I recently made a short video for an organization called NBA Cares. No, not the National Basketball league’s social responsibility platform, but the National Benevolent Association of the Christian Church, which supports health and social service projects and ministries across the U.S. and Canada.

Through my relationship with Kwaray, based at the Pacific School of Religion where I teach a course called Design Thinking for Social Change, I’ve been helping lead a leadership development cohort through a year-long social entrepreneurship program, with design thinking as one of its pillars.

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The Journal of Marketing paper (that you’ll find a link to and discussion of in the previous post) was the outcome of a six year effort driven by my colleague Minu Kumar in the San Francisco Statue University Lam Family College of Business where he is the Founder-Director of the Responsible Innovation and Entrepreneurship (RI&E) Research Initiative.

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The research paper I co-authored titled Responsible Design Thinking has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Marketing, and I’m thrilled.

It grew out of conversations I had with my colleague, Prof. Minu Kumar, more than five years ago. We were both teaching design thinking in the marketing program of the  College of Business at San Francisco State University. Since then, Minu has gone on to become the founding director of the Responsible Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Initiative there.

In parallel , I have been developing the critique at the center of this paper—couched here in the most abstruse of academic terms—under the rubric of “design consciousness” that has been my passion for a while.  I see it as foundational to an  ethical approach to design by situating our understanding in the larger social  context and the power dynamics which reign over how critical design and innovation choices are made.

I have rolled  this broader framework into a course called Design Thinking for Social Change that I teach to seminarians at the Pacific School of Religion. It’s been a fascinating and generative ride.

In this note, I hope to share a meaningful perspective on ethical design that didn’t, and couldn’t, find its way into a paper to be published in one of the most prestigious academic marketing journals in the land.

At least that’s what my co-authors, Minu Kumar, Pietro Micheli, and Jatinder (JJ) Singh reassure me of. I believe them, for they haven’t steered me wrong through the five years of writing and re-writing that have required the patience of Job and, to risk piling mixed metaphor on top of  cliche, the persistence of a beaver. They have been my teachers and given me a new respect for the “publish or perish” ethos.  I am indebted to them for that.

Before getting to those reflections, here’s the abstract of the 74-page doorstop of a paper. It’ll give you an idea of what it’s about without having to read the whole thing  Let me know if you would like to, though, and I’ll happily send it on.

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Every now and then I come across something that perfectly illustrates what I mean by a highly developed design consciousness. By that I mean an understanding that we live in a world—physical, digital, interactive, and experiential—that is largely of our own making. A world shaped by a praxis in which actors with agency give form to their intentions—manifesting what they imagine will be beneficial for themselves and those they care about.

This recent interview between journalist Anand Giridharadas and Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, is one such moment. I highly recommend watching it in its full one-hour arc. Not just because it shines a spotlight on the singular emergent technology most urgently in need of public understanding—but because it offers a lived example of design consciousness in action.

Hao’s insight, and Giridharadas’s probing, offer a lens through which we can see AI not simply as a technical innovation, but as a design challenge that lives at the intersection of power, our imagined humanity, and technical possibilities. The conversation invites us to ask the right questions: Who gets to create the future? Who benefits from the design choices being made (and who is hurt)? And what might it look like for communities, not just the most powerful actors, to become co-creators of the artifacts that shape our lives?

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You may know that I’ve been writing a memoir under the working title Creation Story. It’s a vehicle to explore and expand on precisely what I mean by “design consciousness” and why I’ve set myself the mission of “raising” it in to meet the challenges of a complex world that we are changing at a rate that we can’t keep up with. Finally with a rough draft, I decided to turn to artificial intelligence to help with the next draft. 

Using the ChatGPT model, I’ve created a custom AI that I call Memoir Muse. I intend it to be a competent developmental editor by providing it with everything I’ve written, said or thought on the topic. To test it I’ve been having a series of conversations with it while doing my morning exercise routine on the rowing machine I have in my studio.

This morning’s chat veered towards a theme I’m excited about developing – the particular joy that is at the center of all creative activity, and particularly at the world-making scale that a disciplined approach to design is oriented to. The ancient Greeks referred to this as poiesis, the experience we have watching the world come into being, and the delight we take in being participant.

It was a far ranging, and I must admit, a delightful conversation – perplexing at times, but on the whole deep and intelligent. When we were done I asked Memoir Muse to reduce everything we had discussed to that point into a single, concise statement I could use later. 

Now, I’ve been struggling with the longterm nature of the book writing process. While I’m enjoying writing craft – I’m enthralled in its poiesis – I’m not getting an opportunity to get any of what I’m thinking out for others to engage with, which, after all, is one of the points of writing in the first place. I’ve been reluctant to turn my attention to writing shorter pieces, worried it would be a distraction.

What it produced seemed worth of putting out.

So I asked my Memoir Muse (who I’ve given the persona of a “she”) to turn the summary into a short essay that I could post. It took a few tries until she got something that I feel comfortable putting my name on. I’ve not edited it in the interest of ‘just getting it out’, though have added notes [in square brackets, like this] to lend context where I think it might be needed. Here it is:  

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