Bring back the human: Designing for people, not just products

A few weeks ago, SXSW celebrated its inaugural European edition in London. A few Inviqans were lucky enough to attend, among them Amelia Dolan, who brings her fresh perspective and passion for digital innovation to the New Business team. Below, she shares her impressions from the event.

We’re building faster than ever. But are we still building for humans?

SXSW London 2025 was packed with conversations about AI, automation, and scale. But I didn’t expect to think about grief. Or the beautiful impermanence of cherry blossoms. Or the emotional lives of app users.

These weren’t tangents. They were the thread: a quiet but urgent reminder that all this technology still begins (and ends) with people.

Because amid all this rapid change, one truth stood out: humans don’t need to learn how to be human. We’re already experts; messy, unpredictable, occasionally frustrating, but, overall, fundamentally good. 

The real challenge? Figuring out how to design systems, products, and communities that don’t just tolerate our messiness, but celebrate it.

Across the talks, themes like grief, community, trust, and meaning surfaced repeatedly, not as obstacles, but as natural, essential responses to change. For brands, this means listening deeply, embracing messiness, and grounding decisions in genuine human insight. It means putting the human at the heart of design.

Grief and innovation go hand in hand

Aaron Power’s talk, “The Grief of Innovation,” was a standout. He reframed user backlash not as resistance or failure, but as a form of grief; a very human response to change and loss.

“You can’t outrun, out-plan, or outsmart grief. But you can participate in it.”

He drew on grief counselling frameworks, suggesting that when people mourn a product feature, an interface, or a brand they once trusted, we need to honour that loss, not ignore it.

The Ben & Jerry’s "Flavour Graveyard" is a great example. It pokes fun, sure: but it also validates the emotional connections people form with products. It gives closure. It says: we know this mattered to you.

This perspective feels like a missing piece in many digital strategies. We often measure change by how efficiently we roll it out, not how it lands emotionally. But in the gaps between analytics and A/B tests, there are real stories being told. People get frustrated. Sentimental. Defensive. Curious. If we ignore them, we’re not just missing insight, we risk misreading the relationship entirely.

Community isn’t a newsletter

Laura Nestler, VP of Community at Reddit (and previously Duolingo and Yelp), was refreshingly blunt:
“I just bought some shampoo; I’m not a bubblehead.” Nestler quipped, skewering the assumption that every customer wants to join a branded “community” just because they clicked “buy.”

She argued that real communities are intentional, built on shared values, not just transactions or marketing goals.

It’s worth remembering: the word culture shares its etymological roots with cultivate. Healthy communities grow when they’re nurtured, when there’s space, care, and consistency. When brands treat culture as a commodity instead of something to nurture, they don’t just miss the moment, they risk stripping the soil of what real community needs to take root. 

She emphasised that the best brand communities aren’t owned, they’re supported. They’re full of intrinsically motivated people doing things because they care. That can't be forced, and it definitely can't be faked. 

That requires a mindset shift. One that values facilitation over control, listening over messaging, and messy, human interaction over polished experiences.

When we approach digital work through that lens, the job becomes less about “building community” and more about creating space for community to emerge and then backing it up with systems, structure, and respect.

It’s about stepping back enough to let people bring themselves, not the sanitised versions we try to mould.

Design for depth, not dopamine

Tati Lindenberg, VP of Marketing at Unilever, said it best: “Design for depth, not dopamine.”

We’ve spent so long chasing engagement that we’ve stopped asking what kind of engagement actually matters. 

Are people clicking because they care, or because we’ve nudged them into it?

This isn’t a call to abandon analytics. It’s a call to ground them in context. To pair quantitative signals with qualitative insight. To notice when and why humans are behaving like humans, not just as users moving through a funnel. 

Some of the most strategic signals don’t show up on dashboards. They surface in offhand comments: “I miss how this used to work,” or “This doesn’t feel like it’s for me anymore.” These aren’t just complaints, they’re feedback about emotional fit, trust, and belonging. Ignore them, and you risk designing for metrics, not meaning.

It’s a reminder that chasing engagement metrics alone leads to shallow experiences. Instead, we need to create space for freedom, purpose, and conscious choice. Dirt - as the Unilever “Dirt is Good” campaign puts it - is a sign of living fully, of freedom, of messy human life.

Brands that embed consciousness into their design will empower humans, not replace them. They’ll design systems that invite participation, acknowledge human complexity, and accept that growth often comes with discomfort and uncertainty.

AI won’t save us from being human

AI was everywhere at SXSW, its speed, scale, and efficiency impossible to ignore. But the most memorable take on its limits came from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

His favourite test? Ask AI: “Who is Kate Garvey?” then, “Who is Kate Garvey married to?” The answer is never Wales, despite him being her husband. Instead, the model confidently invents a plausible fiction: a politician, a public figure, someone adjacent. It’s funny, but it's also a warning.

AI doesn’t know facts; it predicts them. Its “hallucinations” aren’t bugs, they’re baked into how these systems work. When coherence matters more than truth, falsehoods slip through sounding credible. And when those errors enter search results or public discourse, they risk becoming accepted as fact.

Wales’s point was simple: in an AI-saturated world, human verification and critical thinking aren’t just useful, they’re non-negotiable.

This idea echoed across other talks. Yasmine McDougall Sterea, CEO of Free Free is collaborating with Cambridge University on teaching teenagers to sharpen their critical thinking, helping them question, not just consume, AI-generated information. Another panel discussed putting “human-made” markers on creative work. 

Wales pointed to Reddit’s human-first approach to moderation. Similarly to Wikipedia, most subreddits self-moderate, a scalable model built on trust and human care, not just algorithms.

Victor Riparbelli, CEO of Synthesia, offered a thoughtful perspective on AI’s creative potential. His message wasn’t anti-AI; far from it. Synthesia is built on AI. But the best results, he noted, still come from people who already have strong creative instincts. The most compelling AI-generated content will come from those who knew what good looked like before the tools existed; people who understand quality, taste, and context. AI can generate at scale, but it still relies on humans to set the tone, define the standard, and decide what actually matters.

The takeaway? AI can scale, assist, and optimise, but it can’t replace the human lens. It’s not about rejecting the tools, but about asking better questions and staying anchored in who we’re designing for.

Not just: “What can we automate?”

But: “What still needs a human?”

Listening isn’t soft, it’s strategic

What came through loud and clear across all the talks was that the best digital work isn’t just data-driven, it’s human-informed.

That means:

• Talking to people, early and often.
• Validating decisions with real stories, not just assumptions.
• Getting close to discomfort, complexity, and contradiction; because that’s where the most meaningful innovation begins.

Or, as Powers put it: “Shut up and listen.”

When we do that, we don’t just create better products. We uncover new opportunities. We build trust. We build relevance. We build responsibly, and we build with care.

Because humans, though messy and weird, are, on the whole, fundamentally good. And if we want to keep building things that matter, we need to bring the human back to the centre.

Bringing back the human isn’t nostalgia; it’s strategy.

Want to hear more from Amelia? Follow her on LinkedIn