Design I am looking at you.
For two decades I called myself a designer. Thirteen years ago I started a community of practice centred on social design, and for a long time I believed design might have the power to change the world. Were you there too?
That conviction led me into some very complex contexts, trying to make a difference. Child protection was my first ‘social’ service design role in 2013. It was not an easy context by any means, particularly when my experience up to that point was in telco and banking.
Design, as I understood it then, rested on the sturdy foundations of empathy and collaboration. These days I’m less sure how sturdy those foundations actually are.
Designers are asked to bring multi‑disciplinary teams together to solve complex, systemic problems. They are asked to research and understand the perspective of the customer, client or citizen. They hear first hand how broken things are and what kind of effect that has on people, families and communities. When I began my career, no one was talking about trauma‑informed design, or the nervous system cost of the work. Not in design spaces anyway. We only talked about ethics, methods and outcomes. We didn’t talk about bodies …. and a lot of folk still aren’t.
The neuroscience of empathy
I want to here acknowledge that this post was inspired by a post by Jo Buick, on the nervous system costs of empathy and care‑related work. Jo also names the systemic conditions that shape these experiences. I’m bringing some of those threads into the context of design practice, looking at how similar dynamics play out.
Research by Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki show that when we engage in affective empathy, i.e. feeling with another’s suffering, the brain activates regions similar to those involved in our own pain. When we sit in affective empathy, our nervous system doesn’t just notice that someone is in pain, rather parts of our own brain respond as if we are in pain. When we find ourselves in that state over and over again, such as during doing research, without having enough space to return to ourselves, the system starts to fatigue.
Placed on top of chronic work stress and organisational pressure, this can leave the nervous system reorganising itself around threat and survival, not safety. Without enough safety, the parts of the brain we rely on for perspective, creativity and complex decision‑making (the prefrontal networks) become harder to access. The irony is that the more we are asked to absorb without support, the less access we have to the very capacities design depends on … collaboration, imagination and relational discernment.
Double trouble
There are at least two layers to the load designers carry. The first is empathic: sitting with someone as they shed tears during an interview, and feeling the weight of their story land in your own body. The second is systemic: walking straight from that room into another one where senior stakeholders want to talk primarily about feasibility, timelines and risk.
Those two distinct moments ask a lot of us. For many of us, it’s more than our capacity can comfortably hold.
When whole teams are living in that space between, deeply touched by what participants share, and repeatedly blocked at the level of decision‑making, nervous systems start to co‑regulate around stress and survival. Meetings that are meant to be about shared imagination become spaces where people tighten, defend their patch, or quietly shut down. We relate less, we imagine less, and the work that was meant to be ‘design‑led change’ starts to feel more like business as usual.
Capacity as the engine
Design is often described as a practice of empathy and collaboration. Empathy and collaboration both rely on capacity.
One way to think about capacity is as a ‘window of tolerance‘. When I teach people about the nervous system, I prefer to call it the ‘window of capacity”. It describes how much stress or activation our nervous system can tolerate before we edge into a slight dysregulation. It’s the range within which we can stay present, think clearly, feel, and still stay in contact with ourselves and others. This window expands and contracts according to how much we are holding and what actions we take to help us metabolise the stress we are under. (Article on capacity and resourcing in complex times.)
When empathy, complexity and organisational pressure keep pushing us beyond our range, we move into survival states. We can fight, flight, fear, fawn, flop, speed up, check out, become indecisive, feel numb or shut down.
In those moments, relational capacity contracts because the system is sensing threat.
Without enough room in that window, our capacity to hold ambiguity, ideate and collaborate narrows. We lose some of our response-ability. For me, part of what design asks of us is to grow our capacity to stay present in the fire of complexity without losing our centre.
Capacity grows through awareness, supportive conditions and practice. As somatic leadership teacher Amanda Blake reminds us, “Awareness creates choice, but practice builds capacity.” Capacity is relational. Our nervous systems are constantly influencing one another. The calm of one person can change a room. The anxiety of a system can ripple through everyone within it. This is co‑regulation in action, and over time it becomes culture.
The so that ….
When I talk about capacity, I’m talking about our ability to stay present, connected and responsive when things are complex or pressured. Capacity is what gives us choice in the moment. It helps us to stay relational, regulated and creative.
From a nervous system perspective, capacity grows through resourcing and practice. Resourcing can be very ordinary, such as a slow exhale between Zoom calls, an honest check‑in, a pause before we open an email, a walk around the block to let the stories we’ve heard land in the body. These small moves help keep our window of capacity wide enough that we can be with what is.
Practice is not just something we do on top of our lives, it’s how we literally shape our nervous system and our capacity over time. New neural pathways get formed through repetition. We can talk about different ways of being till the cows come home, but they only become real through experience. Principles need to be embodied, not just understood.
Every practice is also a way of training our nervous system. The more often we move through a small sequence, the more familiar that pathway becomes. Our system starts to recognise, “oh, this is what we do when things feel…” (insert your somatic symptom of overwhelm).
Every time we pause, notice, name what’s here for us, and choose a regulating move, we are literally laying down new neural pathways. Over time, these pathways become stronger, and more available more of the time, and we have more capacity to respond than react in each moment. Response‑ability becomes embodied.
An invitation
If you’re reading this and it feels familiar, you’re not alone.
Given the times we’re living in, and the work you are doing, this makes complete sense.
One of the questions I’m sitting with is: how do we grow our capacity to be with what is, without hardening, collapsing or burning out? Being with your nervous system in complex times is a small practice circle where we explore that together.
It’s a four‑session practice circle for people living and working in complex times who want to understand their nervous system better and grow a bit more capacity to stay present and responsive. We’ll map our current capacity and protection patterns, then experiment with small, realistic resourcing practices you can weave into your days.
Come join the somatic inquiry.