J. Paul is a London based designer and researcher with expertise in Speculative Design, Service Design, Design Research, and Strategy.
NKD_2 — Nothing can ever be isolated from anything, because it's always connected to everything.
The misconception it corrects
Modern design and product development is organised around the isolatable unit. The feature is the unit of work. The product is the unit of shipping. The team is the unit of accountability. Each unit is defined by what it controls and what it does not, and the boundary is treated as if it were real.
It is not real. Every feature is woven into a product, every product into an ecosystem, every ecosystem into a culture, every culture into a planet. The boundaries are conventions. They are also useful — without them, no one would ship anything. The problem is when the conventions are mistaken for the world. NKD_2 is the corrective.
A feature does not "live" inside a product. It changes user behaviour, changes the product's economics, changes the company's incentives, changes the competitive landscape, and changes — in small ways, sometimes large ones — the cultural script for what the product category is for. None of these are bonus effects. They are the same effect, traced out at different scales.
What it changes in practice
Effects are designed at every scale. When we design a feature, we draw — explicitly — its expected effect on the user, on the product, on the company, on the market, and on the broader culture. We treat the larger scales not as out-of-scope, but as part of what is being designed.
The team owns externalities. The most expensive habit in modern product work is treating second-order effects as "not our problem." NKD_2 puts them back on the team. If the feature is going to change user behaviour in a way that, six months later, becomes the user-research team's problem, then the user-research team's problem is a designed outcome and the team should own it. Not in a punitive sense — in the sense of being awake to it.
Monitoring extends past launch. A connected design does not stop being design once it ships. The team commits, in advance, to what it will watch — at all five scales — for what period of time. This is a different posture from "we'll see how it performs" and a different artefact from "the launch retrospective."
A working method: the five-scale impact sketch
Before any significant design decision ships, we draw a five-scale impact sketch. It is a fast exercise — twenty minutes for a feature, an hour for a product, two hours for a strategy. It produces five short statements, one per scale:
- 1.User scale — what behaviour does this change for the individual user?
- 2.Product scale — what does this change about the product's economics, performance, or surface?
- 3.Company scale — what does this change about the company's incentives, accountability, or capability?
- 4.Market scale — what does this change about the competitive landscape, category norms, or supplier/partner relationships?
- 5.Cultural scale — what does this change about the broader cultural script for what this category is, who it is for, what it is good for?
Each statement is one sentence. The discipline is not depth — it is the requirement to write something at each scale. The cultural scale, in particular, is the one teams want to skip ("we're not designing culture"). NKD_2 is the principle that says you are. You may be designing it accidentally, you may be designing it at low resolution, but you are designing it.
The artefact is small. The decision it forces — are we comfortable with this effect at the cultural scale? — is often the decision that changes the work.
A note on the moral weight of NKD_2
This principle is the one that most often produces silence in a workshop. Once teams accept that their work has effects at every scale, the question of whether they should be doing it comes more sharply into view. Some teams welcome that question. Others find it threatening.
We treat the moral weight as a feature, not a bug. The point of design that takes connection seriously is to make morally consequential choices visible, and visible early. Better in the framing workshop than in the parliamentary inquiry.
Where this principle lives in our work
NKD_2 is the principle that most often gets cited in our debriefs by clients in heavily regulated industries (healthcare, finance, public sector) and in industries facing rising public scrutiny (social media, AI, biotech). It gives them language for a discomfort they were already feeling: that the standard "ship the feature, measure the KPI" approach was understating what they were actually doing.
Key takeaway: every design decision has effects at the user, product, company, market, and cultural scales — and the cultural scale is being designed whether you choose to design it deliberately or not.
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