A term like Kindness may seem a bit uncanny when applied to the world of design, work and business. It's easy to dismiss it as something belonging to a personal sphere altogether. We are also, often wisely, suspicious when corporations are acting too “friendly” towards us and other living beings. After all every business endeavour is a battle at its core. Or is it really?  
 
The Internet and social media have expanded massively our possibilities for interaction with each other. However, the courteousness and kindness naturally embedded in our psyche often disappear behind the cloak of internet anonymity, giving rise to the cruel and callous language that flourishes ever more all over the Net.
 
When people meet in the flesh and do something essentially human together, like making something or sharing a meal, our manners will tend towards kindness, despite any unfavourable preconceptions we may have had of the other. Physical meetings do still carry profound qualities still impossible to reproduce in digital communication. 
 
Kindness is not something that can be easily be coded into a culture, even less so programmed into an object or a piece of software. It is a deeply personal, responsive phenomenon that takes place in a space between vulnerable living beings.
 
The basis for the field of economy as we know it is the maximization of monetary profit. This, along with specific readings of evolutionary biology has implied an understanding of the human being as a primarily egoistical being, unable to act selflessly without a hidden cause. Today, new models of business and psychology are challenging this dogmatic view. 
 
In a transparent world, where it is impossible to hide away ones less desirable activities for long, it is becoming increasingly clear that only integrity is going to count. Institutions and business are, after all, made of people coming together to produce value. 
 
In the field of design, one very obvious act of kindness is to create non-toxic objects that harm nobody, including the jungle and its animals. However, the possibilities of design can take us way beyond that which really should be self-evident. To strive to be kind, privately and professionally, is not a matter of theorizing about our biological wiring or economical models. It represents an ongoing process of adventurous, imaginative acts of choice, which may sometimes come at the price of having to break with consensus and conformity. 
 
How can design help us awaken to the fact that we are part of an infinitely complicated, incredibly beautiful but still vulnerable eco-system of living beings?