Principles of living systems to inform UX & design
Image generated with DALL·E 3
In early 2011, I was glued to YouTube. The Arab Spring was in its early swing, the Tunisian uprising had just toppled the president, so quickly, cleanly, amidst celebratory protests and poetic chants. Within weeks, Egypt followed, with massive crowds flooding the streets, and like in Tunisia, the army leadership refused to crack down on the protesters, and the president had no choice but to resign. These events were so massive for people in the Middle East. Just the thought of the possibility was unimaginable: these leaders had been in power almost since post-colonial nationalization, for as long as two generations can remember. These untouchable rulers were challenged, humiliated, and simply crumbled like fragile figures at the first blow. Eyes and hearts were on the edge in Syria. Will we follow next?
It didn’t take long for the first spark to ignite. Several local sit-ins and protests erupted in early 2011, but one line of events became a symbolic starting point in the lore of the Syrian uprising. Teenagers in Daraa in graffitied “It’s your turn now, doctor!” in a cheeky dig at the president. They were round up, incarcerated and tortured. For weeks, their families and friends went to plea for their release, to be told “forget your children”. The governorate boiled over and the situation got out of hand, and people took to the streets in protest (CNN 2018).
In the rest of Syria, we watched videos posted on Youtube and circulated on Facebook of demonstrators in Daraa being shot. An otherwise isolated event that could have been silenced was now at the center of attention of social media. People in Damascus, Homs, Hamaa, Latakia and everywhere watched the Daraa demonstrations and the crackdown as it happened. They watched and dreamed.
New collective identities emerging in Syria. Left: anti-government demonstration in Homs (Bo yaser, April 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0). Right: pro-government demonstration in Lattakia (Sammy.aw, May 2011, CC BY-SA 2.5).
It took a few months, but the fever gradually spread. By the end of 2011, it had reached Aleppo. When I returned from the US in the summer, the university students were restless. The unrest was most pronounced in the eastern parts of the city, in marginalized neighborhoods with stronger ties to the countryside. The western part, where I lived, was cautiously calm, except for the university campus, which was abuzz. The university system in Syria, along with the army institution, provided a rare path for social mobility from the economic underclass. Being public and free, with relatively egalitarian admissions criteria, it was a melting pot of students from different backgrounds and regions of the country. It was a microcosm where young people could connect, ideas could circulate, and sentiments could propagate. And like other public gathering spaces, such as mosques and social media, the government sought to control it.
When I went to the campus to meet with colleagues and professors, not once did I fail to see action. Students were chanting, organizing sit-ins, and demonstrating before being chased down the alleys. On one visit, I tried to enter the campus, but the guard wouldn’t let me in without a student ID. He said, “Son, just go home. If I let you in and you get caught, God knows what they could do to you without an ID”. As I turned and walked away, students jumped off the fence, chased by young men in civilian clotheing, wielding thick wooden sticks. Soon, three pickup trucks drove by, dropping off more militiamen, followed by a military van with armored riot police carrying batons. In the distance, some students screamed and begged as they were dragged into another van. In my mind I thanked the fatherly guard at the gate who hadn’t let me in. Some of those students may never have returned home.
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I asked a friend how people managed to organize protests under such tight control, and he gave me a quick tutorial. It was based on networks of personal trust. Someone, who trusted someone, who trusted someone else would add each other to a personal messaging list or a secret Facebook group. These groups were local, mostly neighborhood-based, were people would share news, videos, and hearsay. This allowed for a hyper sense of locality. Not only were people connected to distant demonstrations and chants, but their hearts beat together with their neighbors, who played with them as children, visited them, and attended their weddings and funerals. They resonated on a level that had never been possible before — ideas of resistance, freedom and liberty became possible on these online spaces, and these digital local pockets of solidarity kept the spirits high.
Active members of these groups would call for a demonstration, using a certain codified language to indicate time and place; camera operators from the group could join in; then, once assembled at the agreed location, they would chant, often to the bewilderment of passersby, or sometimes joined by them. In most cases, the protesters would quickly disperse after taking pictures and videos and before the militias arrived. When the security forces arrived, the scouts would see them coming, inform the group via the message list, and everyone would flee the scene. This type of demonstration, aptly named Flying or Volatile Protest (مظاهرة طيارة), was common throughout the country. In some cases, these local networks later evolved into coordination committees (تنسيقية); a form of loose local organization to handle protests, supplies, services, or even security and governance in places where government control was receding.
But this is a story about UX and design. So what on earth was going on? What drove these people to use digital technology, interact with their social networks, and navigate their digital and urban spaces? What can this tell us about design?
Looking for an answer beyond design frameworks
When something so monumental happened in the place where I grew up and affected the lives of everyone I knew, it inevitably raised questions on how to live, how to connect, what is good action, and how to design. Design, after all, is an intentional act to change the world, guided by the needs of people people we serve — clients, users, organizations, or communities. The mass mobilization and experience in Syria had to reflect something essential about design. If UX and design cannot relate to such profound experience, the discipline must be quite myopic. That’s a gap I’ve been carrying for quite some time.
What can design tell us about meaningful action for Palestine and Israel? What about climate change, the global psychiatric pandemic, crippling lonelines, rising inequality, and digital addiction? Certain design practices may provide valuable perspectives: provocative exploration (critical design), imagining possible futures (speculative design), planetary health (sustainable design), and user involvement (participatory design). Still, these perspecitves are either partial in the way they conceive of human nature or radically open-ended. In either case we miss an opportunity for a foundational framework from which to start.
Yet, as UX practitioners we critically need to ground ourselves in a firm understanding of basic human drives. The advent of AI and the shift towards generative interaction are shifting the space of design, and this offers us a unique opportunity to rethink how design achieves relevance and utility. This is a chance to revisit and solidify a core foundation of design.
I’m looking for an explanatory framework that organizes everything about purpose. I want to distill what’s fundamental to human drives and motivations into a topology of purpose. To find an answer, I took inspiration from disciplines traditionally occupied with this kind of question, and from which design has a history borrowing: psychology, philosophy, anthropology and cognitive science. I was inspired by the work of integral thinkers, including Alexander Bard, John Vervaeke, Forrest Landry, Greg Henriques, Carl Jung, Segmund Freud, Victor Frankl, and the tradition of Humanistic Psychology (see the readings below). I also drew on qualitative data from my own research over the past years.
My approach was to qualitatively cluster every motivation, emotion, or drive encountered in this body of literature into meaningful, interconnected categories. As I iterated on the framework, it yielded more than I bargained for. The emerging patterns, explaining our motivations and drives, apply beyond human purpose to any living, self-sustaining system. This nice bonus allows us to operate with the same mindset across different levels of emergence: from simple organisms to humans, communities, and ecologies. By understanding the core purposes necessary for life and wellbeing, we can better account for them in design.
The Purposes of Life: Introducing the Framework
The framework begins with a basic question: What is the ultimate purpose for which we design? Purpose comes from the intentions and interests of the people and communities we design for. We can think of any individual, group, or organization as a living, self-sustaining entity with three core purposes necessary to thrive:
Cohesion: The drive for self-preservation, resource security, and internal/external balance. This involves coordination among the parts making up the entity, ensuring its coherence, as well as equilibrium with its environment. This purpose is about sustenance, connection, and harmony.Proliferation: The drive to assert, succeed, expand, and multiply, whether through acquisition, achievement, competition, reproduction, or social impact. This purpose is about triumph and dominance.Transcendence: The drive to explore, choose, learn, and adapt in response to a changing environment. This bridges the gap between cohesion and proliferation. This purpose is about discovery, selection and evolution.The three purposes of living systems: Cohesion, Proliferation and Transcendence (Illustration by the author).
To illustrate each of the core purposes, I’ll share three brief stories from my research over the past few years.
I. Disease and cohesion: from uncertainty to connection
While working on digital health in pharma, I had the opportunity to talk to patients and their families living with different chronic and acute conditions. Here are some snapshots of their experiences.
Families with children diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency shared their stories of initial shock and disbelief. They spoke of the confusion during the lengthy diagnostic process, the relief of finally having answers, and the immense stress of administering daily injections. They described the challenge of establishing a new daily routine and adjusting their lives to accommodate treatment. They also had to deal with stigma and the practicalities of caring for each other, for which no one is ever truly prepared.
Cancer patients shared their fear and the drastic upheaval in their daily lives. They talked about the aggressive treatments, their dependence on close family and friends, and the profound changes in their outlook on life. I learned how multiple sclerosis patients and their partners faced uncertainty and engaged in lifelong learning to manage symptoms, triggers and energy levels, as well as the relapses that can lead to long-term nerve damage. I was also surprised to learn about the struggles diabetic patients face in rebuilding their lives, managing their diets, and coping with self-image and social stigma.
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Each condition is unique, and each person’s journey is different. A common thread, however, is the dramatic upheaval, shock and uncertainty, followed by gradual learning and adjustment. Patients and their families often rely heavily on close relationships for support and love. The loss of control over one’s life in the face of a new, life-threatening condition brings into sharp focus the essentials of existence: managing physical sustenance and, equally important, connecting with others.
Sustenance and connection are a fundamental concern of everything alive, and until recently in evolutionary history, it was our primary human concern. Most of our efforts were directed toward fending off danger, acquiring food, building safe homes, caring for those in need, and finding balance with our ecosystem. We achieved this through synergy with our environment (with varying success) and our ability to live and work together in communities.
Even in our moden, industrialized world, where securing food and shelter are not as critical, experiencing the hardship of disease powerfully underscores our purpose for Cohesion. We feel this deeply as we struggle and then emerge with the support of loved ones and friends. Cohesion fosters connection, trust, coordination, and a sense of shared responsibility. It underscores an egalitarian, empathetic, and altruistic worldview in which individuals contribute to a larger collective identity. Cohesion sustains life. For an individual, it is about maintaining personal, physical, and mental health. For a community, it is about integration, connection, and sustaining the collective.
The importance of connecting with others is central to our well-being. The psychological literature is rife with evidence to support this (e.g., Caciopo & Patrick 2009). Anthropologists have shown that our unique ability to communicate and collaborate sets us apart as a species, allowing us to transcend individual limitations by leveraging community (e.g., Wilson 2013). Neuroscientists suggest that our large brains and neocortex evolved largely to support social interaction (e.g., Lieberman 2015). The central role of cohesion is evident in altruistic practices in diverse fields such as design, governance, religion, and politics. The relationship between mother and infant is fundamental to well-being and survival, especially in humans with our long developmental period and extended childhood (e.g., Hrdy 2011).
Reflection: cohesion in technology and design
Cohesion is often underserved by digital technology. Social media platforms claim to enhance connections and enrich relationships, but they often instrumentalize these connections to optimize consumption, sell insights, and improve ad targeting, likely undermining human connections. While there are some digital efforts to foster connection, collaboration, and care, these initiatives remain at a small scale, struggling to compete with the optimised, lucrative behavioral technology of mainstream social media.
Digital health, at least in the context of the pharmaceutical industry, faces similar challenges. Incentives are often tied to specific commercial drugs, which conflicts with the holistic need for care of patients and physicians. As a result, digital health solutions tend to focus on instrumental aspects such as adherence support, medication refills, and data collection. Some actors in pharma, digital startups, and the public sector are starting to develop drug-agnostic solutions that serve patients and their families more holistically. Also, examples such as Strava, Noom, and Headspace show the potential for health-focused attempts to balance digital commodification with social interaction. However, it remains to be seen whether these solutions can meaningfully contribute to the intimate space of care that relies heavily on giving and shared commons.
In fact, it is challenging to find examples of technology that truly synergize with, rather than exploit, our purpose of Cohesion. The case of VOCI, which I will describe next, stands out as a community using digital media to build connections and govern itself. However, VOCI’s success reminds me more of the early, pre-commodification Internet, when digital governance was more experimental, than the current ad-driven big tech landscape. This suggests that Big Tech’s funding and ownership models may be fundamentally at odds with healthy Cohesion.
II. Dreaming of a renaissance: from cohesion to proliferation
In 2011, I returned to Syria for six months before moving abroad to Switzerland. Being familiar with IT and local community development initiatives, I discovered VOCI, a new student volunteer community in Damascus. Drawn by their energy, I joined them immediately. The community was founded by students from IT and engineering schools at Damascus University. They envisioned a future where they could develop technology inspired by the open source movement, creating decentralized tools and content accessible to everyone. Their goal was to develop the skills and infrastructure necessary for social, economic, industrial, and even political reform.
The founders and members of VOCI had come up with a clever model for their activities. During their events in 2012, they gave a series of small talks on decentralized technology, covering topics such as open social networks, 3D printing, and open source manufacturing and medicine. They presented their ideas using excerpts from TED talks, interspersed with their own commentary and discussion. After the presentations, they met in groups to discuss those themes and write online wiki content in Arabic. They were simultaneously learning, brainstorming, and creating open content. The sessions were so engaging and popular that they formed a permanent group called “Ideas Worth Spreading”, with a decent following on Facebook. This became their core group, where members came together to discuss, reflect, and imagine the future.
From this mother group, various working teams with specific interests emerged. One such team focused on Open Hardware, and aimed to create a hackerspace and run workshops to spark an industrial renaissance in local manufacturing. This cycle of spinning off working teams continued. Successful team projects sometimes led to the formation of new groups, like the hardware team, which eventually became an independent entity — a branching clan from the original VOCI tribe.
What I describe here is a clear dynamic of Cohesion. The mother group served as a space where members communicated, established common interests, and created a shared narrative and identity that bound them together. They nurtured this group, returned to it, and supported its continuity. But just as importantly, another dynamic was expressed: the pursuit of achievement. This purpose centered on ambition, competition, and the desire to rise in status and create something new. And when success is achieved, excitement builds, people gain status, and new initiatives get launched. They proliferate.
Proliferation, the second core purpose I propose, is driven by ambition and the desire to achieve and expand. At VOCI, members wanted to conquer their reality, spread their thinking, and create a renaissance. This drive to succeed and spread is a core aspect of our human nature, very well expressed in our modern economy and politics, which are driven by dominance and growth. If Cohesion is about preserving a living form, Proliferation is about achieving, dominating, and replicating that form. It is the engine for impactful action in the world.
Here too, we find evidence of this purpose in various disciplines. Evolutionary biology hishlights competition and struggle for dominance as driving forces. Environmental, sexual, and multilevel selection all contribute to the pressures on a life form to thrive and ensure its lineage (e.g., Stephen, Tor & Eliott 2021). Sociology and anthropology document competition and the pursuit of social status, material achievement, and dominance (e.g., Sidanius & Pratto 1999). In our political, business and economic discourse, the will to proliferate underlies our theories and practices, in our organizational hierarchies, competitive strategies, and performance-based metrics.
Reflection: proliferation in technology and design
In VOCI, members used a variety of digital tools to grow the community and spread their message. They used Facebook to reach a wide audience, post about open source thinking, and publicize their activities. They used content from TED talks and Wikipedia to shape their message and brand their identity. They used Google Docs and spreadsheets for strategy development and project coordination. They adopted productivity tools, online groups, and social media in their effort to Proliferate.
Digital products that support Proliferation are well developed, especially in B2B contexts. This includes productivity tools, market intelligence, automation, and performance optimization, which contribute to business excellence and differentiation. When it comes to conflict, significant funding goes to arms control systems, cyber warfare, influence operations, cyber espionage, and digital surveillance.
Beyond specific tools, much of our global system is Proliferation-oriented. Market positioning, product development, marketing, sales, and business development are all concerned with finding opportunities, differentiating, and extracting value. Our UX and design practices are often framed in this context, either directly by designing tools that improve performance, or indirectly by designing products that sell better. While proliferation is a legitimate and necessary pursuit, I’ll discuss below how it is overrepresented and disproportionately drives our design practice.
III. Scientists on the move: exploration and transcendence
In 2023, we set out to learn what scientists care about, what they do every day, what they struggle with, and what keeps them motivated. We conducted a series of conversations with researchers from different disciplines, locations, and experience levels. We wanted to learn how they discovered published work, how they read it, and how they used it in their thinking and research.
After a few conversations, patterns began to emerge. Younger scholars showed a clear focus on achievement. They were determined to complete tasks with the proper structure and rigor, whether it was a literature review, a grant proposal, a job search, or building a research program. For those unfamiliar with academia, young scientists today face significant challenges. The number of career positions and funding opportunities is limited, so postdocs and junior professors move frequently, spend a lot of time writing grant proposals, and endure a lot of stress as they chase opportunities. Not surprisingly, they were constantly preoccupied with performance. Formal measures of success played a large role: where they published, how much they published, and how often they were cited. Despite recent attempts to change this dynamic in academia, the pressure to compete and make one’s work visible was intense. In order to pursue their passion for science, they had to survive their early careers.
On the contrary, when we talked to more experienced professors, we felt a greater sense of liberation. Conversations with them were more relaxed, which was a bit of a surprise (I expected to feel closer to early-career scientists). It was as if the soul of the scientist became freer as they became more senior. In most countries, once academics meet certain criteria, they get tenure. This means that the researcher has demonstrated excellence in teaching, research, and service and is given job security. This allows researchers to exercise academic freedom, explore controversial or marginal issues, and express unpopular opinions without fear of losing their jobs. Senior researchers had already paid their dues and felt more secure.
I remember a design professor who spoke of his library as his mental and knowledge landscape. He would explore, discover, and let wisdom emerge from the books as he browsed. When he was writing and developing his thinking about design, he would walk around the shelves, look at the titles, and recall the ideas he’d read. This started an internal conversation with his current thoughts. He’d pick up a book, skim a few paragraphs, and get more inspiration. His library was a living landscape he’d explore, and he’d return richer with ideas. Writing a well-cited literature review or case study wasn’t what motivated him, but the joy of discovery and pushing the envelope.
This stark contrast between accomplishment and discovery recurred as we talked to more scientists. They described their motivation as oscillating between the systematic, goal-oriented production of knowledge on the one hand, and the joy of open-ended discovery, finding profound truths, and transcending with new knowledge on the other. The latter was described with metaphorical, enchanting vocabulary: exploration, novelty, broadening horizons, pushing boundaries, and expanding our understanding. It felt magical.
From distant cosmos to our ancient past, discovery inspires wonder and awe. Left: The Crab Nebula (JWST, Oct 2023, NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Tea Temim). Right: Göbekli Tepe (Beytullah eles, CC BY-SA 4.0).
If the former theme is about competitive achievement (Proliferation), the latter is about exploration and evolution. Science in society can be seen as exploring the space of possibility and causality, uncovering options for future action. Exploration expands our choice space and mediates between Cohesion and Proliferation. To move from Cohesion to performance-oriented Proliferation, an entity must choose an objective, which requires exploration of possible objectives and how to achieve them.
So I propose a third purpose that mediates between Cohesion and Proliferation: Transcendence. Exploration and choice are part of Transcendence, which mediates the transition from Cohesion (being at home, sustaining the entity) to Proliferation (conquering the world, achieving status, and reproducing). Transcendence also mediates the transition back from Proliferation to Cohesion through learning and adaptation, integrating successful patterns into the structure of the entity, making it more resilient, sustainable, and performant. Transcendence is about discovery and selection on the one hand, and evolution and adaptation on the other.
As before, we find ample multidisciplinary support for Transcendence. Evolutionary biology has this idea at its core: evolution explores through mutation and assimilates successful adaptations through selection (e.g., Ayala & Avise 2014). Humans, thanks to neural plasticity, take adaptation to new levels through learning, modifying their behavior and organizational design much faster than biological evolution (e.g., Costandi 2016). In fact, the exploratory and playful neural complex in the brain is ancient, dating back to early mammals and perhaps reptiles, underscoring its adaptive function (e.g., Pellis & Pellis 2010). There’s even a strand of psychology that emphasizes Transcendence as core to wellbeing, made possible by exploration and caring, achieving unity and harmony with oneself and the world (e.g., Kaufman 2020).
Reflection: transcendence in technology and design
For our scientists in the account above, they certainly used technology to explore. They subscribed to journal mailing lists, used scientific search engines, and followed colleagues and topics on social media to stay informed. They read new material, reflected, experimented by writing and connecting ideas, and iterated. They attended conferences and seminars, collaborated with their research teams, and discussed with colleagues. It was a hybrid activity involving multiple streams of information, writing tools, and social connections, but with clear common themes of diversifying exposure, interacting with others, and drawing new connections between concepts.
A telling sign of the appeal of exploration and play to people is the gaming industry, which dwarfs other entertainment industries. Players are immersed, fascinated by the thrill of exploring virtual environments and driven to discover what alternative realities have to offer. The emerging VR industry, which is gaining a lot of attention, will take immersive experiences to new levels, allowing for richer sensory exploration and play. I myself have learned a lot from games: improving my English, history, economics, politics, and strategy.
Generative AI offers another avenue for exploration. The probabilistic nature of AI allows for purpose and relevance to be discovered in situ, as the user explores the possibilities with the application. This approach affords flexible discovery of patterns in data, prediction, and decision support. The UX and product communities are adapting their practice to design products that enable exploration, so that use cases emerge during use and in conversation with the machine (Halabi 2024).
There’s a lot of potential for technology in exploration, play, and experimental decision-making. The key is to creatively integrate our drive for Transcendence with Cohesion and Proliferation. This integration is missing from our UX and design toolkit, which I’ll discuss next.
Coda: back to the Syrian uprising
Cohesion, Proliferation and Transcendence are the three core purposes of any self-sustaining organism, be it a single cell, a human being, or a social collective. They are the essential drivers necessary for life to survive and thrive.
At this point, I have the vocabulary needed to coherently analyze the story at the beginning of this essay. I asked then what on earth was going on with the Syrian uprising, and how we can systematically understand its drivers and inform design, so let’s cast some light on this account using the new vocabulary.
When people took to the streets and social media, they were seeking self-determination. They wanted to take control, to run their own lives, and to Proliferate after years of suppressed aspirations. Realizing that this was a shared, repressed desire, they felt a strong sense of community in sharing it, building new connections away from strict control, and a new Cohesion began to form. They explored ideas, imagined a different world, chose their actions, learned and shaped their future identity — they Transcended by adapting and evolving as individuals and groups. To maintain their Cohesion and Proliferate, they aimed to oppose and overthrow the regime. They experimented, creating different collectives online and on the ground, certain voices rose to leadership, and the spirit spread. For a while, this seemed like a self-sustaining, cohesive collective challenging the regime (another collective). But over time, the movement faded. With intense violence and internal fragmentation, people ran out of steam, and after more than 13 years, both collectives lost Cohesion and were severely compromised: the uprising barely exists, the government is exhausted, more than half the population fled their homes, and society is facing imminent collapse.
Discussion: designing for balance in purpose
By distilling these three fundamental purposes, I hope this framework helps us think systemically about how we design, who we design for, what our blind spots are, what opportunities we’re missing, and whether we’re delivering the best value to our collaborators, ourselves, and the world.
Beyond its analytical and generative capacity, this framework provides ethical guidance for design. Ethics, broadly defined, are the principles that inform actions and guide what one should do. Accepting the triadic structure outlined above implies the importance of all three purposes, their centrality to life, and the need to pursue them in harmony for the good of the entity we care about or design for. Once we choose an entity to design for, we should pursue a balance of these three purposes as an outcome of the design intervention. Suppressing Cohesion results in an organism that is out of balance internally and externally, compromising its stability. Suppressing Proliferation results in a lack of meaningful action, causing it to recede into the margins. Suppressing Transcendence hinders the ability to choose meaningful goals and adapt to change. All three purposes are necessary for the survival and flourishing of the entity. They are necessary for life.
In Syria, society was out of balance. On a personal and collective level, people were suppressed from political expression or the pursuit of power (Proliferation). They were prevented from exploring their potential, locked into rigid strata and unable to experiment with ways to improve their reality (Transcendence). Undermining Cohesion, the state controlled public spaces to prevent the emergence of threatening movements. But the threat to Cohesion also reached the individual and family levels as many struggled to afford basic necessities while inequality increased. The system became so unbalanced to that it was only a matter of time before the right trigger occurred. The debate continues about the role of Facebook and YouTube in the uprising, but it is clear that they provided new spaces to connect and communicate, allowing a new collective identity with a new narrative to emerge (e.g., Arafa & Armstrong 2016). This new sense of Cohesion allowed the collective to Transcend and find ways to Proliferate.
Yet, social media could have done much more for Cohesion by supporting community building and experimentation (e.g., Ramadan 2017). People who lacked public space and experience could have, with the right support and structure, connected, organized, aligned, and directed their new collective toward meaningful action that contributed to their collective well-being. There’s so much in this space that the current model of big social media not only overlooks, but restricts. Those who were around will remember an earlier Internet where people experimented more openly with ways to connect and communicate. No wonder the vision of a decentralized Web 3.0 resonates with many.
In fact, there is a growing sense today that the world is seriously out of balance. We face a psychiatric epidemic, crippling loneliness, alarming inequality, and breaches of multiple planetary boundaries, all contributing to the notion of a metacrisis of interconnected global challenges. The emerging consensus is that our current global model of unsustainable growth has pushed the limits on several fronts, and we are beginning to feel the consequences. We have lost focus on Cohesion as our economic and political systems pursue unrestrained growth, focusing excessively on Proliferation (see Voicecraft’s excellent series on the commons).
The gist of argument is: Historically, we’ve lived local, communal lives for hundreds of thousands of years. The tribe was our home, where we started each morning and returned to share what we had gathered and hunted. At night, around the campfire, we told stories, reflected, and bonded. While the day’s pursuit was instrumental and performance-oriented (Proliferation), it ultimately served the community (Cohesion). In this image, the commons is the container relationship that makes everything else possible. What binds us together is a necessary condition that precedes any economic or political endeavor, and it is what makes all relationships and exchanges possible.
Even today, think of language, norms, culture, conventions, and communication protocols. These are goods that take a lot of collective effort to develop, yet they are part of our shared commons upon which we can build relationships, trust, and interaction. We have gradually reversed the order, from a primacy of Cohesion to a primacy of Proliferation, and now we suffer a tragedy in our community and ecological commons resulting from uncontrolled growth at the expense of care, connection, and the environment in which we live.
Schmachtenberger, Vervaeke, and McGrillist recently had a rich discussion linking our metacrisis to the loss of Cohesion in both our internal connections (psychological and social) and our external connection to the environment. We are trapped in instrumental thinking as a core value, an addictive pursuit that optimizes for dominance. This pursuit has created a culture where the focus is on performance and competition, and the language of caring is marginalized and seen as impractical and backward.
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This imbalance is reflected in UX and design practice, narrowing the scope of practice and limiting the potential for creative or ethical design. Since you are always designing for a living agent out there in the world (a client, a collective, or an organization), you are likely driven by some combination of the purpose triad. In our current economic model, you’re probably (1) selling the agent a solution that speaks to Cohesion, Proliferation, or Transcendence, while (2) serving the company’s drive for Proliferation. In other words, the entire solution space is driven by the Proliferation of the business.
Taken to the extreme, a pure drive for unbalanced Proliferation results in a common dark pattern, where the purpose of design gets focused around hacking into our dopamine circuits to optimize for addictive consumption of content and social tokens, and diverting attention to marketing and selling commodities. This creates a vicious cycle of consumption, glorification of consumption, and entrapment in the pursuit of higher status, while isolating, individuating, and creating a sense of a gaping hole that will never be filled.
If I’m being abstract in my language here, it’s because it’s easy to plug any of our current big tech genres into the paragraphs, and the argument would make sense: try social media, content streaming, gaming, digital marketing-all of which hack shortcuts into our Cohesion, Proliferation, and Transcendence, drawing us into cycles of consumption. To be clear, the critique is not of these genres per se, but of how they’ve been weaponized.
Take games and play, for example. We’ve evolved to value exploration and play as ways to learn, solve problems, heal trauma, and discover the world. Yet most of the gaming industry hacks into this fascination, missing a huge opportunity to use such powerful tools to help us engage with each other and the challenges facing our world (see Anticiplay’s recent piece).
A more troubling case is the hacking of our Cohesion purpose for political influence. Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm, was able to build detailed profiles of Facebook users through psychometric profiling, which they used to micro-target voters with political messages during the Leave EU referendum. Such use of big data for influence operations has been done before and after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but the scale and level of automation now possible with generative AI allows the entire operation to be automated, running rapid experiments on potential voters to figure out the best messaging. This approach leverages the purpose of Cohesion, specifically our in-group solidarity and out-group antagonism, for micro-targeting that can sway public opinion. Cohesion is weaponized, with little (if any) consideration of the impact on the social relationships affected along the way (see Tufekci 2014).
Much has been studied, written, and said about the pursuit of Proliferation through the externalization of costs to communities and ecologies. The result is that Cohesion in our relationship to each other and to our habitat is threatened. The story of the uprising in Syria that I began with above did not happen in a vacuum. It took place in a country with low rainfall and a fragile climate, with a large population that has depended on agriculture for thousands of years. Centralized, nationalistic policies in recent decades have led to short-term opportunities at the expense of sustainable water use and degraded soil quality. Climate change and severe droughts, as well as ideologically driven large-scale development projects, have forced farming families to migrate and live dependent, marginalized lives in the suburbs of larger cities.
Opening the economy to a social market model in Syria meant catering to a new elite of urban businessmen and neoliberal organizations, while cutting fuel subsidies and safety nets for farmers. This accelerated the flow of wealth to the centers and entrenched the urban-rural divide, reducing social security and increasing tensions (see Marwa Daoudy’s rich account, 2020). It is in this climate of declining social and environmental Cohesion that the uprising against corruption and repression erupted and reverberated throughout the country.
The case of Syria is a canary in the mine for the world.
Towards design practice
What will happen with the next emerging technologies? How will AI, VR, the metaverse, Web 3.0, and blockchain help us connect with ourselves, others, and the world, and transcend together?
Not much, if we maintain the same practices, preserve the same structures, and follow the same paradigms. These technologies are likely to serve the Proliferation of the few, drive consumption and addiction, channel wealth upward, and externalize costs onto societies and the environment. The fact that we are at the cusp of what feels like a technological revolution presents an opportunity, but one that requires our conscious and wise scrutiny in order to approach it with the appropriate values and ways to translate them into action.
Our design principles should acknowledge all three purposes of Cohesion, Proliferation, and Transcendence, and seek a balance that considers the long-term well-being of the people, groups, and habitats for which we design. Finding a balance that brings Cohesion and Transcendence back into the equation is not only plausible, it is pragmatic. Otherwise, we continue to compromise the health of the organism, as is happening with our psyches, social relationships, and planet. As practitioners, we can take a deep breath and look ofr ways to balance Proliferation with care and connection. This means sacrificing some ego, individuality, and agency, but it’s not unheard of. We do it all the time for our families, as we did for our tribes for millions of years. We need to find creative ways to develop technologies of trust and alignment across billions of people. That’s our perennial challenge.
I suggest three main ways to use the framework. First, use it to analyze your problem space and research data. Since I argue that living organisms have three core purposes, this framework is useful for understanding motivations, activities, pain points, and articulating what’s implicit in verbal or behavioral data. Second, use the framework to navigate your solution design space. Focusing on different types of purpose can generate a wide range of solutions, often going beyond initial ideas to consider different aspects and discover new opportunities. Third, seek harmony and balance among the three purposes. This can be daunting, but we can all do our best. Sometimes we can achieve balance, sometimes we can mitigate some imbalance, and sometimes all we can do is subtly plant seeds of thought that may flourish in the future.
After all, we are part of a human collective. Creating balance is not just your job, it’s everyone’s job, so take it easy, one small step at a time.
Readings and future work
I’m indebted to the integral thinkers that have influenced me over the past few years, leading to this essay.
Alexander Bard has combined anthropology, philosophy, phsychology, history and theology to reflect on the evolutionary human drives, narratives and the central role of religion. He uses this to explain our modern indivdualistic neoliberal paradigm, and project possible futures towards the attentionalism in the digital age. His interpretation of Hegel has inspired me to view at dialectics as a necessary dynamic in any living system. His Youtube discussions are rich and provocative.
John Vervaeke, in his excellent Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, tackles the conceptual roots of widespread imbalance and the imperative to seek meaning and connection with the body, the world, and others.
Prior to his recent fame, Jordan Peterson published his excellent lecture series on Personality and It’s Transformations that drew my attention to depth psychology, the hero’s journey, and the integration of different kinds of purpose into holistic meaning. His teaching on the Big Five psychometric model were also helpful in reflecting on different categories of purpose.
I was fortunate to recently discover Forrest Landry’s work, which provides a solid foundation for triadic thinking as pillars of stability in complex systems (see his interviews with Jim Rutt for an accessible intro). Gregg Henriques has drawn my attention to fundamental human needs and their associated neurology, which inspired me to consider how they integrate into a healthy whole. He also an ambitious project on a Unified Theory of Knowledge that explains emergence across different domains, from physics, to chemistry, life, mind, culture. This, along with Manuel DeLanda’s work on Assemblage Theory, motivates me to explore the dynamics of emergence across levels of complexity, from simple life to humans, to culture, and beyond.
The YouTube channels Parallax, The Stoa, Voicecraft and The Technosocial Institute are commendable online experiments, tackling modern issues with brilliant thinkers. For these I’m deeply greatful.
In future work, I will need to tackle the processes involved in each purpose category. The current framework is a high-level container within which different living systems at different levels of complexity self-organize. However, I have not yet addressed the processes or possible configurations of stable living systems. Next, we will examine the role of experience (embodiment, perception, flow), sense-making (perception, modeling, projection), coordination (language, norms, culture), and substrate (matter, body, technology). Placing these dynamics into the purpose topology would help discuss stable configurations within the purpose topology at different levels.
Finally, it is crucial to establish a good connection to design practice. As we are concerned with complex living and social systems that solve complex, wicked problems, designing for these systems is not straightforward and requires more than a linear mapping from insight to action. For this I expect inspiration to come from traditions like Design Cybernetics, Complex System Design, and DesignX.
The purposes of life (and design) was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
