By Celso Singo Aramaki + AI
Credo
Design should help the future, not just the present. The goal is to make long-term thinking normal—built into everyday decisions.
1) The problem
Modern design is often trapped in short cycles:
- Products are made to be replaced, not repaired.
- Systems are optimized for speed, not resilience.
- Culture becomes disposable, and ecosystems get treated as externalities.
The result is predictable: more waste, more fragility, and less continuity.
2) The long view
Design needs a longer time horizon—measured in decades and centuries, not weeks.
That means balancing:
- the urgent (what must work today), and
- the durable (what should still work—and still make sense—later).
The people most affected by today’s choices are often the ones not here yet. Long-term responsibility is not abstract; it is part of basic design ethics.
3) Practical pledges
Build for maintenance
- Prefer systems that can be repaired, understood, and passed on.
- Document how things work.
- Avoid unnecessary complexity.
Design for resilience
- Expect shocks: climate, markets, politics, technology shifts.
- Create redundancy and backups.
- Build systems that can degrade gracefully instead of failing catastrophically.
Design with accountability
- Track decisions and trade-offs.
- Make impacts visible (social, environmental, operational).
- Treat uncertainty as normal, and plan around it.
Choose continuity over obsolescence
- Prioritize reuse, repair, and long-lived formats.
- Preserve knowledge that future teams will need to operate and improve the system.
4) A call to endurance
Design should be evolvable: able to improve over time, without breaking everything that came before.
The aim is not to build monuments. It is to build useful systems that keep options open—so future people can adapt, repair, and continue.
That is what it means to design for endurance.