Design Research for Intentional Living.
☼ Lisbon/London
Vital Agents
The things that make us human are getting designed out.
Our focus, our vitality, our presence. Not through malice, but through optimisation. Technology built for speed and convenience has quietly removed the effort, friction, and slowness that turn out to be essential to how we think, move, and live.
The best designers, brands, and policymakers are building it back in. We're here to help them.
Vital Agents is a design research studio focused on the emerging culture of intentional living.
Our Point of View
For decades, technology has been measured by how much effort it removes. Convenience, speed, efficiency. These have been the benchmarks of good design. But research is catching up with what many people already feel: that frictionless living has a cost, and that the things we optimised away — movement, concentration, sensory experience, presence — turn out to be the things that sustain us.
Vital Agents exists at this intersection. We are a design research studio that studies the cultural, behavioural, and policy forces reshaping how people want to live, and translates that knowledge into actionable insight for the teams designing our environments, products, services and systems.