A Small Rebellion of Attention by Alejandro Ramos Saavedra

Can we design our way into meaning, or does true meaning resist the straitjacket of structure? We asked designer, artist, and educator Alejandro Ramos Saavedra to trace the ways connection is fashioned in a world ruled by algorithms and aesthetics — and the small rebellions still open to us.

For nearly a decade, my work has revolved around how people create meaning — on their own, with others, and in the small, unexpected moments that shape us. Meaning isn’t only found in grand expressions; it often lives in the simplest forms: a stranger’s brief smile, a flower that bloomed overnight, the way people navigate each other’s glances in a crowded Piccadilly line train.

This work doesn’t happen at a distance. I’ve had to stand in dozens of rooms, design hundreds of activities, and watch what unfolds: a hand hovering before committing to an action, the moment one person silently waits for another, the non-verbal decisions that make a group briefly coherent. One of my early workshops began with a simple prompt: Create an activity — one sentence, concrete, literal — using whatever was in the room. People wrote:

“Cross the room without touching the floor.”

“Draw a shape that never closes.”

“Make an inverse pyramid

of every book

you can

reach.”

Then they exchanged instructions with whoever was nearest.The room shifted almost instantly. Two strangers balancing on mismatched chairs. A tower of books collapsing. Three people holding hands without comment. Someone drawing with their eyes closed. You could see the unspoken decisions, the rhythm of who adjusts first, the way people take responsibility for each other without being asked. Small, temporary worlds — co-authored, improvised, unpolished, and crucially, not consumed.

Over time, patterns became noticeable. The simple constraints that change how people move and how they notice each other became clear.

Meaning appeared not in the objects, or the activities themselves, but in the process — the struggle, the friction, the adjustments between people. I once watched a participant construct an “Embassy of Nothing:” a quiet, enclosed space for someone they would never meet. Inside was a card that read, “Sit here to remember something important you forgot. Don’t leave until you do.”

What struck me wasn’t the form of the piece but its orientation — towards someone else, someone absent, unknown. Someone they imagined might need what they once needed. Connection wasn’t something they felt. It was something they made. That’s when something became clear:

The problem isn’t that we lack connection. It’s that we keep trying to consume it. We go to the same concerts, travel to the same cities, take selfies in the same spots, scroll through the same feeds, hoping shared experience will turn into shared meaning.

But connection with others rarely comes from consuming the same things. It comes from situations that require mutual attention — where something has to be figured out together. Design has spent decades making interactions effortless.

Maybe it’s time to design for friction again — the gentle kind that makes us adjust, collaborate, or pause long enough to register one another.

Most of my workshops revolve around conditions, not explanations. I provide the scaffolding — materials, time, venue, permission — and participants build on top of it.

They make things that might be useful to themselves while considering the people around them. They leave instructions for strangers who will come later — like a music score waiting to be played. One deceptively simple example of how it works:

Two people, two chairs, one rule — cross the room without touching the floor, and without speaking. It takes less than a minute before a quiet choreography emerges: A glance — are we really doing this? — that becomes permission, a shift in balance that becomes agreement, a moment where one person steadies the other by doing nothing at all. These are the moments I’ve come to seek in my work — the basic act of figuring something out together. We don’t need more stimulation. We need more scaffolding — small, deliberate structures that make attention between people possible again. As a designer, I no longer think our role is to manufacture connection — to deliver it as if it were a feature.

It's to create the circumstances in which connection can take hold. Maybe that’s why these tiny moments of friction feel important to me. Not in a transcendent way, but in the everyday way two people figure out how to move together without a shared script — leaving the safety of norms and expectations. A moment of uncertainty that becomes a bridge instead of a barrier.

A small rebellion of attention against a world that keeps trying to customise meaning on our behalf.

And perhaps that’s where connection begins again — one slow, shared gesture at a time.

This article was written by Alejandro Ramos Saavedra, a Mexican designer, artist, innovation consultant, and educator. He is a Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art and an Associate Lecturer at the London College of Communication. Alejandro’s most recent project is Shubidubi, a body of work built around everyday actions, designed moments, and simple instructions. After a decade of research and practice, Alejandro has learned that we don’t need more frameworks for finding meaning; we need better ways to stay connected to the meaning we’ve already discovered — and to each other.

This article originally appeared in Issue 01, the debut issue of The Lonely Hearts Club, published in January 2026. It was published online on March 12, 2026.