Steve Jobs lay in the ICU with pneumonia so severe his doctor had forbidden him even ice. When he mentioned to his sister that, just this once, he’d like to be treated “a little specially,” she pointed out: “Steve, this is special treatment.”

He leaned over and whispered: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Later, when he was intubated and couldn’t speak, Jobs asked for a notepad. Unable to talk, he did what came naturally: he started designing. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He drew new fluid monitors and X-ray equipment. He redesigned the entire hospital unit that wasn’t quite special enough.

Even facing death, he couldn’t switch off the instinct that had changed the world.

This wasn’t vanity. It was the mindset of someone who understood that design isn’t decoration—it’s a form of care. As Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

That philosophy transformed technology in ways we’re still discovering. Take something as basic as computer fonts. Before the first Macintosh, every character on screen took up exactly the same width. The letter ‘i’ occupied the same space as ‘w’. It looked mechanical, lifeless—which it was.

But Jobs had taken a calligraphy class at college. He’d seen how beautiful lettering could breathe with natural rhythm. So when Apple built the Mac, he insisted on proportional fonts. It was harder to programme, but it made text feel human for the first time.

Today, every device you own uses proportional fonts. It’s so fundamental we barely notice it. But here’s the uncomfortable question: would we have got there without Jobs?

We have our answer in the technologies that never got the Jobs treatment. The video cassette recorder lived and died while remaining essentially unusable for most people—remember the flashing 12:00 that became a cultural punchline? Consider washing machines today, with their baffling programmes that might as well be written in ancient Greek. Office phone systems remain exercises in user hostility.

And mobile phones themselves, before the iPhone, were labyrinths of nested menus and counterintuitive sequences. The iPhone didn’t just improve on what came before—it revealed how needlessly awful everything had been.

Bad design isn’t just annoying. It’s a form of contempt. Every confusing interface, every unnecessarily complicated process, every moment when technology makes us feel stupid—these are failures of empathy. They say: your time doesn’t matter, your frustration is acceptable, good enough is good enough.

But good design is the opposite. It’s courtesy extended to every user. It says: you matter enough for us to think this through properly. Beautiful design can be as uplifting as a gorgeous landscape. Bad design is as demoralising as urban sprawl.

The tragedy is that good design often costs no more than bad design—it just requires someone to care. To notice. To ask not just “does this work?” but “does this work beautifully?”

Jobs understood that in our world of digital interactions, design is one of the last remaining opportunities for genuine human connection. Every swipe, every click, every moment of confusion or delight—these add up to something bigger than their parts.

Perhaps that’s why, even intubated in an ICU, he couldn’t help but redesign everything around him. When you’ve spent a lifetime believing that how things work is how we show we care, it becomes impossible to switch that instinct off.

The rest of us might learn from his restlessness.

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Fuzzy Logic is a series from Hope, a charity communications and fundraising agency. The series explores the imprecise and uncertain world of branding, marketing, persuasion, fundraising, and allied fields, particularly as they apply to charities, social impact businesses, causes and not-for-profits. Written by Michael Isaacs.