The Boy Who Watched Airplanes

I never set out to become a designer. I set out to watch airplanes.

I grew up in Rio de Janeiro, near Galeão Airport. This was before the internet, before smartphones, before any app could tell you where a plane was. Back then, each airline kept a phone line with a recorded message that read out the day’s arrivals and delays. So every night before bed, I would dial those numbers one by one and listen. If I wanted to know when Lufthansa was landing from Frankfurt, or when the Alitalia 747 was due from Rome, that recording was the only way to find out. Then I wrote it all down in a notebook. Flight numbers, arrival times, cities of origin, delays.

The next morning I would sit outside and wait.

When a plane finally appeared on the horizon, I wasn’t just watching it. I was collecting clues. Most people saw an airplane. I saw the registration number under the wing, the aircraft’s own identity, and I wrote that down too. Over time the patterns came into focus. I recognized planes that had been to Rio before. I knew when the same one came back weeks later. I started tracking routes, frequencies, the exceptions that didn’t fit. I wasn’t fascinated by the planes so much as by the system moving quietly behind them.

At the time, I thought I was learning about aviation. Looking back, I was learning how to observe.

Years later, people gave me the words for it. Research. Systems thinking. Service design. Ethnography. Pattern recognition. I had been practicing all of it long before I had the vocabulary, not because anyone told me to, but because curiosity demanded it.

The airport was my first design school. Not because anyone was teaching, but because everything was. The typography on a boarding pass. The liveries on the aircraft. The uniforms, the signage, the quiet choreography of moving thousands of people through something enormously complex. Long before I knew what design was, I was studying it. I just happened to call it aviation.

I have spent the last two decades across healthcare, banking, and technology, helping build experiences used by millions of people. The industries changed. The scale changed. The tools changed. The practice never did. Observe, notice, ask questions, look for patterns, then design.

But the real work was never the screens, or the flows, or the features. It was noticing the thing the data couldn’t see. The moment a person quietly gave up. The reason they actually showed up, the one nobody wrote into the brief. The registration number under the wing. Find that, and the experience almost designs itself. Miss it, and no amount of polish will save it.

That is the part I care about most, because behind every one of those experiences is a person trying to get something done, often on one of the harder days of their life. In healthcare especially, the system rarely fails at the screen. It fails at the moment nobody was watching.

Now we are living through another transformation, and its name is AI. I’ll be straight with you: I’m excited about it. I’ve watched AI do in minutes what used to take days. It can generate the screen, the flow, the variant, the copy, a hundred versions before lunch. The gains are real, and the possibilities are extraordinary.

But lately I keep thinking about that boy with the notebook. Not because I want any of this to slow down. Quite the opposite. If he were here today he would be the first one experimenting, tracking flights in real time, building databases, automating the whole thing, and he would love every second of it. I know, because that boy was me.

But I think he would still keep the notebook. Because the notebook was never really about airplanes. It was about attention.

And that is the question I keep sitting with. As AI strips the friction out of creative work, what happens to the habits that produce real insight? Not all friction is worth keeping, and most of it should go. But some friction is the reason we slow down at all. It makes us sit with a question longer, look more carefully, and think before we answer.

The real risk was never that AI would replace designers. It’s that we start confusing speed with understanding, and output with insight. AI can generate a thousand versions of an experience. It cannot generate the noticing that tells you which problem was ever worth solving.

When the cost of making something falls to almost nothing, the scarce thing is no longer production. It’s judgment. Knowing what is worth building in the first place. And judgment doesn’t scale the way technology does.

In product, the expensive mistake was never slow production. It was building the wrong thing, beautifully.

The experiences that actually resonate aren’t built from efficiency. They come from empathy, context, and a kind of understanding that develops slowly, the kind you can’t automate, the kind that starts with curiosity and keeps the person at the center.

So I don’t worry about whether AI belongs in the future of product design. It does, and it must. The better question is whether we’ll protect the things that made great experiences possible long before any of this existed. Wonder. Patience. Curiosity. The willingness to sit with a question longer than necessary. The willingness to notice.

Sometimes I still picture that boy standing under the flight path in Rio, notebook in hand, waiting for a 747 to come over the horizon. He thought he was tracking airplanes. What he was really learning was how to see.

And in an age where machines can generate almost anything, the people who still know how to see are the ones who will build the experiences that matter.