Darren Yeo has a lovely piece in DOC (from 2024, so a lil' old maybe) about Naoto Fukasawa’s case for “design feeling” over “design thinking.” Fukasawa is one of the most influential industrial designers alive. He’s an IDEO alum, is on Muji’s design board, director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, creator of the wall-mounted CD player that’s in MoMA’s permanent collection. His whole philosophy, which he calls “Without Thought,” is about designing for unconscious behavior: objects so attuned to how people actually move through daily life that they disappear into use.
In Yeo’s piece, Fukasawa is at a design trade event, trying to speak while a room full of seasoned designers talks over him. Then he gets the mic:
“The rational mind makes mistakes as the mind can only focus on one thing at a time. But feeling is different. It’s simultaneous. The feeling of the chair, the carpet, the drink, the flushness of your face and temperature of the room. It can all be felt at once. And if you cannot feel anything, you cannot be creative.”
The org design version of the same problem
- Most org design work is relentlessly cognitive, focused on operating models, domains, decision rights, frameworks and canvases and matrices. A lot of that is important, good, rigorous work. And it's typically sequential, rational analysis that can only hold one thing at a time.
- Feeling is instantaneous and multi-threaded. You can sense the temperature of a meeting, the weight of a reorg announcement, the texture of how two people actually collaborate all at once, without a framework. If your org design practice has no feeling in it, no sensitivity to the lived, material, embodied experience of work, is it design at all?
- Wholeness is often exclusively focused on the idea that people should be able to bring their, whole best self to work. "Whole” has to include the sensing, feeling, bodily self and the cognitive slice, but practices that cultivate this kind of sensitivity tend to land as either corporate cringe or unserious, spiritual, self-help. And yet the Bauhaus had students doing breathing exercises and movement work before they touched materials. We’ve so thoroughly internalized the idea that work is cognitive output (at least in corporate spaces) that anything involving the body or the senses feels like it doesn’t belong. A product designer who refuses to touch prototypes, who only works in wireframes and specs, would be rightly called out for being disconnected from their craft, like an architect who never visits the site or a chef who won't taste. Sensory and emotional engagement is the discipline.
- We org designers have material too: meetings, conversations, the felt experience of showing up to work on a Monday. Patterns like Check In & Out are a small part of how teams develop the perceptual skill to notice what’s actually happening before they take action. Dismiss these rituals at your own risk.
Bauhaus as org design
The Bauhaus was a design school and a way of organizing, with Masters and apprentices working together over shared meals in shared studios. Practicing, breaking bread, merrymaking, learning, all woven together. Community is method is community.
This is what I mean when I talk about "new ways of working and organizing," a super intentional phrase I use constantly that I’m not sure really registers with anyone. “New ways of working” is familiar enough to nod along to. Sure, async! Agile! Stand-ups! But “new ways of organizing” the structure itself, not just the habits within it, requires seeing that method as designable; designing it well requires the same kind of embodied sensitivity that any good design practice demands. The Bauhaus didn’t teach people new techniques inside an existing school structure, it reinvented the school! You can’t get to Psychological Safety by running a workshop inside a structure that punishes vulnerability.
How ideas spread
Japanese students study at the Bauhaus and return home. Architect Renshichirō Kawakita, who never visited the school himself, works from their contacts and translated manuscripts, organizing meetings, contextualizing the ideas for a Japanese setting, and establishing Kōsei education. It moves from architectural pedagogy into art education through Fukujiro Gōtō, and decades later, it emerges in Fukasawa’s “Without Thought” philosophy and Muji’s wall-mounted CD player, which turns the memory of pulling a fan cord into a musical experience.
This is how patterns spread, mandate-free and market-driven, through people who inhabit an idea, carry it somewhere new, and let it adapt. Whenever you see an org design or people team try to “scale” a way of working by writing a playbook and emailing it to 500 people, I want you to think about how Kawakita did it instead: translating, convening, contextualizing, and letting it become something new.
Good further reading here in AIGA.
Have a great week!