After messing around with things for long enough, you eventually come to the conclusion that what really matters isn’t finding the right colour or using the right line. Or at least, it matters no more than trying to understand the unfathomable nature of human passions. Pain, drama, tragedy, laughter. All those things that pull us back into the animal nature of what is already there.

There is an almost inevitable need to order, classify and understand the world. For that, we have used mathematics, science, maps and, of course, design. We like putting everything in its place. The problem begins when we start believing that the place we have chosen is the place.

Understanding the world through the empirical, the mathematical or the physical is fundamental. But I don’t think it is enough. We also need to touch things with our fingertips and be touched in return. To enter that far less precise territory of emotions, where the rules are more like bare wires and things get complicated at the slightest touch.

That is why my obsession with the figure has less to do with representing a body than with chasing one.

The figure is a possibility that connects you to the infinite. A kind of battle with something that never quite allows itself to be caught. You draw, correct, distort, draw again and, just when you think you finally have something in front of you, that something has already moved on and become something else. I suppose that’s where joy begins. You never know which direction it will come from.

I increasingly think of design as the construction of a stage. We place the leading and supporting actors. We design the lighting. We decide the rhythm, the distances, the movements. We build hierarchies and establish what should appear first and what can remain in the background. So far, so good.

The problem begins when we become too professional about making the stage work and forget what is actually happening on it. We can build a technically perfect, perfectly functional stage and still produce something utterly idiotic.

The stage should serve precisely the opposite purpose: to bring us closer to human passions, to contradiction and to what cannot be controlled. To that strange mixture of the animal, the rational, the learned and the environment that makes possible what we call “the human”. I don’t think what matters lies in each ingredient separately, but in the personal touch you give the gazpacho. The ingredients matter, of course, but so does what happens when you mix them.

Design must build tools. Of course. We need structures, codes, systems and forms that help us find our way. We need someone to lay a few boards on the floor before we start dancing.

But once the stage has been built, perhaps design should bow out. Leave some space. Allow the body to make mistakes. Design just enough ballet steps before the music starts to set the dancing free. I like to think that design can place us in a particular situation so that, once we are there, we can escape from it. To build a structure solid enough to allow us to break it.

Designing, then, would not mean determining what should happen, but preparing the conditions for something to happen. The work stops being merely an object and begins to behave like an event. It does not need to have a specific intention at every moment. It does not need to constantly justify what it is for. For an instant, it can simply produce presence.

Something happens.

And we are there.

Perhaps that is why I am uneasy about a certain contemporary idea of design that tries to anticipate everything. We design experiences, emotions, behaviours, journeys, desires and even ways of relating to one another. Apparently, designing the chair is no longer enough. Now we also want to design the person sitting in it.

I don’t think design should build the human being of the future. I think it should build tools that allow that human being to make and unmake themselves. The difference is tangible. In the first case, we design the actor. In the second, we build the stage and accept that the actor is free to use their own abilities. Even to abandon the idea of being an actor altogether and become human again.

There is something profoundly human in the possibility of stepping outside the script. Something animal that momentarily breaks through the structures we have built to understand ourselves.

Perhaps we need to return a little more to that language. The language of the body before it is organised. Of the gesture before it becomes a code of conduct. Of the impulse before it becomes behaviour with a reason behind it.

This is not about naively returning to some supposedly pure state of nature. That nature probably never existed. It is about leaving a gap.

That is why I think design belongs to an earlier stage.

It speculates. It tests. It organises. It builds possibilities. It opens up scenarios.

But it should be careful when it tries to decide which of them is the right one.

Design interests me precisely when it stops presenting itself as a problem-solving machine and starts working as a tool for formulating problems. When it does not try to close a situation down, but to open it up.

Perhaps one of our tasks as designers is precisely that: to build incomplete structures. To prepare stages without knowing exactly how they will end. To design objects that not even the person who made them knows exactly how they should be used. To leave areas unresolved.

Because if one day we manage to design the optimal qualities of what it means to be human, we will probably have made an irreversible mistake.

A perfectly designed human being would be efficient, balanced, productive, healthy, reasonable and probably unbearably sad. They would have no contradictions. They would never waste time. They would never do anything stupid.

And perhaps they wouldn’t even be able to die, because they were never designed to.

Some things work precisely because they don’t quite work.

Laughter might be one of them.

So perhaps we shouldn’t design it too carefully.

The moment we manage to design laughter perfectly, it will probably stop being funny.