Design I am looking at you.
I spent two decades calling myself a designer. I started a community 13 years ago, centred on design. I thought design had the capacity to fix the world. Were you there too?
My belief in design was so great that I found myself seeking very complex contexts to try and make some impact. Child protection was my first “social design” cab off the rank in 2013. Wowsers. Not an easy context by any means, particularly when your experience up to that point was in telco and banking. Design for social innovation and what was being called ‘co-design’ was new.
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 really are.
We are asked to bring multi‑disciplinary teams together to solve complex, systemic problems. We are asked to research and understand the perspective of the customer, client or citizen. We hear first hand how broken things are and what kind of effect that has on people, families and communities. At the time, no one was talking about trauma‑informed design, or the nervous system cost of that work. Not in design spaces anyway. We only talked about ethics, methods and outcomes. We didn’t talk about bodies.
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. She also names the systemic conditions that shape these experiences. Here, I’m following some of those threads into the context of design practice, looking at how similar dynamics play out.
Studies 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 (such as the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex). 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. If we do this over and over again, without enough space to come back to ourselves, our system starts to fatigue. It is working as if we are constantly under strain.
Place that on top of chronic work stress and organisational pressure, and you have a nervous system that is reorganising itself around threat and survival, not safety. Without a sense of safety, the parts of the brain we rely on for perspective, creativity and complex decision‑making (the prefrontal networks) become harder to access. Ironically, 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 a meeting where senior stakeholders want to talk primarily about feasibility, timelines and risk. Those two distinct moments ask a lot of us.
We can feel, sometimes in the same hour, both the depth of what people need and the resistance of the system to move beyond small, tactical changes. Holding that contradiction in our bodies, project after project, is one of the hidden costs of this work. For many of us, it’s more than our current 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 supposed to be about shared imagination become rooms 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.
We still show up. We still deliver. But there is a part of us that knows the changes we are proposing sit well below what is needed, and that knowing does not simply disappear at the end of the project.
Capacity as the engine
Design is often described as a practice of empathy and collaboration, but 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 our “window of capacity”. It speaks to how much stress or activation our nervous system can tolerate before we move 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 holding. (Article on 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. Importantly, our relational capacity contracts as we are, in effect, sensing threat.
Without enough room in our window of tolerance, our capacity to hold ambiguity, ideate and collaborate narrows. Without capacity we lose our capacity to respond, our response‑ability. With less capacity, meeting organisational resistance often means we scale back our recommendations and default to what feels acceptable, even when we know more is needed.
I feel that not only the practice of design, but what these times are asking from us, is the capacity to stay present in the fire of complexity without losing our centre.
Capacity grows through awareness and supportive conditions. As somatic leadership teacher Amanda Blake reminds us, “Awareness creates choice, but practice builds capacity.” Capacity is relational. Nervous systems influence each other all the time. 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 am 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 something that sits on top of our lives. It is one way we can shape our nervous system and our capacity over time. New neural pathways get formed through repetition. We can talk about different ways of being as long as we like, but they only become real through experience. Principles need to be embodied, not just understood.
Every practice is also a way of training the nervous system. The more often we move through a small sequence, the more familiar that pathway becomes. Over time, the 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, those pathways become stronger and more available, and we have more capacity to respond rather than react in each moment. Response‑ability becomes something we can feel, not just a concept we talk about.
An invitation
If you’re reading this and it feels familiar, you’re not alone.
Given the times we’re living in, it makes sense that your system might be tired.
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.