How fear shapes design

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how fear shapes design.

During the pandemic I was working at a communications tech company, building digital tools for governments and industries at scale, from healthcare and transport to logistics and emergency services, and in a matter of weeks I led the development of contact tracing forms that ended up being used by 22 government departments across Australia.

At the time it felt like important work, helping keep people safe and giving teams the tools to coordinate in the chaos, but it also opened my eyes to something bigger: how differently we respond to fear.

When fear takes over, some people move towards care and connection while others move towards control, and when control meets technology, scale amplifies everything.

Those tracing systems were designed for safety, but they also showed me how easily safety can slip into surveillance when urgency drowns out reflection.

That experience changed everything for me, because it made me realise that technology isn’t neutral; it mirrors our values, our fears and our intent.

When I co-founded SIX, I knew I wanted to use those same tools, design, data and systems thinking, for empowerment instead of control, building transparency instead of opacity and trust instead of extraction.

Looking back, that project wasn’t just about COVID but about understanding power, and it’s why I believe the systems we build in moments of fear shape the kind of world we live in long after the crisis has passed.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

Fear is a state before it becomes a strategy. When a whole population is frightened at once, the nervous systems of the people making decisions shift with it, reaching for speed, certainty and control, and in a crisis that response makes sense. The trouble is what gets built while everyone is still inside it.

The same pattern shows up in any system under threat. A frightened parent tightens the rules, a frightened relationship starts checking phones, a frightened organisation adds approvals, monitoring and dashboards and calls it governance, and a frightened government builds the infrastructure to watch. Each response feels reasonable in the moment, yet each one tends to outlive the fear that produced it, because once a structure exists it quietly finds new reasons to be used.

That is the interplay worth noticing. A frightened state produces a story, that we need to know where everyone is for their own safety, and the story justifies a structure that stays long after the state has settled, so that by the time anyone asks whether it should exist, it has already become part of how things run.

In the Coherence Framework this is drift travelling from state to story to structure, and it is why regulation is never a soft skill in leadership. A system making decisions from fear will build that fear into its design, whatever its values say, and the answer isn’t to slow everything down but to build in a pause long enough to ask who this protects, who it exposes, and what it will be used for once the emergency is over.

Technology raises the stakes because it scales. A frightened manager affects a team while a frightened platform affects millions, and the same tools that can inform people can just as easily watch them, with the difference sitting almost entirely in the intent and the conditions they were built under.