Designing for Warmth

Technology is mediating more of our daily lives than ever—and yet the U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness and isolation a public health epidemic. Designer and researcher Daniel Gloyd has spent years asking why, and building a way to address it: Designing for Warmth.

Gloyd brings over 25 years of experience in human experience design, having helped organizations including Toyota, Samsung, and McDonald’s embrace human-centered design. He founded the User Interface team at Samsung’s LA Design Lab, served as principal VP of Design Research at Gist Design (acquired by TrueFit Innovation), and holds five U.S. design patents for human-computer interface innovations. His forthcoming book, ZX, explores Shaker design and the principles of warmth in designed experience.

Together with Stephanie Smith, an ID alum and co-organizer, Gloyd is bringing these principles to life at ZX 26—a design retreat September 30–October 3 at Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires. Kristin Gecan of ID sat down with both of them to talk about what warmth actually is, why it’s designable, and what worldbuilders can do about it.

Daniel Gloyd: It starts with the notion that in order to truly thrive, people need to experience interconnectedness—that we are part of something bigger. It’s not just a system of systems; we’re inherent parts of it, with other people, with nature, with everything outside our own skin. And that’s not just intuition—there’s real science behind it. In medicine, psychology, and spiritual practices across many cultures, that interconnectedness is prioritized.

So far too often, the field of user experience is prioritizing the individual experience. It’s right there in the name: user experience design. And too often that user is really just one person, one task, maybe one transaction. As a result, I think many of us are feeling a lack of connection in these man-made worlds. Technology is mediating our relationship with a lot of the world around us, and it’s beginning to feel a little cold.

Warmth is like the warmth you feel around certain types of people you’d describe as having a warm personality. It’s a principle of connection. It turns out warmth is very real. The National Institutes of Health and other science bodies have been trying to understand not just the psychology of warmth but the physiology of it. There’s an actual part of our brain that evolved to respond to this phenomenon. And—I love this factoid—it’s the same part of our brain that responds to actual physical warmth.

You’ve identified three core principles. Can you walk us through them?

Daniel: When I ask people in workshops to think about someone they know who they’d describe as having a warm personality, the feelings they describe almost always fall into three buckets.

1. The first, and most common, is feeling seen and heard. That branches into a whole set of principles for designers to approach design as conversation—good, respectful conversation—rather than the common framework of problem solving, where an expert has a solution and comes in to tell you what to do. True, respectful conversation is warm. It’s ongoing, it’s reciprocal.
2. The second is a scaffolding of support for self-actualization—helping someone become the best version of themselves they can be. This goes back to Abraham Maslow’s idea. You create a scaffolding to support that person, not a structure that forces anything. And we learn how to become that scaffolding by truly seeing and hearing that person to begin with.
3. The natural third step is belonging—or sometimes I’ll say attunement. It’s about sharing a cause with other people. As Maslow would say, the highest form of altruism: to activate your own superpower and then contribute to something bigger than yourself.

Stephanie: In design we call it empathy and empathy building. These are all very much related to how to activate the facets of warmth. At ZX 26, we’re going to go deeper on this—to help people start to shift their perspective, even in areas that are well-trodden in design, like research or persona building, to help them see differently how to establish that notion of conversation and being seen and heard.

There’s an assumption that warmth is about aesthetics—organic materials, soft colors. Is it?

Daniel: There’s an important distinction between two types of warmth. Our family dog was very sick and was going to have to be put down, and we stumbled upon a veterinary clinic called VEG—Veterinary Emergency Group. When you walk in, it’s all open—no divided waiting room, no doors. About as cold as you can imagine in terms of visceral aesthetic qualities.

But what we experienced was a series of cascading moments that aligned to the principles we’re talking about here. Feeling seen, feeling heard. The pet would lay on the ground on a mat, not up on a table. When the doctors came, they sat on the floor with the animal. From the moment we walked in till the moment she was gone, they never moved her and they never moved us. It was the best version of that experience I could imagine. All of the design principles that went into creating that clinic were the principles I’m describing, and none of them were about a cushy chair or wood trim.

Examples like these—from financial services to healthcare to consumer technology—are central to ZX 26, where practitioners will share the worlds they’ve built around these principles and the results they’ve seen.

You’ve found a historical model for this in Shaker design. What did you discover?

Daniel: It wasn’t until I got to occupy one of those Shaker villages—full of their architecture, room design, furniture—that I felt something profound as a designer. It was inspiring, but it seemed to be more than just the aesthetics. As I sat and contemplated it afterward, I came to realize what I experienced was warmth. Everything in this carefully designed environment was reinforcing interconnectedness. All of these objects had very conspicuous design features that caused them to act in concert with one another. The Shakers said that when they created these villages, they were building heaven on earth. They took very seriously the idea that the worlds we build in turn build us back. The things we design design us back.

Stephanie: There’s quite an iterative quality to Shaker design—it was created iteratively and personalized to the individuals in those communities. It creates a sense of meaning and warmth, and a sense of communing with those communities.

[Editorial note: ZX 26 includes a full day at Hancock Shaker Village, where attendees will experience this environment firsthand.]

Where does ZX come from, and how does it relate to UX?

Daniel: Maslow’s very last published paper was about Self Transcendence, he called it Theory Z. The name ZX is inspired by that model—it’s a new lens on UX where we’re saying it’s not a user, a single person; it’s about a transcendent experience we’re trying to design for. It’s not a replacement of UX. It’s a different lens.

Stephanie: As AI becomes increasingly more of a design production engine, the roles designers will have—particularly ID students, who I think are well equipped for this—will be more strategic and directive. The questions you’ll encounter as a designer will be about how to create experiences that support people. Designing for Warmth is a set of principles that’s really practical but also inspiring for people who want to make a better future.

Daniel: Even though ZX 26 is a design retreat with speakers, none of the speakers are designers. That’s by design. We wanted to bring in really interesting voices we don’t hear every day. In many ways, the experience we’re trying to create is hopefully demonstrative of the principles—when you come and immerse for a couple of days, we hope you’ll feel some of these qualities.

Stephanie: I personally see this as part of a larger movement in design—centered around bringing the human back into the space of the environments and the processes and technologies we’re defining. That’s also personally what I want to build: a collective effort to create better societies for us in the future, especially as technology continues to advance.

ZX 26 takes place September 30–October 3, 2026, at Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires, Massachusetts.

Learn more and register →

designingwarmth.com