“I will always bet on curiosity,” says Kevin Bethune, the Founder of dreams • design + life, a design think tank aiming to foster multidisciplinary and holistic solutions with its collaborators with authenticity and room for ambiguity.

In his upcoming book, Nonlinear: Navigating Design with Curiosity and Conviction, releasing February 2025 from The MIT Press, Bethune outlines his philosophy informed by his decades-long career in design, engineering and business.

During the latter half of his career, Bethune noticed a concerning trend toward formulaic decision-making among multidisciplinary teams. By rigidly applying design frameworks, teams would tend to seek “expected outputs” and make decisions with too much caution, he observed. Eventually, this risk-averse approach leads down the same paths toward uninspired designs.

Instead, Bethune argues, effective design teams must get curious about dynamically-changing information and make space for the unexpected. One step at a time, effective design teams bravely navigate what Bethune calls the “forest of ambiguity,” calling to mind a fantasy realm with both unknown perils and treasures.

Betraying his engineering roots, Bethune describes each step in the design process as a vector: a mathematical quantity with a magnitude and direction. He likens magnitude to a level of effort and direction to a choice of prototyping, testing, and iterating. The magnitude and direction of these guiding vectors are informed by the best data available at the present moment. These data may be quantitative, like usage metrics, or qualitative, like focus groups and interviews.

He underscores the importance of the time it takes to “find organic patterns” between data to make informed and more creative decisions. Data can also come from nonlinear methods — Bethune suggests designers lean into empathy, deeply interviewing people to draw out the “layers of underlying cognition,” a practice he credits to researcher and strategist Indi Young’s book Time to Listen.

In a recent visit to the MIT community, Bethune presented Nonlinear and the story of his career to a room of student designers and the public as part of the MITdesignX program. He wove together personal accounts of his journey toward the present — also a nonlinear path winding through engineering, business, and design, driven by curiosity.

A youthful interest in sketching paid dividends when the opportunity to design sneakers for Nike, Inc. arose. His experience mingling with designers at Nike led him to return to design school, eventually launching his journey through the business and design world and motivating the founding of dreams • design + life, and most recently, his forays into writing.

Nonlinear design also characterizes Bethune’s process as an author. He describes,

His first work, Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation, was published by The MIT Press in March 2022.

In Reimagining Design, Bethune expands upon his experience as a Black professional in corporate America throughout engineering, business, and design. He affirms the importance of diverse perspectives from individuals of differing levels of privilege and marginalization, all of which strengthen multidisciplinary teams.

He says: