Seeking a “Minimum Viable Softness” — my proposed SXSW Panel
If we're so deliberate about what makes a product minimally viable, shouldn't we also consider what's minimally necessary for tech to operate within the limits of our relational obligations?
This piece previews my ongoing inquiry into what I call a Minimum Viable Softness — a riff on the tech world’s obsession with Minimum Viable Products. If we’re so deliberate about what makes a product minimally viable, shouldn’t we also consider what’s minimally necessary for innovation and technology to operate within the limits of our relational obligations?
I’ve reformatted this content into a SXSW Panel. If it resonates, consider upvoting me here. The full SXSW presentation will dive deeper; theory and practice. Thank you. Being on stage is an opportunity to share what I’m unlearning in my ongoing practice.
This story explores the concept of lines and their role in systems of control. I’ll be non-linear in my text, prioritizing urgency over structure.
Lines mark a path between defining points, establishing clear direction and boundaries. This is what makes lines dangerous.
My rebellion against lines began when I realized, in the most eingefleischt of ways, how they often serve as tools for domination and control, which is problematic in our era of multiple crises.
This insight came from my direct experience with hyper-regimented design thinking initiatives, loosely based on the Double Diamond, where I observed how easily lines can be instrumentalized for personal gain to the detriment of more desirable outcomes.
What was, and is, felt in the body evolved into an investigation of the origins and instrumentalization of lines as control mechanisms, revealing an operating system that aligns with Bayo Akomolafe’s question:
“What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?”
Or perhaps: what if our responses to crises are actually deepening them?
This isn’t solely about lines; it’s primarily about how lines function as convenient mechanisms of control when used in power-imbalanced contexts that emphasize materiality over theoretical or ethical objectives.
Institutionalism, Universalism & Solutionism
This is how innovation theater plays out in broad strokes: institutionalism establishes a certain discourse through ‘expert’ knowledge and institutions, a discourse assumed to be universal — norms, assumptions, and knowledge are generalized to every situation, dismissing culture or context. Solutionism then aligns with this discourse, problematizing certain realities over others in modern organizations, always aiming to change existing situations into desired outcomes. Maya Chopra explores these dynamics in her thesis, “Counteracting Dominant Design Through Intersectional Feminist Thought,” revealing how this approach often overlooks cultural nuances and alternative perspectives.
“Desired outcomes.” Desirable to whom? Diabetes medications are very desirable and profitable — more so than removing sugar from supermarkets. Prevention is rarely profitable (unless we’re talking about CMS’ value-based care arrangements, a topic in its own right).
These constructs — where seemingly beneficial solutions obscure more fundamental, systemic improvements — are so ingrained that they become invisible, dismissed as facts of life. Heidegger’s concept of reification.
The dissonance: design becomes paradoxically sustainable and unsustainable, future-making and de-futuring, problem-solving and problem-creating. There’s a gorgeous piece on this in She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation here.
This dualistic form of production is a “Pyrrhic victory” — short-term gains imply larger losses elsewhere.
Lines of Thought
Design researchers have attempted to theorize and conceptualize design practices for a long time but it wasn’t until the UK Design Council undertook the challenge of creating a framework to empirically define the design process that the double diamond, with its lines neatly separating project phases, emerged.
The convenience of lines comes into play here, becoming a grab-and-go approach and toolkit voraciously adopted by practitioners. This phenomenon aligns with what design scholars Lucy Kimbell and Cameron Tonkinwise term managerialism — the pervasive belief in professional management’s value and the systematic rollout of its methods and practices.
Managerialism has penetrated diverse social contexts (public institutions, civic organizations, civil society), and it has produced a specific form of technocentric rationalism that privileges scientism, leading to routine, dogmatic, and often inappropriate applications of scientific methods — essentially becoming a vehicle for articulating and realizing managerial priorities while suppressing nonconforming ways of being and knowledge-making.
We’re used to lines by now. They’re everywhere, slicing through our social fabric: Canceled | celebrated so that we can conveniently discard people the way we think we’re throwing away plastic (and eating it again as microplastic); Approved | rejected, with algorithms facilitating the classification of bodies in accordance with the value provided; Male | female debates, blah blah blah — are you with me?; the now old Mind | Body split — a convenient fiction that lets us treat bodies as machines in line to be optimized for productivity; etc.
We’ve been practicing drawing lines to separate things for millennia, arguably since our Eurochristian-Judeo God split man from nature by telling Adam and Eve, “You’re off this land, separate from nature now. Start sweating for your food.”And man began synthesizing his own food and everything else. That’s how we got to drink water from plastic containers. It’s this line that underlies all the others; this illusion of separateness that conceals our interconnectedness.
Power Games
Before illustrating other possible ways of being + knowledge production, I’ll bring one last example I learned from the late Nêgo Bispo, a Brazilian quilombola leader and philosopher who passed away in December of last year. (Quilombolas are Afro-Brazilian residents of quilombo settlements first established by escaped slaves in Brazil).
Nêgo Bispo invites us to consider soccer, a game ‘invented’ by colonizers. Imagine you’re in the bleachers, watching England vs France. Your favorite team is losing. Even if you have skills and tons of energy, one can’t jump over the barriers and join the game — the barriers are there to protect the game.
I used quotes around ‘invented’ because, similar to how the double diamond framework packaged pre-existing ideas without attribution, soccer was a very late innovation appropriated from being a people’s game. It was played in China as cuju (蹴鞠) and Greece as episkiros long before, but it is now FIFA’s proprietary game — a classic colonizer move of rebranding something existing as an innovation, then using it to establish control and profit.
Now consider a game created by non-linear thinkers: Capoeira.
Capoeira was invented by enslaved Africans in Brazil in the 16th century as a form of resistance. It combines martial arts, dance, and music. It is a circular form of technology that brings bodies into motion and “sintonia” (harmony, more or less). It strengthens bodies and increases self-understanding of one’s capabilities and those of other players (not opponents). More intriguingly, practitioners experience a holistic ‘sound-body’ connection: the experience renders the body porous, allowing it to be influenced by environmental vibrations while simultaneously affecting the environment itself (Kapchan 2015).
There’s no beginning or end, no winners or losers.
Practitioners can enter, exit, and create at will, in their own rhythm.
There are no sprints in Capoeira.
Capoeira embodies malícia, a playful wisdom thriving on surprise, misdirection, and adaptability. You get to be upside down, seeing the world from a different perspective. You can go backwards: design & deliver to discover & define a deeper problem.
The Capoeira circle is porous, allowing people to flow through it and bring new ideas. There’s no DEI in Capoeira, because there is no line dividing people. Meaning: it’s not about inviting people to the room. There’s no room.
It creates coherence across multiple bodies inhabiting the same kinesthetic system, regardless of identities. It’s a “collective effervescence” (Durkheim) and non-scripted “spontaneous communitas” (Turner), uniting flow and play — attributes proven optimal for combinatory opportunities of ideas coming together to create change, yet impossible to achieve within regimented, Taylorist, Ford-factory style constructs.
When power wants you tired and compliant, Capoeira will build your strength. When society demands productivity, hustle, and effectiveness, Capoeira encourages deep listening. When the system glorifies lone heroes, Capoeira shows us that we’re stronger together.
Seeking Dis-order
This body of work aims to disorient us purposely.
Being in line implies facing the same direction as others and refusing out-of-line possibilities. Direction isn’t casual; it’s organized. Getting out of line and losing our politeness in following lines disrupts the repetition of following, allowing lines to disappear and new ways of being to emerge.
One such tiny gesture: last year, marking my consulting practice’s 20th anniversary, I began distancing from linear frameworks to “stay with the trouble.”, reframing Technology as a political process of “bringing forth.” This bringing forth, while caring for a world coming undone and being human-decentered, is difficult — as is creating beyond points on lines.
But that’s what emergent design practice is about. It’s a constant practice of not returning, of departing from; we call it a practice because we gain new orientations through repeating unfamiliar patterns.
Just like playing the piano or the berimbau.
Lines & Solitude
Honk if you’re reading this, and maybe I’ll delete this whole section.
There’s a literal isolation in engaging with critical works on design, innovation, and technology. The process is perceived as unproductive. It’s the opposite of the, I am thrilled to report! Linkedin updates.
Self-innovation never feels productive because it’s dangerous; dangerous because it can reveal a system that views you as merely a set of commodified hours waiting to be profited from. Protect your talents.
Then there’s the deeper form of isolation that comes from resisting easy binary thinking. On LinkedIn, it’s Pro-AI or Anti-AI. No nuance allowed.
There’s a heaviness in this intellectual liminality, but you reach a point where snapping to binaries becomes increasingly difficult — and increasingly problematic, too.
As Dana Karout recently stated,
“to parter with generative AI effectively, we need to first shift our predisposition towards artificial intelligence from dependency or fear, avoidance, and denial toward an openness to the big unknown of AI.”;
I’m going to plug two people, right now. You know why? They’re both staying with the trouble of holding these middle spaces.
First,
. She explores “loneliness as a personal, shared, and societal issue — and its power to reconnect us with ourselves, each other, and the world.” Her perspectives carry a silently powerful sensibility that’s upended my beliefs about loneliness. I continue to benefit from her teachings; explore her work if you’re curious.Second,
and DROdio at Storytell.ai. Erika, Co-founder, Chief Customer Officer, and creator of Courageous Candor, alongside CEO DROdio, are demonstrating how to intersectionally create technology with integrity and accountability. Erika leads workshops on unlearning and community building, which you can explore here.
Robert Pirsig, fifty years ago:
“If you run from technology, it will chase you.”
As linear text, this piece is ending, but the practice has barely started.
My SXSW presentation is an opportunity to share what I’m unlearning in my ongoing practice. It’s a way to bring this thinking from the margins to center stage, inviting (dis)agreement and entanglement. If you enjoyed this story, please consider upvoting my panel!
Adore this, all of it! Thank you for your radically courageous and deeply thoughtful work—upvoted your panel, fingers crossed 🤞
Beautiful piece, thanks for the mention! Pls keep this work alive. As Donella Meadows says, we're drawn to lines but we're also drawn to mystery.