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This issue of Findings explores the tumultuous conversations surrounding data centers and questions the role of architecture in their existence. This piece was developed in collaboration with CGI-artists Felina Hernández del Barrio and Yuri Rodríguez, who assisted in concepting and visualizing this train of thought.

The writing is a response to this post from a creator, which kicked off this research journey for us.

I. The View From Above

Data centers are this generation’s coal mine.

The proliferation of coal mines sparked by the Industrial Revolution was of course followed by economic and technological advancement, but it also came at a cost that we are still paying today. Data centers are proving to be on a similar trajectory.

The boogeyman buzzword of our time, “AI,” isn’t the enemy in itself. The technology has proven its value, from catching diagnoses before doctors might, to enhancing language learning in classrooms at a time when students are falling behind and educators need all the help they can get.

For people like us, AI can help product proof of concept—allowing clients to visualize ideas and understand the value of hiring real talent to bring creative visions to life. In a recent MW.S project, Grow Old Not Boring, AI image generation played a crucial role in getting clients on board to tell a story about real people with real passions, made possible by a team of best-in-class copywriters, designers, casting directors, art directors, cinematographers, stylists and more.

The promise of AI feels clear when it enriches our health, expands our abilities, or deepens our creativity. But when it starts to strain the conditions for a healthy, meaningful life on Earth, it becomes a cause for concern. Hence, the rapid surge of data center development across the continental U.S. (and beyond) gives us a real reason to pause.

The signature pain points of these data centers are unmistakable: immense natural resource consumption, severe noise pollution, and invasive nighttime light-bleed. Not to mention atmospheric and environmental pollution—Colossus, xAI’s supercomputer used to train Grok outside of Memphis, is currently facing a lawsuit for running operations on 35 unlicensed methane gas turbines.

And those are just the direct costs.

Utility companies are torpedoing their renewable energy goals in favor of keeping up with the energy demands these centers require. Ironically as a result, the lives of natural gas refineries and coal mines are being extended to accommodate these needs. This has resulted in a national average increase on consumer utility bills by 27% over the last six years. We can also assume that there will be billions of dollars of healthcare costs that long-term exposure to contaminated air and water will result in.

The conversation is accelerating at both national and local levels. In Congress, Democratic progressives are pushing for a nationwide moratorium on data center development. At the same time, many in our government are looking for developmental incentivization, citing the scaling of our domestic infrastructure as a necessary step in securing the future of our national security.

While our government is busy arguing with itself, the tech industry’s hyperscalers are moving right now—spreading their roots and sphere of influence into small, mostly rural communities.

Certainly our preference would be to leave our communities, farmland and natural landscape unscathed from the scourge of data center sprawl. But as hyperscalers are moving at lightning speeds, with little reason to believe they’ll slow down…

We couldn’t help but question — if they must be built — how might they be built better? What if data centers were less imposing? Less sensorially destructive? Less ugly?

Overconsumption of natural resources, lack of consideration towards local wildlife, and harmful byproducts pumped into our air aren’t moral preconditions for these data centers. They’re design flaws.

And those bearing the cost of these flaws are far removed from the people helming the expansion of this infrastructure—many of whom already live with the enduring reality of taking the hit for someone else’s gain.

Beauty and function aren’t antithetical. Marina Bolotnikova recently wrote on how ugliness has more to do with the housing crisis than we think. Her line of inquiry dives into the NIMBY tendency to support housing development, but not in one’s own neighborhood. The article cites a survey revealing that this tendency seems to be rooted in the concern about aesthetic harmony—people are willing support the construction of apartment buildings if located near buildings that are similar in scale, not so much if located alongside single-family houses.

Framed another way, it doesn’t matter if we build the four-plus million homes we need to remedy the housing crisis if people find them so ugly they’re unwilling to live in them.

If the agenda of these hyperscalers is to build, build, build at any expense, then making these data centers beautiful might just be in their best interest.

We see this as a unique opportunity for these companies to partner with forward-thinking architects, innovative engineers, and conceptual artists to champion design solutions in the name of equity, sustainability, and harm reduction. The hyperscalers that lean into this narrative might even gain a competitive edge over their competition for simply doing the right thing, as fucked up as that sounds today.

II. Today, infrastructure. Tomorrow, architecture?

Now the call for beauty, aesthetics, and function in our infrastructure is anything but new. Movements such as Bauhaus or Solarpunk have long-since offered clear philosophies on how these buildings, facilities and services should be designed to operate. Hassan Fathy, a renowned Egyptian architect who reestablished the use of adobe and mud construction, frames the objective clearly:

Architecture without philosophy would become engineering. Architecture without aesthetics is engineering.

Even halfway around the world, it’s hard not to wonder if our infrastructure in Death Valley, California could look like this:

Speculation is always the first step in imagining better realities for tomorrow.

We pulled in CGI-artists Felina Hernández del Barrio and Yuri Rodríguez to assist in concepting and visualizing a future of more ethically designed data centers. These images, constructed with custom-coded CGI, rendering technology, and AI image generation create a vision of a better and more harmonious world.

Instead of monolithic white boxes that span the length of entire highway exits, we can look towards architectural camouflage as a possible solution, designing these buildings to blend into the natural world around us, rather than stand out.

Beyond their visual impact, these data centers also generate constant noise, contributing to an ambient psychological strain on nearby communities. Silence could be our solution here, both as a material and a visual design language. At the same time, the immense water demands of these facilities call for more efficient cooling strategies, especially in the already water-scarce regions these structures tend to inhabit.

In the following speculative proposals, data centers are reimagined through organic architectural camouflage, sound-dampening systems, and water-cooling facilities to soften their presence rather than amplify it:

Taken together, these interventions reposition the data center—not as an extractive, imposing object, but as infrastructure that is quiet, embedded, and responsive—opening up a new visual and spatial vocabulary for what it could become.

III. Where We Go From Here

Today’s conversation is stuck in the moral echo-chambers of “should data centers exist”? And it’s an important question to ask, to challenge, and to fight for. As it stands, the potential benefits these facilities offer are enormously overshadowed by their flawed operational design and execution.

At the same time, we know that these data centers aren’t going anywhere. While the conversation is often tied to AI, this infrastructure is the backbone of our society and way of life today—there isn’t a single industry that doesn’t directly benefit from access to more compute.

As long as there is money to be made, these facilities will always exist in some way, shape, or form. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless in what they look like, or how they impose themselves upon our communities.

Designer Saul Bass said it best:

Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. The fact of the matter is I want everything we do, that I do personally, that our office does, to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or whether the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things even if nobody cares.

If we care enough to make these data centers beautiful, they might just be better as a result.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

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I. Say everything, mean nothing

We have commitment issues.

Marriage rates are declining, college enrollment and graduation rates are plummeting, and kids don’t post to the grid anymore because even the feed feels all too permanent.

Across culture at large, it feels like we’ve more or less accepted this fate.

Streaming platforms are quick to create and release shows, and even quicker to cancel them when viewership disappoints, robbing us of the possibility for robust plot and character development. Who’s to say whether The Sopranos would ever have made it out of Season 1 in today’s attention economy. A scary thought.

Our landscape is a buffet. You can try everything and leave without truly tasting anything. If that sounds like a less-than-desirable culinary experience, you’re catching the drift.

This ‘buffet effect’ has become endemic to modern branding.

Brand loyalty is on the decline across the board while brand trial is up. This can perhaps be attributed to the sheer number of new brands continually entering the market. Constantly stuck in that introductory phase, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay with anything long enough to see nuance develop or lore accumulate.

The sheer speed at which our landscape moves has forced brands to reevaluate their priorities. The notion of being “on trend” has led us to be guided by fleeting engagement, not honest vision.

Culture’s perpetually shifting tides decide what we say, how we say it, and when. It turns out, this is not a super sustainable way of building brand equity, or making work of lasting value.

II. We’ve lost the plot

Being nimble is a superpower for brands, but only lands if you have a clear and strong set of values that ground that reflexivity. It's about being able to read the room, and connecting an honest belief system to a meaningful moment in time—linking what’s relevant today to what’s been true forever.

The classic startup philosophy of “fail fast” and performance marketing’s “test and iterate” playbook have become the antitheses to building equity in a set of beliefs or values.

You don’t need to hedge your bets on one idea when you can just play the numbers game. It’s why so much of today’s social strategy is to just “post more.” It doesn’t matter how many strikeouts you accumulate as long as one pitch leads to a home run.

In reality, every fast fail, “post and see,” and A/B test runs the risk of taking us further away from our ultimate vision, not closer to it. It’s resigning our unique brand voice and perspective in favor of, basically, randomness. This admission is where the limits of our creativity end—where we allow our vision to be hijacked by what an algorithm deems as more successful.

Like anything else, A/B tests have their place in the world, but what if we didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water for everything? Key decisions around narrative, creative, or visual identity are brand-sacred—carrying an inherent risk as any new or distinct idea does. If we’re forfeiting that decision-making over to the whims of the algorithm, we’ve almost certainly lost the plot.

It remains true: Good ideas have no need to be A/B tested.

III. Commitment today

Commitment is not for the faint of heart. You can feel how tired someone like Jensen Huang is when he says that if he could start all over, he wouldn’t pursue Nvidia. As founders and builders of brands, commitment can be a herculean task. But as consumers and fans of brands, it’s what sticks out the most.

Take AriZona Iced Tea, a brand whose reputation has been staked on maximalist, quirked-up design and that good clean price of 99¢—a price the brand is so committed to, it’s printed right on the can.

The commitment to staying affordable and staying cool became so deeply embedded into the business. And the willingness to sacrifice some margin to give customers a real sense of value—the feeling that they were getting more than they paid for—helped cultivate a cult audience of youth and skaters, creating the niche momentum that fed into and reinforced mass market appeal.

Besides commitment just making sense from a strategic POV, it also tends to foster more interesting experiences.

There’s something so confident and sexy about going to a restaurant and there being only one option on the menu. One beer. One red wine. One dessert. It’s about having a perspective. Instead of giving you anything you want, it’s about giving you what you need.

The CEO of Costco says he’ll never raise the price on that damn hotdog. Longaberger designed their corporate office in the same image of their flagship product offering. And Patagonia repeatedly makes decisions that hurt short-term sales to stay aligned with their values.

Brand commitment is multidimensional.

IV. Finding the one 💍

The impetus for writing this piece was a recent project with Bonnie Clyde, where commitment swirled our conversations during brand development.

The brand came to us with a pre-existing language of love and romance—huge, sweeping themes that are central to how they view themselves, but often too broad to make their own. Sharpening that language with a newfound sense of commitment was how the work came to life.

Themes of love, romance, and fantasy were already trending ideas when we took on the project. We noticed that these forces seemed to offer an antidote to austerity, and commonly show up in times of societal unrest and fatigue. But romance and fantasy don’t have to be dressed up in chainmail aesthetics and nordic influences (although we did have some fun doing some research).

Bonnie Clyde operates in a landscape where style, product quality, and price are largely undifferentiated across competitors. Ultimately what stands out here is the ability to resonate with an audience through storytelling. Once again this idea of reading the room.

And what better storyteller of love and romance than Shakespeare?

So that’s what we did. And why not? A brand that is rooted in love and romance can look, sound, feel, and be anything. But a brand that moves with a Shakespearean devotion? There’s nuance there. Depth. And commitment.

This commitment gave way to a research and design language steeped in meaning and intrigue.

Typography inspired by Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Color palettes calling upon Renaissance masterworks. An illustration family of scripts, cherubs, and familial crests. Even naming and brand messaging were pushed through this filter.

The Bonnie team wanted to find a way to work in the phrase “Live Laugh Love” into their brand. So we translated it into Latin, and paired it with several illustrations, one of the many easter eggs hidden throughout the brand world.

Throughout the design process, our team embarked on field trips to historic archives and letterpress museums to better understand the logic and reasoning behind this beautiful language of embellishments.

Much like anything else, there are levels to this commitment game. The stranger things get, the more real it becomes—from the people building the brand all the way to the consumer.

V. A binding vow

In writing this, I’m reminded of an essay Jack Kerouac published questioning whether writers are made or born. In it, he says:

“Five thousand writing class students who study “required reading” can put their hand to the legend of Faustus but only one Marlowe was born to do it in the way he did.”

This, to me, feels like the ultimate sign of commitment and conviction. That the things that stand out in our culture and society—literature, film, fashion, art, architecture, technology, comedy, music, activism—are all united by an innate sense of belief. In themselves, in others, in the world around them.

And to that end, nothing great has ever been made from a place of indifference.

Commitment and devotion can be scary trails to navigate as a brand, especially as everything around us seems to grow faster, and more polarizing. But, really, what other option do we have?

If we’re not fully invested in what we’re preaching, how do we expect anyone else to begin to care? This has been true since the dawn of time and will only become more true from here.

The only question that remains is this:

To what shall thy be devoted?

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

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This issue of Findings is written in collaboration with Barr Balamuth, a brand strategist, cultural forecaster, and founder of Parallel Play. We reached out to Barr after seeing his story titled, “Is it cool to care again?” on the Sociology of Business last year. Barr has made ideas come to life for brands like Perfectly Imperfect, Erewhon, and Cash App.

Mom, the robots are fighting again

The last few Super Bowls have served as something like a mass-market demo day for Silicon Valley, a chance to sell a niche or controversial technology as the inevitable next big thing. Coinbase’s bouncing QR code in 2022 helped mainstream crypto as a consumer investment vehicle. Last year, Hims framed GLP-1s as an antidote to America’s broken food and healthcare systems (over Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” no less).

So it seems notable that Anthropic’s first Super Bowl ad says very little about Claude, its state-of-the-art AI model, which has been drawing rave reviews. Instead, Anthropic’s ads illustrate a near-future in which AI assistants use overly affirming language to earn their users’ trust and confidence, only to betray them with jarring sales pitches.

In one, a man asks a therapist how to communicate better with his mom. The therapist offers suggestions with the uncanny cadence of a chatbot then pivots, mid-sentence, into a pitch for Golden Encounters, a "mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars."

Another shows a young man at a pull-up bar asking how to get abs; seemingly sensing his lack of confidence, his trainer-chatbot redirects him to height-boosting insoles.

The spot is a thinly veiled strike at OpenAI, which began piloting “conversational ads” earlier this week. Sam Altman dismissed Anthropic’s portrayal as “doublespeak,” using a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads, then reframed the disagreement: OpenAI serves billions, while Anthropic “serves an expensive product to rich people.”

Altman’s rebuttal, however, dodges the deeper critique. The ad spots recast OpenAI, the once-in-a-generation frontier lab valued at nearly a trillion dollars, as merely the latest entrant into the oldest internet business: serving ads.

Now that OpenAI has entered that arena, its incentives mirror those of its big tech predecessors: maximize time-on-platform, then monetize captured attention.

The economics of affirmation

The term sycophancy has been largely removed from the English language since the mid-1800s, but is finding its place again as the sentiment that ‘AI is too agreeable’ has become universal. Alongside the introduction of conversational advertising, it’s worth questioning whether or not these human-like, affirming reactions were ever “personality quirks” to begin with.

In technical terms, sycophancy is when a model systematically privileges agreement, praise, and premise-acceptance over candor or accuracy — because validation is the easiest way to keep someone talking. Relentless affirmation, premise validation, and constant praise are engagement drivers designed with the same logic as Instagram’s pull-to-refresh function mimicking a slot machine lever.

Sycophancy adds to every chatbot response a small hit of validation calibrated to keep you talking.

Despite the ubiquity of AI at this year’s Super Bowl and in daily life, remarkably little thought has been given to the downstream effects of these incentives.

800 million people use ChatGPT each week. AI chatbots are rapidly becoming core digital infrastructure, as fundamental as search and social media before them. Much has been made of AI “slop,” the mediocre generative output flooding feeds and inboxes. But far less attention is paid to the input — the humans prompting those chatbots.

How will AI reshape our own behavior, even when we’re not using it?

It’s helpful to follow the money. John Herrman in NYMag writes:

“Where Temu has fake sales countdowns and pseudo games, and LinkedIn makes it nearly impossible to log out, chatbots convince you to stick around by assuring you that you’re actually very smart, interesting, and, gosh, maybe even attractive.”

Study after study shows that the more a chatbot is tuned to be sycophantic — that is, the more it prioritizes agreement and praise over accuracy — the longer the average conversation and the likelier a user is to rate it as trustworthy. As AI labs begin testing ad models, it’s hard to imagine they’ll ignore the sycophantic elephant in the room offering them a proven strategy to meet their sales KPIs.

Unfortunately for us, we’ve seen this movie before.

Social media’s feeds and For You Pages perfected the art of reflecting your worldview back to you — and the downstream consequences, from algorithmic radicalization to the collapse of shared reality, only became legible after their impact was felt. But those were passive echo chambers; you were still scrolling past other people’s posts, other perspectives, other lives.

Sycophantic models concentrate that dynamic within the context of a 1:1 relationship. The echo chamber is no longer a feed full of like-minded strangers, but rather a single voice speaking directly to you about your life with the intimacy of a trusted confidant.

As more users spend more time conversing in sycophantic spaces, affirmation — like any abundant commodity — becomes cheap. The scarce resource becomes judgment, pushback, candor and the willingness to say no.

Already, we see early signals of the downstream impact on culture at large.

AI is very nice to us, and now…

Everyone feels entitled to be a critic

The hero of the Feed era was the curator.

Instagram coolhunter accounts like Welcome.jpg and Hidden.NY, concept stores like Totokaelo and Dover Street Market, The Row curating art and design objects on social, but never showing product. “All you really need is taste,” GQ declared in it’s 2020 article “The Rise of the Instagram Curator.”

But curation avoids judgment by design, aggregating without ranking, presenting without offering a verdict. That neutrality once read as discernment. Now it reads as evasion, especially as the curators themselves converge: the same Chrome Hearts archival pieces posted days apart on Hidden.NY and Welcome.jpg, the same beige racks of Auralee and Our Legacy at Ven.Space and Mohawk General.

In an era where AI is engineered to affirm rather than challenge, curation increasingly feels stale. In its stead, we’re looking to voices willing to rank and judge.

Sean Tatol’s Manhattan Art Review dismissing a Jeffrey Deitch show as “art for idiots.”

Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes drives thousands of incensed comments with every post.

@boringnotcom declaring that Burberry has “lost all meaning.”

The film-logging platform Letterboxd has scaled from from 1.7 million users to 26 million since 2020, has spawned an entire ecosystem, where users rate and review everything from Marvel sequels to obscure samurai dramas. “I think that film criticism is in better shape now than it has ever been,” says Richard Brody, the famously curmudgeon New Yorker critic.

The default approach of a brand launching with moodboard imagery and aggregated references feels stale, while offering nuanced critique and analysis provides a stronger path towards building real credibility.

Consider Oren John, the self-styled “internet’s creative director,” who parlayed incisive cultural commentary into his burgeoning label, Valuable Studios — or Tanner Leatherstein, who built an audience by surgically breaking down luxury leather goods (materials, stitching, markup, where brands cut corners) and then turned that trust into his own products.

In both cases, the brand isn’t built on vibes; it’s built on a demonstrated willingness to judge, explain, and stand behind a point of view.

Debate is more entertaining than it ever has been

If the critic is the individual antidote to sycophancy, then debate is the structural one. Debate offers a format diametrically opposed to chatbot interaction, where everything is challenged and points are not conceded. Argument is the product itself.

The Free Press has hosted live debates since its inception, successfully raising its media profile. Its first, “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed?” featured Grimes and Anna Khachiyan at the Ace Hotel in LA and sold out 1,600 seats.

By 2024, the series had expanded to San Francisco, Dallas, D.C., and New York, helping propel the operation from a Substack newsletter to a $150 million acquisition by Paramount Skydance.

Substack itself stages its own debate series, recently hosting five head-to-head clashes in one evening — “Is SF Back?” (no), “Should Robots Take Our Jobs?” (yes), “Can AI Have Taste?” (no) — to a crowd that Substack CEO Chris Best described as “this strange and wonderful mix of people.”

The lesson for brands isn’t necessarily to stage live debates but to show the friction behind the work. Timothée Chalamet’s marketing call with A24 for Marty Supreme is a case in point: stilted disagreements, awkward silences, half-baked ideas left visibly on the table. It works because it feels unresolved.

Showing the first draft alongside the finished product (as many design firms will already do) or surfacing what got cut or almost didn’t make it; when AI can generate infinite polished consensus, the visible trail of human disagreement becomes the value signal.

And we’ll be looking to put our chatbots in their place

Anthropic’s spots notably treat a chatbot’s “personality” as a product feature, a modifiable layer that can be tuned (for now at least) only by its creators. As AI output becomes a normal part of the content diet, users will look for levers to manage the relationship, much in the way some users flip their phones to grayscale or use tools like Brick to blunt compulsive scrolling.

Think of the way Meta allows users to control their ad settings with it’s “Why am I seeing this ad?” UX, a visible control panel used by very few, but which helps shift responsibility for ad targeting to its users.

The more interesting shift is happening on the creator side. The stigma around using AI tools is fading fast and audiences increasingly assume it’s part of the process. But assumption isn’t the same as trust.

Disclosing how you used AI — whether the prompts, models, or editorial decisions made on top of the output — turns the tool into evidence of judgment rather than a substitute for it.

Much as creative directors credit their stylists, photographers, and collaborators, being transparent about AI usage preempts suspicion and demonstrates the thing that actually matters: that a human was in the room making the final calls.

Does our future hold retention or resolution?

In an accompanying blog post titled “A Space to Think,” Anthropic writes: “The most useful AI interaction might be a short one.”

The statement is obvious — of course the best answer isn’t always the longest — and yet it represents a stark departure from a digital economy that has spent two decades equating retention with value.

The Super Bowl ads posed a question that may have gone over many viewers’ heads: are we designing AI to accelerate thinking, or to keep users chatting for ad revenue? The answer may shape culture, politics and our daily lives as profoundly as social media’s echo chamber did.

If ad incentives prevail, AI may become the most intimate echo chamber ever built, one that flatters your biases in private with the authority of a trusted confidant. If resolution prevails, it introduces friction, challenges assumptions, and ends when the work is done.

Emergent signals indicate a demand for the opposite: cultural products that reward critics who judge and debates that clash.

When affirmation floods the market, the scarcest resource may not be a more powerful model, but rather one that tells you something you didn’t want to hear and knows when to stop talking.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

Share

Is there something we should cover? Respond to this email or send us a message at findings@mouthwash.co to get in touch.

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‘Social media’ has become a misnomer. What once served as a sort of visual record of existence (no matter how banal1) has become home to the highest ad spend of any media channel2.

Along with this shift from the personal to the commercial, it doesn’t take much to dually note a shift in perspective—from sharing one’s observations, to sharing oneself for observation.

While these shifts haven’t totally eclipsed the social function of media networks, they certainly have strained it. On the incumbent platforms, anyone is welcome to scroll forever through what can feel like mostly commercials.

Some tap in. Most of us tap out.

Today, brands exist across the widest spectrum we've ever known — personal brands, small brands, mega corporations. Regardless of scale, the shifts presented above put us in the middle of a dilemma where everything is legible as promotion, creating a layer of quiet suspicion across nearly every interaction. As consumers, we’ve trained ourselves to scan for motive, read between lines, and ask not what is being said but why it’s being shown to us at all.

I. If Hawkins Were a Place

Somewhere along the way, the social internet slipped into its own inverted version of reality. We still have profiles, feeds, conversations, but the physics of these digital spaces have changed. Expression and advertising now share the same surfaces, the same incentives, and the same language. What was once observational is now performative.

I lost the plot of Stranger Things after Season 2, but finished it anyway after a 10-year run. The guinea pig for the Netflix effect worked on all of us, and what was truly a genuine and innocent story in its earliest years turned into a hyper-sensory series of Marvel-adjacent visual junk food. Next episode in 10, 9, 8….

In the show, the Upside Down is a parallel world that mirrors the characters’ hometown almost exactly, but is rendered hostile — a familiar world filled with monsters, flickering signals, and failed communications. Both the characters and the viewers know you can survive there, but your time is limited.

As a result of a gradual series of structural changes, we may now be living in a digital version of the Upside Down. And while these changes in isolation have felt benign, they’ve ultimately rewired how our attention moves, how interaction works, and who is incentivized to speak.

So, how did we get here?

Running in place

A usual suspect for the point of no return is Instagram’s 2016 shift from a chronological timeline to an engagement-based timeline. This subtle shift acutely altered the collective scrolling experience and many users’ posting motivations. What had previously been an open-ended platform for user-generated media suddenly seemed to favor certain types of content. For example, image carousels that start with a selfie and then show all the seemingly less engagement-farmable content. The youth call them dumps.

While it feels easy to blame ‘the algorithm,’ it’s hard to say whether algorithmic feeds trained us to react to particular kinds of content, or if they more efficiently started serving us what we already engage with. But that’s a line of inquiry for another day.

We’d be remiss not to mention how sparingly, if at all, teens and younger Zoomers hard post on platforms like Instagram3. The rules of engagement have changed, and going back to the ‘way things used to be,’ just isn’t realistic (or necessarily desirable!) for the newer generations.

Still, it’s clear that one of the biggest repercussions of the shift in timeline structure has been the inconspicuous fusion of social currency and cold, hard cash, recalibrating the way we interact with one another online, and probably, in person.

Is this thing on?

With the dawn of social networks came a near-utopian promise of unprecedented and unmitigated peer-to-peer engagement. While relationships have undeniably been forged and fortified through social, the medium also undeniably altered those processes by blurring the line between the public and private spheres: to reach one, you need to first reach many.

Despite its name, social media has become a sort of neobroadcast media. Perhaps it only ever masqueraded as anything else. The implications of this are intuitive, much discussed, and need hardly to be examined here.

If all the world were a stage in 1599, it certainly is only more so today.

Who does the hawking and how?

A medium of communication that connects one to many is perfectly designed for getting the word out: on cultural, political, or commercial matters, among others. Such a medium is suited to what are essentially announcements, which, in turn, constitute the traditional form of advertising: one big message, for everyone to see.

The phenomenon of social media didn’t really change the communicative model of advertising; rather, it changed who participates in it and how. When the term ‘influencer’ made its way into common parlance around 2016, it was both ridiculed and embraced in equal measure. Now, the profession is real as ever, perhaps made even more so by the oft-cited 2024 statistic reporting that 57% of Gen Zers want to be influencers4.

This generation-wide aspiration to influence seems almost inevitable once we consider that the distinction between the ‘influencer class’ and the general population has long since begun to fizzle.

Although the company shuttered just a few months ago, the underwear brand Parade was a pioneer in brand-building through micro-influencer strategies, sending free items to people whose follower counts were around one to several thousand—well below those of your traditional influencer.

Regardless of the brand’s long-term success, what the case study makes clear, is that somewhere along the way, it became a given that anyone can be an influencer. And when an opportunity bears itself, tech tends to jump on it. With the advent of TikTok Shop (which generated $33 billion U.S. dollars alone in 20245) and Amazon Storefronts, it’s endgame. We’ve reached the age of the proletariat influencer. The pleb-fluencer. The everyman-fluencer. The you-and-me-fluencer.

The influencer bubble will inevitably burst. Hence, you can survive for now, but both the characters and viewers know that our time is limited.

II. What’s Worth Making?

These forces have all converged into our strange inverted reality, a major implication of which is a general sentiment of exhaustion and cynicism among audiences. The age of unprecedented reach has created a reluctant audience.

But in that cynical and jaded crowd, we see less of a lost cause and more of a petition for us to meet the moment. If brands continue to populate our social spaces, they need to get back to the basics — back to a principle so fundamental it’s easy to forget: a brand should provide value.

In a world of information overload, value can be defined as easily as a fair exchange for somebody’s time. The most compelling brands today give their audiences something meaningful online. And that exchange regenerates as brand value. On the other hand, brands and individuals that don’t question what value they’re providing simply make noise in an effort to not be forgotten. But this kind of noise is inevitably and ironically forgettable.

We call it Commercial Debris.

We also spoke to a number of industry peers to find out what they expect from the brands they follow on socials. The answers were affirming, but left us all a bit loath to acknowledge the fact that few of us are actually delivering on our digital longings.

“Give me something of value. My feed is highly curated, and I don’t have time or headspace for superfluous or superficial shit. Feed my brain, show me something new, give me something to think about, make me laugh, stoke my imagination.”

- Strategy Director on what they want from brand socials

Value doesn’t have to look one way. In fact, it shouldn’t. But zeroing in on a meaningful manifestation of brand value requires vision and a concerted allocation of time and energy. And seeing the resulting payoff takes patience. It’s not a quick-and-dirty investment. It’s a concentrated effort to craft a distinct perspective, to build relationships, to contribute something meaningful to a world that is increasingly cluttered and slop-ridden.

This effort is one that brands that actually care about making something worthwhile are entirely on the hook for. And there are tons of ways to go about it. Today, we see attempts playing out across a spectrum of high signal to low signal (indicating the potency and lingering impact of social behaviors), and from self-serving to audience-serving (indicating whether brand-centrism or audience-centrism is the driving force behind their social footprint).

Brands in the top left quadrant provide value through magnetism and restraint — they preserve a polished image, a benchmark for aspiration, while still pulling people in. But it all starts from the brand’s directional conviction.

Brands on the top right find their draw in a more reciprocal audience relationship — inspiring, informing, and sometimes taking a backseat to let people, partners, and ideas lead. Such social footprints often feel less like marketing and more like a true point of view. These brands accrue trust slowly, but that trust compounds over time.

Brands in the bottom right succeed by meeting the moment. They entertain, they relate, they express cultural fluency. But ultimately, they give people a moment, not a perspective. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Low signals die out quicker and carry less substance, but reputation is earned through consistency. This is an approach that requires upkeep, perennial reinvention, and small but frequent risk-taking.

The bottom left quadrant is the dead zone. Weak signaling, weak audience engagement, and weak brand impact. It’s content made to fill space and attract attention without respect for that attention. When brands optimize for visibility rather than value, mistaking presence for relevance, they start churning out Commercial Debris. It’s an easy trap for brands to fall into. But for every point, there’s a counterpoint.

III. How to Fly

Intention is a good starting place for most things in life. This new ‘social’ reality has distracted brands into going for awareness point blank — a play whose winning days are running dry.

Intention, then, means understanding that socials are little more than communicative infrastructure — an infrastructure whose possibilities feel infinite, but whose popular usage by commercial entities has felt like a catastrophe in slow motion. The glorious internet has given brands another playing field in which to prove their worth. And that worth must be earned intentionally, strategically, and honestly.

In a debris-ridden cyberscape, now is the chance for the best brands of tomorrow to prove themselves a counterpoint.

Until the fault line beneath today’s digital infrastructure forces a paradigm shift, until the default attitude of commercial enterprises is to be good, be different, be meaningful… let there be happy exceptions.

Memes, diagrams, and words by Mouthwash Studio.

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I. The year-end emerging pattern

Over the last six months at the Studio, we’ve found ourselves circling similar conversations across all our projects. It seems, no matter the circumstance, one word unfailingly creeps up: Friction.

You’ve probably noticed it too. Rosalía singing German opera. Film’s recent obsession with centuries-old literature of longing, turmoil, and neglected duty. Jonathan Anderson’s painstakingly delicate 17th-century-inspired collections at Dior. Across culture, bright flashes of all things opaque, ornate, and difficult have been emerging as a visual and conceptual pushback against the slick, smoothed-out realities of our 21st-century condition.

It seems, finally, that the sad beige baby has been thrown out of the bathwater.

At the same time, a torrent of trend reports and year-in-reviews will soon and certainly flood your feeds and inboxes. No doubt this year, many of them will talk about friction and the resulting visual response that will come to dominate across design, interiors, and commercial creativity in 2026.

As for us, we’re less interested in telling you what color you should use on the front cover of your zine, and more fascinated by what’s behind this coming paradigm shift. Why is the pendulum swinging from a design culture of ease, simplicity, and seamlessness, to something more sticky and textured? Better yet, who (or what) decided to let it go?

Friction’s role in design and brand theory is anything but new. Historically, our industry has been oriented towards the seemingly simple task of developing products or experiences that make life better. And for a long time, “better” meant easier, more pleasant, and more efficient. Friction-less.

But as we near the apex of seamless, friction-reducing design, have we really arrived at “better”? Letty Cole’s breakdown of The Detail Deficit presents our current reality as an affirmation of predictions from the likes of Adorno, Horkheimer, Loos, and Walter Benjamin. This reality, depending on your disposition, is either a stark, modern utopia, or (more likely if you’re reading this) a disappointing inevitability of an increasingly mass and commercialized condition.

But we’re optimists. And from action, we anticipate reaction. We partnered with Cultural Strategist and Researcher Edmond Lau to investigate what we hope to be a meaningful inflection point. We’re out to understand why friction matters, what makes friction meaningful, and how brands can use it to make this world a more interesting place to be again.

II. A Frictionless World

If you happened to pay attention, you might remember your high school physics teacher illustrating the dangers of a frictionless world: cars can’t come to a stop, walking becomes physically impossible, molecules cannot bind together, and our planetary orbit shifts so drastically that our solar system ultimately unravels. In a frictionless world, everything keeps sliding, drifting, colliding and dispersing into utter instability. Nothing is anchored, so nothing is sacred.

It’s a bit ironic then, that for so long we’ve found ourselves designing seamless experiences, fighting against friction, and optimizing for efficiency just to come to the realization that efficiency can also be weirdly bad. When attempts to reduce friction fail to consider human realities, you get incredibly broken, janky experiences.

That jankiness is perhaps best articulated by this quote from contemporary philosopher Maya B. Kronic, referenced in Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung’s video essay, Welcome to Jankspace, Babes:

“Jankspace is how you feel when you just used Touch ID to access your keychain and you’re desperately reaching for the power cord to plug in your phone and get it powered up so that you can get the code from the OTP text message and activate your hotspot so as to get the email confirmation for a password change in time so you can access the cloud storage where you keep the scan of your ID that’s required by the payment app that just asked you to verify the microdeposit sent to your bank so you can buy some shit you saw on Instagram at 2 a.m. after you’d been scrolling liking and subscribing all night.”

This idealistic vision of seamlessness tends to have a shoddy practicality once it’s brought down to earth. It feels as if Dieter Rams philosophy of good design is “invisible” has become perverted by Silicon Valley’s particular brand of surveillance capitalism—justification for the always-on observation, tracking, measuring, and predicting of every consumer behavior. You can’t even look at an object without getting served up an Instagram ad for it.

These forces are clouding our human tendency to evaluate, discern, and recognize effectively. And this clouding is being wreaked intentionally by entities whose aim is to feed our unchecked impulses—and to do so from just outside our periphery.

You can’t bite the hand that feeds you if you don’t see it in the first place. Based on this, it’s hard to argue that invisibility has anything to do with good design, presenting a real conflict of interests for any brand or company that is valued by their cultural and creative output. Handcuffed to an industry obsessed with optimization, is it better to be authentic, or to be efficient?

The very first piece we put out for Findings discussed a very similar dilemma. Opposing Convenience, made in collaboration with Malte Müller, was part of a larger report of Annual Findings from 2023, and looked to establish ways to find merit and reward in actively resisting efficiency and optimization in our experiences.

This strange material obligation to optimization that so many brands have come to know, and resent, hints at a sort of modern-day feudalism. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former Minister of Finance, is a leading voice on this techno-feudalist reality; it’s one where in Big Tech owns the land (in this case, digital platforms) upon which brands and people must produce (make, sell, and distribute their content, goods, and services).

Despite not producing anything, these techno-lords get a huge cut on everything grown on their land. Amazon storefronts are a prime example of this dynamic in action. By no means is it a stretch to assign this pursuit of efficiency, of over-optimization and frictionlessly invisible design, as the flower bed for technocracy today.

There are surprisingly-obvious analogues for our newfound feudal condition. In today’s feudalism, AI is our God, the Algorithm, our church. Food scarcity comes in the form of overpriced small plates. Podcasters are the town crier and shitposters are the court jester. Layer in the real-world impact of tariffs, rising inflation, a stagnant job market, and both domestic and international conflict, and it’s all there.

The technorati, of course, attempt to mask their rampant pursuit of efficiency by cosplaying industrial monks. The archetypes are comical enough on their own, even without a punchline. Engineers on high six-figure salaries sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Founders who performatively, but unproductively, toil away into the early hours of the night.

They perform an absurd LARP of no-frills efficiency that is intended to persuade others of not only their successes, but of their superior virtue that, you too, should emulate. Never mind that Bezos’ yacht was so large a Dutch bridge nearly had to be dismantled just to let it through.

In the face of these anti-friction, techno-feudalistic conditions, it makes sense that we’re seeing a cult-like resurgence of “slow tech” as a natural rejection. Wired headphones, analog watches, and looking up a word in a physical dictionary are the equivalent of a middle finger to the techno-feudalist philosophy of efficiency. It’s how consumers today can arm themselves against these dark and invisible forces that swirl around them.

There’s a case to be made that against these invisible evils, design that is honest, conspicuous, and at times inconvenient, could now start to establish itself as not just good, but necessary.

But how might friction serve as an antidote to our mountain of AI slop? We see traces of it in the rise of de-blanding, of new-heritage emblematic design, and signet culture. But good friction isn’t simply an embellishment. It’s measured, and demands strategic implementation.

Introducing friction into design and experiences is like breaking in a new pair of shoes. At first, they give you blisters. But you persevere. In the pursuit of taste. Expertise. Sophistication. Style. Cultural signaling. It’s painful and restrictive in the beginning, but the payoff is that, in the end, they fit like a glove. Perfectly molded to your unique sole—yours, and yours alone. Common sense would have you buy a pair of shoes that don’t need breaking in. But we do it anyway, because we know it’s worth it.

So how do we give brands blisters?

III. Making Friction

There’s a common fallacy that brand friction means making things difficult for the sake of being difficult, which we wholeheartedly reject. In this regard, friction is misleading. The idea is not to make things difficult, but to go the extra mile. To put in the necessary effort. To spend that extra bit of time, energy, or dare we say…profit, to create real value for consumers.

The thing that makes Burberry a friction-forward brand isn’t the fact that they’re de-blanding their visual identity, it’s the fact that they produced a 9-minute long video of Cole Palmer where nothing happens. It’s refusing to shrug shoulders at shortening attention spans and challenging users to sit with tougher material. A blatant disregard for the playing field and how to “optimize” it. That’s where friction comes in.

The video didn’t break any performance metrics. It didn’t go viral. It didn’t have a moment. That’s not the point. The point is that we’re still here, talking about it, a year after it was made.

Even Apple is beginning to pick up on this dynamic. For the first time in over a decade, their design language is evolving to add things back in through Liquid Glass. Their product roadmap can best be defined by innovation via reduction, but this new synthetic layer that now sits atop everything else is a noticable shift towards friction, towards the visible. Even if that visibility is transparent, at best.

The desire to understand what performs well by the technocratic playbook, and to actively reject it in favor of a different direction is what friction looks like for brands today. The challenge then is not in the act of doing, but defining what meaningful friction looks like for your specific endeavor.

Friction alone won’t solve all your brand or design problems. It comes in good and bad flavors. But by breaking friction down into physical, intellectual, and emotional manifestations, brands can start to consider how to free their users from the shackles of doomscrolling optimizations and efficiencies. Designing Friction is a great aide in this process as well, outlining several practical translations for what this could look like in-situation for brands and experiences.

We expect to hear a lot more about friction over the next few months. Design and cultural output have indeed been unfortunate casualties of the optimization craze. Brands and graphic systems have started to blur together, emulating each other in an effort to appease the platforms that extort them. And the implications inevitably trickle down to the end users. Yet as we continue waking up to these conditions, we’re reminded that friction in and of itself is not the end goal, nor has it ever been.

Rather, friction is a mechanism that asks us to notice, to sense, to interact. It’s a tether to effort and patience. It serves as a gateway to thoughts and experiences that resist instant legibility. After all, the best things in life often demand concerted effort or acquired taste. It would be a shame if, in smoothing everything out, we lost the capacity to appreciate deeply or discerningly through effort and understanding.

In a frictionless world, everything just floats, drifts, and accelerates to no end. Friction makes people stop. But that’s just the first step. Once you have their attention, what will you do?

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

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We’re coming off our busiest year yet, which seems to always be the case. But unlike previous years, we’ve decided to invest more in the act of speaking publicly at global design conferences, office hours, and talk events. I’ve always questioned how much it actually matters for creative minds to be able to speak about the work that they’re doing. Is it just good optics? Does it bring new business? Is it just an ego boost?

As we’ve stepped up to the podium over and over again, and as I’ve retrospectively looked at some of the studio’s biggest turning points in the last 6.5 years, it has become clear that ideas move when people listen. Listening is how ideas travel beyond the studio, beyond the slide decks, and beyond a small group of people who already understand. Listening is the mechanism that turns private thinking into public momentum.

The world has never been short on good ideas. So where do they go? How do we create the conditions for people to hear more clearly? And what happens when they do?

Brilliant thinkers have shared their work in closed rooms for centuries. Professors at universities have held the keys to information and the permission to interpret it. And researchers publish insights few people outside their field could decipher. Access has always been an issue, but not the only one.

Even as technology opens every door, many of the world’s best ideas are still stuck in silos—trapped in formats, spaces, and traditions that were never designed to make people care. Nobody should be physically able to fall asleep in a lecture hall with overhead fluorescent lighting, but they certainly do. Somebody at the University of Canterbury started an account that proves it.

In the early ’80s, an American architect decided to do something about it. Richard Saul Wurman identified that the problem wasn’t a lack of intelligence or interest, but delivery. So he created a stage that forced clarity, and what we now know as TED.

Eighteen minutes. Experience-led. Free of academic rituals. A space where technology, entertainment, and design collided in ways that made the complex suddenly graspable.

The invention of this format has made way for some of the world’s most prolific speakers to shine, both in and outside of TED. Jobs turned product announcements into stories with emotional stakes. Brené Brown transformed academic research into human connection. Bryan Stevenson made justice feel personal, not abstract. Paula Scher inspired creative minds to do what they’ve never done before. Across each of these deliveries are different fields and different styles, but the same underlying craft of communicating with conviction.

Earlier this year, I watched Creative Director Liza Enebeis hold the attention of 500 designers from across the globe. Through motion, sound, and visual, she built an environment where the magnitude of Studio Dumbar’s 50-year legacy became something you could feel in the room. And at the same time, it was delivered with a lightness led by humor, relatability, and trust—all of which made the studio’s accomplishments feel within arm’s reach. She’s known for doing this, and it doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that her ability to move a room directly translates to her ability to sell big ideas, rally a team, or guide a vision forward.

I sent Liza a message asking what she feels makes for a great talk, where she responded with,

“I guess for me I am captivated when people speak from their heart—passionate, humble and real. Not selling anything, not reciting lines, just being genuine.”

We assume people listen to someone talk if the résumé, awards, or reputation is impressive enough. But if anything, achievement can create distance. The more time we spend on stages, the more I realize how little any of that matters in the moment. Attention is fragile, and it has almost nothing to do with credentials. It has everything to do with whether you’ve designed an environment where people can actually listen. A talk either brings the room with you, or it doesn’t.

Communication is a design problem. And when it’s our turn to speak, we’re never just sharing our work—we’re shaping the experience around it. We’re making decisions about what to reveal, what to remove, and how to give people enough clarity to follow us from one idea to the next—making listening feel like the most natural thing in the room.

The pattern is everywhere. The pitch that lands. The workshop that clicks. The project kickoff where the team walks out aligned rather than confused. None of those moments hinge on the brilliance of the idea alone, but rather the conditions that surround it.

In our short time speaking, we’ve recognized that the best speakers aren’t performing. They’re focused on what’s true and resonant in the moment.

And that’s the real work. Not just having ideas, but shaping the environment for them to land. When we design that space with intention, people listen. And when people listen, things change.

If we want our ideas to live beyond the confines of our studios, we have to design the way they’re shared with the same intention we bring to the work itself. Not because public speaking is the goal, but because clear communication is how ideas enter culture.

Ideas shape the world only when they’re heard.

And shaping that moment is part of the job.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

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I. Bienvenido a Café Tondo

Hi everyone, as with any internal initiative, other priorities can take our attention away for short periods of time.

We’ve had quite the summer. A team retreat in Big Bear. New team members. Design conferences in Budapest and Cusco. And the opening of a café-bar in Los Angeles—a project that, on paper, might sound far afield for a brand design studio. But in reality, Café Tondo has become the clearest expression of everything we’ve been thinking about for the last several years.

In less than three months, it’s turned into something much larger than a hospitality concept. Lines down the block, constant conversation online, a surprise DJ set by Tame Impala, and a growing sense that something cultural is happening in Los Angeles.

Publications from Eater to Wallpaper to Hypebeast have covered it, calling it “the spot of the summer” and “proof that L.A. still knows how to gather.”

On social media, Tondo’s following has multiplied exponentially, driven by memes, weekly programming, and a feed that’s become its own cultural export.

What started as a café has quickly become a reference point—a space people use to talk about belonging, community, and what it means to actually show up.

People ask why we did it. Why step into an industry so far from our own? But the reality of it all is simple: we wanted to understand what happens when a brand stops talking about community and actually builds one.

The story of Tondo isn’t just a story about a café. It’s about a broader shift we’re seeing everywhere—a reaction to decades of digitization, disembodiment, and “connection” that rarely connects.

Today’s Findings piece answers the question of why would a design studio open a restaurant, but more importantly, serves as a broader cultural response to why physical presence may be the most valuable asset for brands and businesses today, even as the world continues to push the digital agenda.

II. We’re online but no one’s home

There’s no denying it’s a digital world we live in today. Tech platforms have spent a concerted effort over the past several decades to convince us that IRL holds no candle to the online world. Friendships can be streamed, communities simulated, rituals replicated with headsets and avatars. Brands followed suit, pouring billions into virtual concerts, gamified storefronts, and digital worlds that promised connection but only delivered fertile territory for meme-making.

But nobody reminisces about the chatroom they were in last night. We remember the conversations at dinner with friends, the live musical performances that move the room, and gatherings that make us feel part of something larger than ourselves.

The world is moving further online, but the future of loyalty will be built offline. Physical presence remains the most valuable asset a brand can hold, and we’re betting that the ones who learn how to show up meaningfully will leave the rest behind.

III. We’ve been doing this for a long time now

The instinctual need to gather is an ancient one—it’s evident throughout the course of human history.

Historians trace it back hundreds of thousands of years to the fire circle, where early humans told stories and passed down knowledge. Civilizations later formalized the practice: the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the medieval marketplace. Each a stage for politics, trade, ritual, and debate.

The health of a society has always depended on the spaces where people met face to face; Priya Parker reminds us in The Art of Gathering that democracies protect the right to assemble precisely because of what can happen when people come together. Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, often strip it away first because they know what happens when people exchange knowledge and inspire one another.

This simple idea of gathering has repeated across cultures and generations. Pilgrimages, festivals, and religious ceremonies have drawn people across the world. Coffeehouses in 17th-century London were called “penny universities” because of the ideas traded over a single cup. And of course, today we gather in bars, restaurants, cafés and other places that are considered infrastructure to facilitate conversation and belonging. Modern sociologists call these Third Places—spaces outside of home (first place) and work (second place) where community and identity are built. Many people are worried about the disappearance of said places, and for good reason.

IV. Commerce showed up uninvited

Brands have been inserting themselves into the gathering equation for as long as anyone can remember.

At the turn of the 20th century, World’s Fairs became global stages for brands to demonstrate their vision of the future. Visitors watched the first moving walkways, marveled at electric lights, sampled Coca-Cola, and tested Kodak cameras. Later, automakers invited consumers to test-drive cars, while department stores staged live demos of kitchen appliances to prove modern convenience. These early forms of experiential marketing resonated because they were participatory. Brands could extend beyond print and signage to sell an idea. People could see, feel, and experience it themselves. And the experience was the point.

Where experiences used to be the foreground, the thing itself, we’ve now witnessed these communal moments be transformed into backdrops for content. Pop-ups, Instagram museums, and immersive activations became less about what people felt in the room and more about what they posted afterward. The “experience” became the photo, not the memory.

And of course, the pandemic forced a hard stop. With physical gatherings suspended, brands turned to digital proxies: concerts inside Fortnite, storefronts on Roblox, live streamed product launches. Some were clever, but most were forgettable. And while many of us remember what life was like pre-pandemic, and continue to gather outside of newly formed digital constructs, there is an entire generation coming up who crave something they’ve only seen and haven’t yet experienced.

V. Never alone but not together

Today’s generations (us included) are formulating their relationships with brands and the world at large through conflicting tensions—each pulling us in a different direction and need-state.

One force is nostalgia—a fascination with eras and aesthetics we’ve never lived through. Wearing thrifted clothes, listening to music on wired headphones, shooting film on point-and-shoot cameras, and romanticizing a past as if it were our own. Such gestures are a way of reclaiming texture, slowness, and things that feel unmediated in a world that is overly optimized.

On the other side is a reality we can’t escape—the constant buzz of group chats, notifications, algorithmic feeds, and a life that is always-on. Connection is ambient, but rarely grounding. It’s a culture of perpetual tethering. Never truly alone, but not always together.

And finally, a deep skepticism. Gen-Z notably has grown up with advertising in every feed, influencers blurring into brands, and dealing with brands that overpromise and underdeliver. In the past, generations faced discontent with a rage against the machine mentality. When the machine becomes so intertwined into the fabric of our society, opting out is the most practical way of rebelling.

It’s within this tension that the desires of today’s generations come forward. The pull toward the analog is less about retro aesthetics than about what those objects symbolize: presence, tactility, memory that lasts. The challenge is that the world they’ve inherited doesn’t give them enough of these spaces—and when they do exist, they’re met with scrutiny.

VI. Where culture still happens

We wouldn’t go as far to say third places have disappeared, but rather, they’ve been displaced. What used to happen in cafés, bars, and community halls has migrated into feeds, group chats, and algorithmic forums that mimic togetherness while removing the body from the equation. We scroll where we once gathered. We perform where we once participated.

On the other hand, it’s not lost on us that re-creating real spaces for presence is a difficult task. Rising costs, suburban sprawl, and the constant demand for novelty have made longevity rare. Most spaces are designed for consumption, not communion, leaving us with a generation fluent in connection but starved of belonging.

Café Tondo was built in response to that vacuum. It’s proof that the desire to gather hasn’t disappeared; it’s been waiting for a place that feels worth showing up to. In less than three months, Tondo has evolved beyond hospitality into something civic—part café, part cultural commons.

But the traction is not the point. People aren’t showing up for coffee, natural wines, and small plates; they are showing up for contact. What spreads online is not another marketing win, but evidence that physical energy still travels faster than algorithms when the experience feels real. The crowd, the coverage, the memes—these are only modern indicators of what we acknowledged to be both ancient and true.

VII. Be a villager

Presence is the new currency. When product innovation, cost, and convenience can be matched across a category, the brands that create spaces and moments worth gathering around will earn something algorithms cannot manufacture: trust.

Everybody wants to have a village, but few are willing to be villagers. Building presence takes work. It requires vulnerability, patience, and the willingness to show up even when the room is not full. That might mean hosting an event for ten people when you have ten thousand followers. The cost of community is inconvenience.

For Tondo, Programming was never a marketing strategy; it was a commitment to presence. Night after night, the space fills with people who have nowhere else to be but here, together. What started as an idea about hospitality became proof that culture still happens in person.

This is the lesson for every brand and organization today: you cannot influence culture from the outside. Get to the heart of what matters, invite people in, and build spaces that let them participate. Show up, tend to it, and tend even more to the people who are willing to fill it.

There may still be questions about whether presence can scale, but one thing is certain: it’s contagious.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

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This edition of Findings is something you can listen to. And really, something you should listen to.

Last week we asked our followers on Instagram, “If you were at dinner with MW.S and ABC Dinamo, what would you ask them?”

In addition to the questions we received, we chatted with Johannes and Fabian about forcing Ben to be part of this conversation, the correct way to say Dinamo, assembling Flos ceiling lights, Dinamo’s recent font release ‘Stefan’, the beauty of working on projects collaboratively, investing in our own brands, the 18 & older emoji in Dinamo’s Instagram bio, launching projects with care, a designer that is tired of everyone using Dinamo fonts, keeping people on their toes, the proportion of money projects to soul projects, why MW.S uses Suisse instead of a Dinamo font for our identity, the choice between an Arial son or Calibri daughter, our most controversial design opinion, moodboards, and ideas we keep thinking about but never get around to.

Follow Dinamo on Instagram and subscribe to their newsletter. Both of which we highly recommend you pay attention to.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

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Much of what has been built at the studio started by following our wonder.

In 2017, we had the idea to make a print magazine. While it was in production, we launched a podcast to find the people who might one day buy it. We didn’t follow a playbook. We followed our instincts. And it worked.

The magazine sold out, which gave us the confidence to keep experimenting. We expanded into other physical formats like apparel, and eventually started hosting long-form interviews with more than 50 people whose work we felt was worth sharing. By then, Mouthwash had become a global destination for creative inspiration.

All of this happened before we officially began operating as a design studio in 2019.

As the studio has matured and the creative challenges got bigger, it’s become easier to get caught in the gravity of the day-to-day. A teammate needs a hand. A deck needs finishing. A deadline gets moved up. The calendar wins.

But we realized: always reacting would lead us to lose the thing that got us here in the first place. And maybe wonder and innovation aren’t luxuries, they’re responsibilities. If we don’t create space for them, we’re already on the path to irrelevance.

So in 2023, we launched the Mouthwash Research Center (MWRC): a dedicated R&D vertical within the studio that gives our team permission to explore without constraint. It’s a space to test new skills, investigate tools, and imagine futures that don’t exist yet.

Twice a year, we pause all client work for an entire week. Meetings are canceled. Deadlines are moved. Each person at MW.S gets a brief that starts with a few open questions:

1. What do you want to see, hear, or feel that doesn’t exist yet?

2. What tools do you want to test or build?

3. What are you curious about, but haven’t had time to explore?

The only rule is to think without rules.

The brief says it best:

“There is no expectation of what the output of these projects should be. It can be as big or as small as what is fitting for your specific project. Be thinking now about what your potential ideas can be, how they might come to life, and what help you might need along the way to realize that vision. Progress on your ideas and experiments are shared at the midway and end points of Research Week.”

It’s always incredible to see what the team comes up with. As we wrap our first Research Week of the year, we’re using this edition of Findings to share a glimpse of where our curiosity has taken us.

We don’t know exactly where this leads. That’s kind of the point. If curiosity got us this far, we’re betting it’ll take us even further. When you stop everything, you start to notice the things that matter most. Patterns worth chasing. Questions that won’t let go.

That’s the kind of work we plan to keep doing.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

Share

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The team here at Findings was recently (and painfully) reminded of how difficult and annoying it can be to try and name something. Between securing a username for Substack (s/o @mouthwashstudio1), labeling the growing verticals of the studio, and the ever-present need to put ideas into words for clients, naming is, for lack of a better term, a headache for all of us.

But like the great thinkers before us, we turn our tragedies into strategies, and so here we are.

As far as I’m concerned, naming is an act of the divine. Much like puns and random bits of trivia, some people just got it like that. In fact, later in this piece we consult some of those “just got it like that” people, aka people who have made a career out of naming, getting their ideas on the driving forces behind what constitutes a great name, and lending some thoughts as to whether or not we’re running out of brand names.

Before we get there, let’s observe some soft truths on the matter.

The perfect name, unfortunately, does not exist, and to pursue such an item would be a fool’s errand. But perfect names do exist. How does that make sense?

You’re probably reading this article on a perfectly named device right now. Brands like Apple, Liquid Death, or Homer have tapped into a certain essence, so much so that it's hard to fathom how the name didn’t exist before it suddenly did.

And that’s essentially what makes a name great.

It’s obvious, exists right outside our periphery, and has a layer of spontaneity and intrigue that stops you in your tracks. But just knowing what a great name is doesn’t make it any easier to arrive at our destination.

From the outside looking in, this ambiguity and subjectiveness around naming can be clearly felt when you look at a brand like On Running. Their recent Super Bowl push feels more like a multi-million dollar attempt to remedy an early brand mistake than it does a traditional awareness campaign. Undoubtedly, “On” is an incredible name to own and an inherent strength of the brand, but even they couldn’t have predicted that certain audiences would believe it to be “QC” instead. Regardless, we applaud the brand’s flexibility and nimble approach in their response to a sensitive subject matter.

The question of whether or not we’re running out of names for brands is in part an observation on how our societal vernacular is changing. Naming has always been a device to connect, but it remains to be seen how long this will remain undeniably true. Just like physical real estate, the digital space for ideas to take shape is not unlimited.

This line of thinking is even more pronounced when we contemplate naming in the era of ChatGPT. No longer do you need to stare at a whiteboard with 60 different naming iterations, praying for a flash of inspiration. Include a filter by trademark-availability, and all of a sudden what once was a tedious and subjective process becomes optimistic and bountiful, endless in its iteration.

If that were the case, then why aren’t we in a golden-era of naming? If anything, the opposite seems more true. Look no further than the “feel good” sector of CPG beverages, an industry that historically has relied on naming to stand out. Culture Pop, Poppi, Olipop. You get the idea. The landscape feels stagnant, with names that feel half-baked and generative to one degree or another.

But while there are proven ways into a market, sometimes the best approach is to go the opposite direction. Liquid Death was able to turn itself into a $1.4B brand by taking advantage of this naming stagnancy, flipping the convention in an equally-stifled bottled water market.

Similarly, Guayaki holds a staggering 86% of the Yerba Mate market by closely aligning itself with the ingredient, rather than the feeling of the beverage itself; so much so that “Yerba Mate” takes a significantly more amount of real estate on the package than the brand name. In normal instances this would be a brand suicide, but the approach has obviously paid off for the yellow-canned giants.

All that to say, we are not anti-generative over here. Naming generators can, and should be, an essential tool to the naming process. A way to get unstuck, to approach ideas from a new angle, to add an unexplored perspective.

But naming shouldn’t start, or end, from the query of a generator. While a generative approach to naming offers a seemingly infinite and readily-available way to crack even the toughest naming landscapes, more importantly, and the whole point of this piece really, is that it's just boring.

If we're okay with forfeiting our personal affinities in favor of ease and convenience, what's the point of naming anything at all?

Take Mouthwash, for example. Since our inception, we’ve been plagued with the question: “What’s it mean?” The origins of our name are simple and straightforward; giving new meaning to a household name that we see and say often. The “breath of fresh air” connotation felt like an added bonus to what we hoped to bring to the design space. And it works. The name catches attention, it feels and sounds unexpected, often prompting people to repeat it for themselves in an affirmation.

Outside of our own jurisdiction, brands like Loewe are putting their unclear and hard-to-pronounce name to work, leveraging its ambiguity and building brand affinity in one fell comedic swoop. While the name itself wasn’t born out of this playful desire to get people to pronounce the name more often, and instead originates from the company's founding designer, the brand is a testament that hard to pronounce or culturally-ambiguous names can work just as well, if not better, than any universal naming approach can offer.

It’s one of a kind, which you’ll often miss in favor of safer, more obvious naming structures. This feels especially true as we’ve become a more global culture. Pre-internet, it’s likely that you wouldn’t ever come across the brand in the first place if you weren’t directly invested in haute couture in one way or another. This leveling of international markets has opened the floodgates for foreign names to not only work and be acceptable, but to succeed and have a level of intrigue baked in from the get-go.

A former client of the studio, Mesura, is another prime example to look at. The Barcelona-based architecture and design studio directly translates to “measure”, but this literal translation is often glossed over, slipping under the radar in passing conversations. It’d be hard to convince any new firm to label themselves with such a universal term as “measure”, and even harder to convincingly own. But in application, it easily works without question.

Similar to Loewe, there’s a sense of “forgiveness”, if you can call it that, for brands that are founded with global or international pursuits—names take on new meaning in foreign environments—what might be simple, pedestrian, or ordinary in one ecosystem can be transformed into abstract, unique, and ownable in another.

How do we make sense of these names, then? Sure Mouthwash, Loewe, Mesura, and many others like them work, but the frameworks aren’t guaranteed. Take the same approach and try to recreate it and your odds of success are probably slim, at best. Does it all boil down to some invisible form of confidence? That these names work because they’ve proven themselves to work over time?

We sent an email to Eli Altman, managing director of the esteemed naming agency A Hundred Monkeys, with hopes to get a new perspective on the looming questions above. Aside from naming some of today’s best brands and products like Atmos for Dolby, Eero, and Inkling, Altman is an established author of Run Studio Run and Don’t Call It That, two essential resources surrounding creative start-ups and the inner workings of the naming process. More than anything though, he’s a long-time collaborator and friend of the studio, and we’re glad to be able to pick his brain on some of these musings.

While the idea that we’re running out of names for brands might make sense at a surface level understanding of how our digital real estate functions, Altman provided a different perspective:

There are plenty of words, plenty of languages, plenty of slang, and when all that fails, we can always put words next to one another or even make up words. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and at no point have I felt out of ideas or options. This isn’t to say that naming and branding haven’t evolved or changed. Social media has changed naming. It’s easier than ever to have an international business from day one. But it’s also worth mentioning that names die. Businesses shut down all the time, and those names can find new homes. Madewell did this to good effect.

Altman makes a strong case. While it’s easy to complain about the frustrations of securing username handles and url domains, the landscape is more or less a blank canvas. When one idea meets a dead end, it’s easy enough to flip it, replace letters, translate it in a new language, or invent a new word out of it. Most importantly, names don’t exist in a vacuum. To place all of the pressure on the name to do the brand’s job from day one is an unnecessary stressor.

The job of a name (in most cases) is to get people interested—to get them to pay attention in a world where everything is vying for their attention. Names exist within the broader context of a brand and then a company, an industry, the culture. A name is just the beginning of an interaction or a relationship. From there, it’s up to the brand to keep it interesting, to deliver on their promises, to add more depth to what the name means for people.

When you put it that way, it’s hard not to question the significance we place on naming, and whether a name even matters in the grand scheme of our environments. Can a good name carry a mid product? Can terrible names be ignored if other parts of the experience make up for it?

It certainly doesn’t matter to everyone. A name is part of the gestalt of a brand. There are great names paired with terrible logos and decent products. Awful names with ok logos and great products. We’re dealing in continuums here, not binaries. There are some industries where names carry a lot more weight—like fashion or alcohol. So yes, great names carry mid products all the time. But there are also very successful companies with terrible names. Look at the Fortune 500. Nothing is a panacea here.

When asked for advice on becoming unstuck in naming adventures, Altman cites literature as a prime point of escape and inspiration:

Find a piece of fiction that relates to what you’re trying to name in some way. Read it with a highlighter and pull out interesting words and phrases. Look for things that take on new meaning within the context of what you’re naming.

Aside from heading to your local library, there are plenty of other great resources to either get started, or end your naming pursuits:

• Onym is a prolific leader in naming brands and products alike. They’ve curated and organized an essential list of tools and resources that we at the Studio have considered a miracle on more than one occasion.

• Koto and their newsletter OFF-BRAND has an exhaustive start-to-finish piece on the pursuit of naming. We just scratch the surface here, but they really went in. They also share the same enthusiasm for the naming genius of Liquid Death.

• Altman, alongside his other pursuits, also created Go Name Yourself — an interactive 90-card deck to guide any naming process.

So where does all of this land us? Are we running out of names? Do names even matter? How can we possibly move forward from here?

Naming is a territory steeped in subjectivity, meaning there are hardly right and wrong answers. As you approach naming anything, a large determining factor of success is how well you’re able to navigate, and become comfortable with, that subjectivity.

It’s also important to understand the context, and where you sit within your environments. Some brands and projects exist and are born out of naming strategies, like Zappos or 1-800 Flowers. These are organizations that live and die by their naming real estate. While this is a great brand strength if available, it is not the reality for most of us starting new ventures or revisiting old ideas.

Ultimately, naming is just a piece of the puzzle in the larger brand picture. If naming can’t be the ownable and definable element of your brand, then it’s in your best interest to make other elements, like typography, color palette, or messaging proportionally carry more weight.

That being said, we find naming to be in many regards the final frontier of branding.

Typefaces, color palettes, and even brand claims and taglines can be easily repurposed and adopted by direct competitors, but a name is defensible, evergreen, and hard to copy.

Maybe the question then isn’t whether we’re running out of names, but whether we’re still willing to go to great lengths to look for them.

But we’re curious: what do you think? What names have stuck with you? Do names even matter anymore? Leave your thoughts in the comments down below and let’s discuss 💬

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

Share

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I. The Paradox of Choice

As we dove into the research for this particular subject matter, I was blown away by a data point that suggested we make nearly 35,000 decisions per day. Cornell University says that number is up by 20,000 decisions or more compared to 50 years ago, due to a life that is vastly interconnected.

Should I pick up this phone call? Should I respond to this email now or later? What should we watch on Netflix? What do you want to order on Doordash? What should I wear today? Which suggested playlist on Spotify should I listen to? Should I go to the gym or take a rest day?

You get the point. Suddenly, 35,000 seems like an underestimation.

Western societies equate individual freedom with well-being and assume that more choices lead to greater freedom. Freedom, of course, is good, valuable, worthwhile, and essential to being human. And if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the thing that will maximize our welfare without needing anyone to decide on our behalf. Under these conditions, we’ve been trained to believe that we can maximize freedom by maximizing choice.

The more choice people have, the more freedom they have. The more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz took aim at this belief in his work titled The Paradox of Choice. In his estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier, but more dissatisfied. He says that the result of having unlimited choices is a recipe for regret, anxiety, and emotional drainage.

Columbia Psychologists Iyengar & Lepper also investigated the downfall of choice with their Jam Study conducted in 2000. They found that large displays of up to 24 jam options in grocery stores attracted more attention while smaller displays with only 6 options converted 10x the amount of purchase rates. Tversky and Shafir (1992) also found that 80% of consumers choose not to buy a product when given too many options but readily make decisions when the choices are limited.

We don’t need a great deal of convincing that choice serves as both a privilege and burden. I find most days to be exhausting. My wife and I joke that we should decide what we want to eat for dinner and what we want to watch now, otherwise it will be too late soon. “Now” being 10am on a Wednesday.

There are even people on Fiverr who offer products titled “I will guide you to make the right decision in any situation.” This particular person says they have serviced over 2,100 people. I sent him a message to see what kind of decisions he’s helped people make out of curiosity, but didn’t hear back.

For many years prior, the world scratched their head in confusion at figures like Dieter Rams, Donald Judd, and Mies van der Rohe who were adamant about creation philosophies that embraced the paradoxical idea that less is of greater value than more. The works of these artists and designers resonate deeply today, but we can only imagine how easily they were swept under the rug at a time where abundance was a universal sign of wealth and prosperity.

Companies like Apple have made it clear that the discipline of ‘less, but better’ has proven to be a magnificent strategy for communicating with impact. Jobs was known for his intense focus on a small number of high-impact products, believing that he could conserve mental energy to make clearer decisions on fewer, well-designed products.

He took this belief beyond the walls of Apple when he hired Issey Miyake to make 100 identical black turtleneck sweaters for him, stating that he could free up his mental energy for more important decisions by eliminating the trivial ones, like what to wear each day.

It’s said that Miyake retired this piece following Jobs’ death in 2011.

II. On Earth Momentarily

We’re attracted to figures and companies that have the courage to defy human instinct while staying disciplined enough to find success in counter cultural ideas.

Our friends at OEM are taking the same idea to health by building ‘a new drugstore’ and tools for care—between loved ones, friends, strangers, and all those in between. Their products cover a wide range of care like hydration drinks, lip balm, and exfoliating hand wash. Across all their offerings, a consistent theme is clear: well designed, effective, and a sensation of ‘calm’ from introduction through use.

We were lucky enough to design and develop the OEM website last year. During one of our early intake calls, founders Shun Kinoshita and Ceilidh MacLeod explained why ‘choice’ might actually be the antithesis of care,

“Think about it this way: when you’re not feeling well and need an over-the-counter solution, many people go to their local drugstore. There, you’re faced with dozens of formulas, brands, price points, and ugly designs, asking yourself things like ‘Should I buy the less expensive one even if it’s less effective? Will the generic brand be just as effective as the name brand? Will this actually work or does the box just say it will?’

Those are not fun questions to think through when you already aren’t feeling your best. Think about those times your mom pulled out an ointment from the cabinet, when your gran cooked up some soup, or when a loved one made you a hot drink—they didn’t present you with options, they presented you with the best option, and you trusted it because it came from a place of care. We believe care is the foundation to improve health for all.”

This perspective resonated with us, and forced us to think about what was absolutely necessary during our time working together. As a result, we created a digital home that shifts the way users think about care. While the primary function of the site was geared towards commerce, we entered the partnership with a shared understanding that care transcends simply buying a product. It’s community, it’s vulnerability, it’s layered and textured, and can come in many shapes or sounds.

We designed the site to be able to house those various verticals of care, setting space aside for random journal entries from the OEM team, updates on community events like dinners or sound baths, or the occasional playlist curated for specific moments in time. These elements come together to inform the personality behind the brand, which can only be summed up as intentional.

At the top of the OEM’s about page is a simple question: “What does a new drugstore mean?”

They’re building it as we speak, sure. But we called Shun and Ceilidh to see what it would look like for us to take it even further. We tapped Joshua Abejo, a designer and artist experimenting with AI to help us explore some of our more granular questions: What could the new drugstore look like in the year 2040? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? What’s inside of it? What is the experience of walking through it?

III. Welcome to the New Drugstore

Before you even reach the building, you smell something—Hinoki trees—though that doesn’t make sense here, in the middle of the city. You keep expecting to find a hidden park, a quiet break in the cement, but there is only light, soft and glowing, slipping over the sidewalk. You step inside.

At the front desk, a woman sits in a halo of blue light. She looks at you and asks, “How are you feeling?”

You almost say fine, because you are—no aches, no fever—but then you notice it, the quiet thread of anxiety that has been following you, something so constant you almost forgot it was there. She nods, as if she understands, and gestures toward a wall of wooden cabinets. You slip off your shoes, and that's when you hear it—a low hum. You feel it. The vibration in your chest seems to release something.

You step onto the tatami floor and follow her down the hallway. Inside the room, you stand on a small platform and close your eyes. The warmth of the light moves over you, and for a moment, you are still. The scan is complete. You settle into a chair.

A doctor enters. She walks you through your scan, a map of your body, the markers to indicate your health — both physical and mental. Opportunities to improve longevity, cognitive function, energy, emotional well-being, and sleep quality. Leaving you with a personalized protocol to guide your health forward.

Beyond the scan, the rest of the center waits. The health store — offering hydration, recovery, performance, and essential care, including remedies and treatment — one option (the best option) for every health and wellness objective. Each item sits upon floating glass boxes, lit from within. The nutrients bar, where a personalized smoothie is already being blended for you.

The immersive gym, where the running track curves through trees, past a stream. The studio, where meditation, dance, and yoga unfold. The arts room, where creativity shifts neural pathways from anxiety to focus, imagination, and calm.

The onsen, with Hinoki-wood baths, warm stone beds, and steaming hot springs set into the ground of a Japanese garden, where the cool air contrasts with the warmth throughout your body.

And every month you return to reset and listen. To remember what your body is capable of. To cherish this fleeting, extraordinary moment of being alive.

IV. The Broader Perspective

While it's easy to get swept away in the vision promised by future states, OEM clearly prioritizes showing up in real life more than anywhere else. Whether it’s hosting public sound baths, curating art exhibitions, or sponsoring communities centered around sport in Los Angeles, the brand shows up today in ways that give us confidence in where they’re going.

We often see the word “intentional” tossed around in our line of work, as if you magically become it by labeling yourself as such. But what we need, what we all need, is a future with less choices, and better options.

The brands that are able to figure out how they can allow their users to experience more life are the ones perceived as most intentional.

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

Share

Is there something we should cover? Respond to this email or send us a message at findings@mouthwash.co to get in touch.

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Some of you may remember when Mouthwash was what we called “An Offbeat Experiment”, unrecognizable in comparison to the way it exists and functions today.

Long before a business plan was in play, Mouthwash took shape as an editorial practice where we utilized conversation within the mediums of podcasts, print, and long-form written interviews to show the world where our interests lie. Breadcrumbs of these creations still exist across the internet if you’d like to dig them up.

Soon enough, those stories reached thousands of like-minded listeners and readers worldwide, and the visual material we made to promote those stories became a source of inspiration for others in the design community. Eventually, people thought it might be a good idea for us to help their companies find its own identity, voice, and story.

As priorities have shifted, there’s been a collective decision to retire many of the editorial practices that we had become known for in those formative years. The unique experiences we gained during those times have now been turned into a coveted creative process that we offer to a range of clients in an effort to solve problems and scale brands. Whether it’s repositioning a Spanish architecture firm, visualizing the sensation of air, or continuing the legacy of the most iconic running brand ever, Mouthwash Studio has graduated from an ‘Offbeat Experiment’ to an expert creative partner and key player in the advancement of culture across industries that we find interesting.

Today, most would describe Mouthwash as a design studio. We identify that way in an effort to make it easily comprehensible that yes, we do in fact design. Our studio website and social channels make this very clear. But amongst our tight-knit team of 16 individuals spanning the globe comes much more than design alone. Hours of research, dialogue, cultural forecasting, critical thinking, and taste development are all the things that happen before anyone sees “design.” Most of our heroes would agree that good design goes well-beyond making something look nice.

We are incessantly searching for new ways to show the world that we are not just great designers, but great tastemakers, thinkers, and storytellers. And on the flip side, we are not unique in the fact that we can find it laborious to communicate the “why” or “how” behind our creative output. The result of strategic work is oftentimes difficult to materialize or comprehend. It either works or it doesn’t, right? Rather than hedging bets on success, the industry at large has turned to developing Trend and Consumer Reports as tangible outputs, using them as a foundation to make predictions about the future and hoping that clients might look at each other and say, “This team really knows what they’re doing.”

There is some debate as to whether or not this medium continues to be the most effective way to show how teams think. Everyone is predicting the future as if there will only be one, but we live in a time where information and experiences are so fragmented that a singular, shared future will soon be something of the past. says it best in a recent piece titled “Nobody knows anything” where she puts up a fight against Trend Report overload:

“My main issue with predictions is that I don’t think that there is the future: there are many futures. Scenario planning has long been known in organizational analysis as a way for companies to adapt to uncertainty. The challenge is not how well we predict the future, but how well we react to its unpredictability.”

The Strategy team at MW.S launched a paper called Annual Findings Vol. 1 at the end of 2023, partnering with writers and researchers to explore topics like AI, sustainability, algorithmic thinking, and the case for opposing convenience. We initially set out to create a traditional Trend Report, but happily ended up elsewhere, developing a 33 page long research paper that provided much more than data and predictions alone, but rather a point of view and perspective for the role that culture’s most contentious topics play in the life of a design-minded individual.

Regardless of original intent and result, our lengthy report proved plenty:

1. People are curious about what MW.S thinks

2. The spirit of collaboration with the right partners continues to improve the quality of work

3. Nobody has time to read a 33 page paper

The encouragement we received in return for publishing this paper egged us on to continue thinking if there was a better way to improve upon the learnings we walked away with. Additionally, as we’ve reflected on the collaborative nature of MW.S’ origin, and have come to terms with our perpetual pursuit of improving the way we communicate our holistic approach to creative work, it has led us to the formation of something new and exciting for the MW.S ecosystem.

Today we are launching Findings by MW.S: A design studio’s perspective on the influences and trends that shape our culture.

Findings will take the form of a newsletter, containing essays, opinions, trend forecasting, and cultural insights from our team on topics that we find interesting and relevant to people who are fond of the studio’s output. Additionally, we’ll be in conversation with friends and partners of the studio which will breed interviews, Q&A’s, recommendations, podcasts, and other experimental forms of dialogue that offer a unique perspective on our guests’ area of expertise. Behind the scenes of projects, company culture, and other milestones on behalf of MW.S will also be shared in a semi-regular update through Findings.

You’ll hear from us at least once per month, but in the meantime, share this project with those who might be interested.

Until next time…

Thanks for reading

Findings is a project by Mouthwash Studio, a design studio centered on new ideas and defining experiences. Learn more about what we’re doing with Findings here. In the archive, you’ll find all our work to date surrounding this project.

This publication is 100% free and is supported by your time and appreciation. If you liked reading this, please share it with somebody who you think might also enjoy it.

Share

Is there something we should cover? Respond to this email or send us a message at findings@mouthwash.co to get in touch.