What's "Design. Regret. Confess."?
Design. Regret. Confess. is a roving confessional housed in a small Japanese truck that invites designers to anonymously confess professional regrets and ethical missteps. Captured and posted on to a website, the confessions describe designs disasters, ethical compromises and moments of spectacular failure.
Who's it for?
Designers, educators, and researchers in ethics, futures, and creative practice will be impacted—those seeking honest reflection on failure, contradiction, and the emotional realities erased by professional polish.
Approach
This project used a mix of critical design and participatory methods. The Kei truck acted as a mobile confessional, inviting designers to anonymously share professional regrets. These stories, captured via a website created a collective portrait of the hidden emotional and ethical realities of practice.
Rather than solving problems, the project revealed tensions—between imagination and compromise, futures and failures. It used design not to fix, but to expose and hold space for what usually goes unspoken.
This approach highlights design’s potential as a reflective, relational, and socially accountable practice.
Contribution
Design. Regret. Confess. exposes the hidden failures and ethical compromises of design practice, challenging the myth of the designer as a flawless problem-solver. By making space for honest reflection, it helps build a more accountable, human, and regenerative design culture.
Why is it in the Observatory?
This project belongs in the Observatory because it reveals design’s hidden emotional and ethical dimensions. Unlike typical case studies, it foregrounds vulnerability and contradiction as valuable insights.
Design Research can critique, not just create!