmed by news of the day… after day, after day. A new government and unelected actors are taking sledgehammers to complex systems and social norms, to government, business, safety nets, and fundamental rights.  

In Bradbury’s cautionary tale, even the most advanced silicon creations could not save humans from ourselves or the planet from us. Butler, who weaved her own poetic reference by naming her novel after a Bible story, offers a simple seed of agency in the face of terrible things: God is change. Embrace it, even if it appears to be too late.

It feels like the right advice. So, as best we can, let’s touch, change, resist, build and build upon, read poems, and tell stories. Let’s plant seeds. Let’s be changed.

In the spirit of sharing phrases in my head, let me send you into your week with this paraphrased thought inspired by Butler: All that you touch, you redesign. All that you redesign redesigns everything.

What are we going to redesign for good?*

More news, inspiration, and poetry below. Wishing you a calm and safe week ahead.

Ellen McGirt
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The Big Think

“There Will Come Soft Rains”
(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Podcasts

Design Asis a podcast series that asks a diverse array of design practitioners to imagine a better world together. Who does design belong to, and who is it for? How does it serve us — all of us — and how can we learn to better understand its future and our own? As the design world comes to grips with an industry in turmoil, season two offers a blueprint for a brighter, more peaceful, and more playful future. 

Host Lee Moreau sets the stage:

In early 2023, some of the most talented designers I’ve ever worked with were let go by Google, one of the world’s largest and richest companies. It was part of a series of cost-cutting efforts at the tech giant that not only gutted its design capabilities, but sounded an alarm throughout the entire professional design ecosystem.

Later that year, in October, the legendary design consultancy IDEO (and one of my former employers) laid off a third of its workforce, cementing industry watchers’ worst fears. 

These two events bookended a year of seismic setbacks — the demise of the corporate design practice at J&J, for example — causing social impact designer Robert Fabricant to declare that 2023 “felt like the closing of a chapter.”

In a sobering long read published by Fast Company, Fabricant posited that the era of “big design” may have ended: “The very people who advocated successfully for a ‘seat at the table’ when design first made inroads into big business (and jump-started thousands of creative careers) find themselves at major crossroads with fewer seats left.” This “big design freak-out,” he said, revealed major fault lines in the relationship between design and industry that are still in the process of shaking out. 

While this may not be all bad for the overall state of design — evolution and innovation are inherently uncomfortable, right? — I can affirm from countless conversations that it’s been quite a journey for many in our community. The now constant reflection on the idea that design’s mandate has shifted, or that design leadership needs to be reinvented, has become exhausting. 

Not to mention the state of the world.

So, by the time summer rolled around, I confess I had grown tired of this narrative and the damage it has been doing to the community.

And that’s when I got the boost I didn’t entirely know I needed.

More here.

Observed

Hey! Remember when America leaned fascist? Steven Heller does. 

Jessica Helfand remembers Véronique Vienne, who died recently at 82. “Véronique loved design and she loved designers. In her family’s home in Languedoc, she would invite friends to come stay, eat, swim — and argue. “Most of my friends are designers, artists, or brainy types,” she wrote to me in the summer of 2022, “and I enjoy our long impromptu conversations about arcane topics such as typography, semiotics, or visual literacy… how I wish you too could come and stay here… with all my graphic designer friends who argue endlessly over typefaces and politics while lingering after lunch.”

Who’s really behind the mass exodus from TikTok to Xiaohongshu (or RedNote), the Chinese short-form video app? As Garbage Day explains it, it’s not a government psyop, but Black social media influencers. “According to Google search caches, accounts such as @the_ronin_sage and @smashleyboyd were first to use the #TikTokRefugees and #rednote hashtags… And in the case of @smashleyboyd, in her first video about RedNote, she explained that she had already heard about the app because, ‘all the black girlies were on here talking about how it is over there and it is, indeed, cute as shit over there.’”

What comes after design thinking? “Design thinking was created for a different era: a time when new products or services, often the brainchildren of tech visionaries, sought to empower individuals with the ethos to ‘think different,’” says Deniz Dönmez, a design strategist at ATÖLYE. “However, today’s challenges call for moving beyond this individual focus to think and act in ways that transcend ‘the individual.’ It’s clear that current social and economic systems are struggling to sustain life.”

From Davos: AI is rapidly changing building design. “While opportunities for AI in design have, so far, been mostly focused on streamlining processes through digital tools, it has the potential to create more fundamental changes in how buildings are used and operated, and how they connect with people and wider urban systems.”

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