MUTANT.SYSTEMS
MUTATION AS METHODOLOGY
—— AN EVOLVING FRAMEWORK FOR CREATIVE EXISTENCE IN LATE CAPITALISM, WHILE REMAINING ADAPTIVE, RESILIENT, EMPATHETIC, HUMAN.
I started creating this approach after many conversations about the inherent fear so many of us have in the midst of this... multimodal polycrisis. I believe that as creative entities, it’s OUR role to create the new paths and models through whatever comes next. In biology, mutation is a geneological respond to external forces that transform a being, sometimes in a harmful manner, but often in a way that is inherently adaptive to its context. That is the premise of this framework. Adapting under the contexts we are in and letting ourselves transform to orient, confront, wrestle with, create new forms within, and help give perspective to others through, whatever is next.
MUTATION AS METHODOLOGY
I started creating this approach after many conversations about the inherent fear so many of us have in the midst of this... multimodal polycrisis. I believe that as creative entities, it’s OUR role to create the new paths and models through whatever comes next. In biology, mutation is a geneological respond to external forces that transform a being, sometimes in a harmful manner, but often in a way that is inherently adaptive to its context. That is the premise of this framework. Adapting under the contexts we are in and letting ourselves transform to orient, confront, wrestle with, create new forms within, and help give perspective to others through, whatever is next.
WE MUST MUTATE.
We live in the age of endless tools and haunted aesthetics. Logos dream of the 1970s. Brutalism returns every few years to remind us it never left. We reach for the past not out of laziness, but longing for the familiar, for clarity, for something that feels real. I’ve done it too. At Nike, Apple Music, at various agencies and through my studio The Pressure, I borrowed from the archive to build the present. Now, through a global plague, a polycrisis and framed through my time in SCI-Arc’s Fiction and Entertainment Masters program, the loop has cracked open. Nostalgia has gone from reference to ritual, cold anasthesia and style is another kind of spellwork meant to protect us from the chaos outside.
Meanwhile, the world refuses to sit still. AI is reshaping the edges of our practice. Institutions we held dear crumble. Climate, culture, and code are all in flux. Yet so much design still clings to old forms, afraid to fracture, rupture, glitch. Branding is a mask we never take off, and the “personal brand” is a disgusting result of self as capitalist institution. Our moodboards are mausoleums. Mark Fisher wrote that the future is no longer evenly distributed; it’s been cancelled. But what if we uncancel it? What if design stopped curating memory and start prototyping new myth?
This is not a purge, but an intentional mutation. A reckoning with new tools, new languages and new kinships by way of Bridle, Bateson, Bucknell, and Haraway. She tells us to stay with the trouble and Octavia Butler teaches us to shape change. The future is not a style, it’s a system waiting to be made. Grids can be cages and nostalgia is soft armor. Branding is a spell we can break. The work ahead is weirder, slower, more collaborative and less polished. But it will be more alive, and it’s already begun.
We live in the age of endless tools and haunted aesthetics. Logos dream of the 1970s. Brutalism returns every few years to remind us it never left. We reach for the past not out of laziness, but longing for the familiar, for clarity, for something that feels real. I’ve done it too. At Nike, Apple Music, at various agencies and through my studio The Pressure, I borrowed from the archive to build the present. Now, through a global plague, a polycrisis and framed through my time in SCI-Arc’s Fiction and Entertainment Masters program, the loop has cracked open. Nostalgia has gone from reference to ritual, cold anasthesia and style is another kind of spellwork meant to protect us from the chaos outside.
Meanwhile, the world refuses to sit still. AI is reshaping the edges of our practice. Institutions we held dear crumble. Climate, culture, and code are all in flux. Yet so much design still clings to old forms, afraid to fracture, rupture, glitch. Branding is a mask we never take off, and the “personal brand” is a disgusting result of self as capitalist institution. Our moodboards are mausoleums. Mark Fisher wrote that the future is no longer evenly distributed; it’s been cancelled. But what if we uncancel it? What if design stopped curating memory and start prototyping new myth?
This is not a purge, but an intentional mutation. A reckoning with new tools, new languages and new kinships by way of Bridle, Bateson, Bucknell, and Haraway. She tells us to stay with the trouble and Octavia Butler teaches us to shape change. The future is not a style, it’s a system waiting to be made. Grids can be cages and nostalgia is soft armor. Branding is a spell we can break. The work ahead is weirder, slower, more collaborative and less polished. But it will be more alive, and it’s already begun.
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The mutant isn’t just adaptive, we are misfit, edgewalker, refusal made flesh. To call oneself a mutant designer is to reject the design industry’s obsession with polish, brand clarity, legibility, and market fluency.
In a world that rewards the stable, the mutant mutates on purpose. In an industry that sells clarity, the mutant traffics in trouble, translation, and transformation.
Mutation in this context becomes not just biological or poetic, but political.
A strategy for survival within capitalism, and more importantly, a way to subvert it without needing to “exit” it first.
It signals:
+ A refusal to romanticize purity, nostalgia, or tradition.
+ An embrace of unstable, adaptive, plural practices.
+ A creative evolution from within the system and not a false utopian leap beyond it.
+ A critique of branding’s demand for consistency, clarity, and legibility. All the things mutation actively resists.
It’s channeling Haraway’s becoming-with, Butler’s God is Change, Fisher’s haunting by lost futures, Morton’s hyposubject.
It’s a way forward that isn’t heroic or perfect, but possible and alive.
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MUTATION IN POLYCRISIS
Here are some actions, practices, and perspectives that mutation makes possible, even (especially) in crisis:
--
POLITICALLY / COLLECTIVELY
Centers empathy.
As a design tool
Names exploitation.
But doesn’t require exit, allows us to work inside capitalism with awareness and resistance.
Keeps imagination alive.
Which is what fascism always tries to kill first
Makes space for collaboration.
You don’t have to carry the whole weight, or work alone
--
EMOTIONALLY / SPIRITUALLY
Gives you language for overwhelm.
“I’m mutating” is a way to frame breakdown as growth
Builds rituals.
Creating daily signals, altars, or practices grounds you in instability
Invites softness.
Says you don’t have to scale or solve everything to be valid
--
ECONOMICALLY
Makes space for multiple income streams.
Being plural isn’t failure, it’s method
Shifts pressure.
From career identity to creative survival, creativity is sustenance, not status
Encourages reuse, remix, ritual.
To make more from less, and make it count
Here are some actions, practices, and perspectives that mutation makes possible, even (especially) in crisis:
--
POLITICALLY / COLLECTIVELY
Centers empathy.
As a design tool
Names exploitation.
But doesn’t require exit, allows us to work inside capitalism with awareness and resistance.
Keeps imagination alive.
Which is what fascism always tries to kill first
Makes space for collaboration.
You don’t have to carry the whole weight, or work alone
--
EMOTIONALLY / SPIRITUALLY
Gives you language for overwhelm.
“I’m mutating” is a way to frame breakdown as growth
Builds rituals.
Creating daily signals, altars, or practices grounds you in instability
Invites softness.
Says you don’t have to scale or solve everything to be valid
--
ECONOMICALLY
Makes space for multiple income streams.
Being plural isn’t failure, it’s method
Shifts pressure.
From career identity to creative survival, creativity is sustenance, not status
Encourages reuse, remix, ritual.
To make more from less, and make it count
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Daily behaviors for seeing clearly, shifting gently, and staying human in collapsing system.
1. Notice What’s Breaking (and What’s Emerging)
Every day, ask: What feels strained, silent, cracking open? Instead of retreating from collapse, treat it like a signal, because where something breaks, something else can emerge. Let stress and friction teach you, so let patterns show you where to mutate.
2. Make A Small Shift in Practice
Change one tool, one method, one assumption. Use a different brush. Ask a new question. Rearrange your process. Mutation doesn’t require reinvention, just redirection, and one unexpected move per day can create long-term transformation.
3. Have a Conversation That Changes You
Talk to someone who doesn’t work like you, and ask a deep question. Listen past the first answer. Every mutation is relational. People are part of your system. Connection is intelligence.
4. Use Empathy as Disruption
Pause when you feel friction: with others, with a client, with yourself. Don’t try and smooth it over, but sit with it. Empathy isn’t about ease. It’s about staying long enough to feel, and a world built on optimization, presence is rebellion.
5. Archive the Fragment
Capture something incomplete. A thought, a sound, a sketch, a glitch, and let it live unfinished. Don’t explain it. Every fragment is a seed, and the mutant’s archive is built from what others discard, whether idea, something gone unnoticed or thrown away.
6. Invent a Ritual, Repeat It for No Reason
Light a candle before writing. Sing to your file folder. Walk around the block before building. It doesn’t need to be productive, and ritual gives chaos rhythm, it tells your nervous system: this is ours.
7. Say Yes to One New Tool You Don’t Understand Yet
Use dreams. Use your hands. Use AI. Use code. Let the tool remake you. The goal isn’t mastery, it’s mutation. Every unfamiliar tool holds an unfamiliar version of you to evolve.
8. Write One Sentence Toward the Future
A headline. A scene. A spell. A refusal. Language is infrastructure. Use it to make cracks in the now.
9. Feel Your Body, Then Design Anyway
Stress, anxiety, grief, and confusion are signals, not flaws. Let them shape your process. Let them slow you down. We don’t transcend the body, we design with the body, under pressure.
10. Hold Two Truths at Once
Systems we know are collapsing, and that’s okay. We are still here, we will adapt and can create new systems in the ruin.
Daily behaviors for seeing clearly, shifting gently, and staying human in collapsing system.
1. Notice What’s Breaking (and What’s Emerging)
Every day, ask: What feels strained, silent, cracking open? Instead of retreating from collapse, treat it like a signal, because where something breaks, something else can emerge. Let stress and friction teach you, so let patterns show you where to mutate.
2. Make A Small Shift in Practice
Change one tool, one method, one assumption. Use a different brush. Ask a new question. Rearrange your process. Mutation doesn’t require reinvention, just redirection, and one unexpected move per day can create long-term transformation.
3. Have a Conversation That Changes You
Talk to someone who doesn’t work like you, and ask a deep question. Listen past the first answer. Every mutation is relational. People are part of your system. Connection is intelligence.
4. Use Empathy as Disruption
Pause when you feel friction: with others, with a client, with yourself. Don’t try and smooth it over, but sit with it. Empathy isn’t about ease. It’s about staying long enough to feel, and a world built on optimization, presence is rebellion.
5. Archive the Fragment
Capture something incomplete. A thought, a sound, a sketch, a glitch, and let it live unfinished. Don’t explain it. Every fragment is a seed, and the mutant’s archive is built from what others discard, whether idea, something gone unnoticed or thrown away.
6. Invent a Ritual, Repeat It for No Reason
Light a candle before writing. Sing to your file folder. Walk around the block before building. It doesn’t need to be productive, and ritual gives chaos rhythm, it tells your nervous system: this is ours.
7. Say Yes to One New Tool You Don’t Understand Yet
Use dreams. Use your hands. Use AI. Use code. Let the tool remake you. The goal isn’t mastery, it’s mutation. Every unfamiliar tool holds an unfamiliar version of you to evolve.
8. Write One Sentence Toward the Future
A headline. A scene. A spell. A refusal. Language is infrastructure. Use it to make cracks in the now.
9. Feel Your Body, Then Design Anyway
Stress, anxiety, grief, and confusion are signals, not flaws. Let them shape your process. Let them slow you down. We don’t transcend the body, we design with the body, under pressure.
10. Hold Two Truths at Once
Systems we know are collapsing, and that’s okay. We are still here, we will adapt and can create new systems in the ruin.
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adamrgarcia.studio