Long Now Design

By Celso Singo Aramaki (with AI-assisted)

Most of us work inside short cycles: quarterly targets, campaign windows, product sprints, election calendars. Those cycles are real—and sometimes useful—but they also create a blind spot: we get very good at shipping, and not as good at enduring.

Long Now Design exists to close that gap. It’s a design and research initiative focused on helping organizations and communities build more durable, repairable, resilient, and culturally grounded products, services, and places.

This is not a claim that we can predict 10,000 years. It’s a commitment to extend the time horizon of decision-making and make “long-term” actionable inside real budgets, regulations, and supply chains.

Why this exists

1) Short time horizons create expensive outcomes

When systems are optimized only for speed and efficiency, they often become fragile:

• products that are difficult to repair or upgrade
• buildings and interiors designed for early replacement
• infrastructure that performs well in normal conditions but fails under stress
• policies and strategies that ignore future costs (waste, risk, social backlash)

The result is not just environmental impact—it’s also financial leakage: rework, churn, waste handling, reputational risk, and supply chain vulnerability.

2) Sustainability is often treated as messaging, not design

Many organizations have goals, reports, and campaigns—but fewer have practical design rules that change what gets built, procured, and maintained.

Long Now Design focuses on what tends to be missing:

• clear standards that teams can actually follow
• measurable criteria (not vague aspirations)
• prototypes and pilots that prove feasibility
• documentation that survives staff turnover

What Long Now Design is (in practice)

Long Now Design operates as a toolkit + pilot program + partner network.

Core outputs

We produce practical assets such as:

• Long-horizon design guidelines (repairability, modularity, circularity, resilience, accessibility)
• Decision frameworks (how to choose trade-offs transparently: cost, durability, carbon, maintenance, social impact)
• Project templates (briefs, checklists, procurement language, evaluation rubrics)
• Pilot prototypes (small, testable implementations with clear success metrics)
• Case studies (what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d change next time)

Typical use cases

• product teams redesigning for repair, upgrade, and longer life
• real estate / cities seeking adaptive buildings and lower lifecycle costs
• brands aligning sustainability claims with verifiable design choices
• cultural institutions building knowledge infrastructure that remains usable over time

How we work

We keep it simple and operational:

1. Scope the horizon
   Define the timeline that matters for the project (5, 10, 25 years—sometimes longer), and the risks we’re designing against.
2. Map lifecycle reality
   Materials, maintenance, failure modes, end-of-life, user behavior, regulatory pressure, supply chain constraints.
3. Set non-negotiables + trade-offs
   What must be true (repairable, accessible, low-toxicity, modular, etc.), and what can be negotiated (finish, speed, feature set).
4. Prototype and test
   Build small pilots that can be measured and iterated quickly.
5. Document for continuity
   Standards, checklists, and decision logs so the work survives beyond a single team.