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On January 17, Copenhagen resident Jesper Rabe Tnnesen woke up, packed his cargo bike with 300 red hats, and trekked over to his citys U.S. embassy, where thousands of citizens were gathering in the street to protest President Trump’s proposed takeover of Greenland. By the end of the weekend, those hats had become the dominant symbol of the dissenting movement. For months, Trump has insisted that the U.S. should control Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. But, in recent days, he’s escalated his threat to take over the region, announcing on Truth Social that he would impose additional tariffs on eight allied nations who spoke out against the plan. In response, tens of thousands of protestors have gathered in Denmarks capital, Copenhagen, and Greenlands capital, Nuuk, to voice their dissent against American occupation of Greenland. Nuuk, Greenland. January 17, 2026. [Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images] Tnnesen, the owner of a vintage store in Copenhagen called McKorman, was one of those protestors. Hes also the designer behind a line of hats parodying Trumps Make America Great Again (MAGA) caps. Tnnesens hats substitute Trumps famous phrase for the line Nu det NUUK! which is a play on the Danish phrase, Nu det nok, literally meaning Now, it’s enough. Tnnesens caps, as well as several similar designs, have emerged as the stand-out visual symbol of the protests, appearing in countless photos of the demonstrations. The caps were produced as a comedic response to Donald Trump thinking he could buy Greenland, Tnnesen says, and as a political statement that enough is enough. Jesper Toennesen. January 13, 2026. [Photo: Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP/Getty Images] “Enough is enough” Tnnesen first created his Nu det NUUK! cap last summer, when he ordered 100 copies for his store and sent another 100 to Greenland. The philosophy behind his design, he says, was simple: The red MAGA hats have become a very visible political symbol, and so it seemed right to also make the anti-MAGA caps red and white too. Besides that, he adds, red and white are the two colors of both the Greenlandic and Danish flags, adding an additional layer to the parody. Initial sales were slow. Just a few caps were sold in-store, while others were given away. But a week before Saturdays demonstration, in the wake of Trumps increasing insistence on a Greenland takeover, the hats went viral. In just a few hours, people bought 80 hats, and Tnnesen says he could have sold hundreds or even thousands more, had they not sold out. He currently has thousands of new hats on the way from the manufacturer, and plans to donate all profits to the Greenlandic childrens charity Grnlandske Brn. It’s been a few intense weeks of talking to global media and people wanting to show support by buying the caps, Tnnesen says. In times like these it’s important to stand strong in solidarity, and it’s been nice to see people doing that and agreeing that what’s going on is simply intolerable. A c55 “Make America Go Away” hat in Sisimiut, Greenland, on Sunday, March 30, 2025. [Photo: Juliette Pavy/Bloomberg/Getty Images] How satirical MAGA hats took off in Greenland and Denmark While Tnnesens hats have recently shot into the spotlight, hes not the first Danish designer to satirize the MAGA cap. Indeed, Tnnesen was inspired by an earlier hat created by designer Jens Martin Skibsted. Jens Martin Skibsted Skibsted is the creative mind behind the website c55, which sells a variety of protest-based statement hats. In the past, hes created multiple hats in support of Ukrainian charities in the midst of the Russian invasion. He says that he was inspired to create something for Greenland after Donald Trump Jr. visited the territory back in January 2025, in protest against America’s ambition to assert control over the island. His cap is called the Kalaallit, which is the name of the Greenlandic Inuit in their language, Kalaallisut. It features the slogan Make America Go Away, paired with the Greenlandic flag on one side. While it playfully echoes Trump’s slogan, the design is distinct, the hats online listing reads. The red and white colors reflect the Greenlandic flag, and the typeface, DS 737, is based on the official Danish signage typeface, originally released in 1954 by Dansk Standard as Danish Standard no. 737. Skibsted says the hat is made in partnership with the Greenlandic NGO Uagut, which is dedicated to promoting Greenlanders wellbeing in Denmark. [Photos: Jens Martin Skibsted] Since initially handing out his caps for free last spring in the Greenlandic city Sisimiut, Skibsted has created three more iterations of the hat, each honoring some aspect of Greenlandic heritage (including one white version of the cap, which he says was added after “MAGA media” digitally erased the original caps’ text to resemble actual MAGA hats). Like Tnnesen, he passed out 200 copies of his original cap at the Copenhagen protest. He says sales have recently spiked, as awareness of Trumps threats against the territory have reached a much larger audience. It’s become very international, because obviously very few people in the international community agree that it’s okay just to take over a foreign territory, Skibsted says. A lot of people want to stand behind the Greenlanders, and also, by proxy, the Danes.
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E-Commerce
We have a growing problem making our institutions work for humans. Across society, and especially in business, humans are increasingly treated as resources to be squeezed rather than as individuals to be served. Employees become human capital to be optimized; customers become users to be converted or upsold. This tendency predates AI, but AI threatens to accelerate it dramaticallyautomating the depersonalization, scaling the indifference, and introducing another layer of abstraction that separates real human beings from real human beings. Yet there is an alternative path. Human-centered design is often dismissed as a soft or unserious discipline, a distraction from the serious business of maximizing the commercial income to be extracted from every interaction. But it is actually the most practical route to value creation available to organizations today. When you design around real human needsthose of both customers and staffyou build the bridge between internal transformation and external results. The Foundational Principle In The Design of Everyday Things, design expert Donald Norman articulates a deceptively simple idea: pay close attention to the needs of human users when defining design goals. This principle applies far beyond product design. It is foundational to how organizations create value. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Human-centered design acts as a critical bridge that taps into and connects two groups of humans. On one side, customer experience drives revenuepeople buy from, stay loyal to, and recommend organizations that understand and serve their actual needs. On the other side, the employee experience drives executionstaff who feel understood and supported deliver better work and stay in their roles for longer. Neglect either side and value leaks away, no matter how sophisticated your technology or how ambitious your strategy. Crucially, human-centered design is not a one-time exercise conducted before systems are built. It is an ongoing discipline that begins with observation, continues through implementation, and persists as long as the system operates. Humans change. Their needs evolve. Their contexts shift. A design process that treats initial research as sufficient will produce systems that drift steadily away from the people they are meant to serve. The organizations that sustain value are those that build continuous feedback loops, returning again and again to observe, test, and refine. Why AI Makes This Urgent AI amplifies the consequences of getting human factors wrong. There are three reasons why human-centered design becomes especially critical in the age of AI. First, speed and scale. When an AI system interacts with customers or processes employee workflows, its behavior can propagate across millions of touchpoints. A poorly designed interaction that might have affected dozens of people in a manual process now affects thousands or millions. The cost of inattention multiplies accordingly. Second, the fallacy of confusing humans with machines. Management systems and technical architectures tend to assume that they are dealing with rational actors who process information logically and respond predictably. This is the same fallacy embedded in the economist’s concept of homo economicusthe fictional human who optimizes utility with perfect information and no emotion. Real humans bring biases and emotions to their decisions and interactions; they bring varied cultural contexts and needs that shift depending on circumstances. Different people come to AI from radically different angles, and a system designed for an idealized user will fail actual ones. Third, the diversity of stakeholder interactions. Not everyone affected by an AI system interacts with it directly. Some draw on its outputs at second or third handa manager reviewing AI-generated reports, a supplier responding to AI-optimized orders. Other stakeholderssuch as government agencies, labor groups, of consumer rights advocateshave regulatory or social interests in how you implement AI. Miss out any of these groups in your design process and you create friction that erodes the value you are trying to build. Building Human-Centric AI Systems Translating these principles into practice requires deliberate choices at every stage of AI development and deployment. Start with personas designed for context. A single AI system may need to present itself differently depending on who it is interacting with. A customer-facing interaction might require conversational warmth, natural pacing, and even deliberate pauses that make the exchange feel human. An internal communication feeding data to supply chain managers might prioritize speed, precision, and structured formatting. An AI agent participating in a multi-agent orchestration layer might need yet another modeone optimized for machine-readable clarity. These are not cosmetic differences. The persona an AI adopts shapes whether the humans on the other end can work with it effectively. Design these deliberately, not as afterthoughts. Embrace the iterative spiral. Normans concept of human-centered design follows a cycle: observation, idea generation, prototyping, testing, and then back to observation. This is not a linear checklist to be completed once. Each round of testing reveals new information about user needs that the previous round of observation missed. For example, initial research might suggest that speed is the primary requirement for a customer service AI. But watching real users interact with a prototype might reveal that some customers prefer a chattier experience with more interaction, even if it takes longer. The spiral deepens understanding as experiments scale. Recognize the limits of self-reporting. Users do not always know what they need, and they are often not well-placed to articulate their desired outcomes even when they do know. Customers might tell you they want human agents, but longer-term behavioral analysis may reveal a preference for AI solutions that eliminate waiting times. Subject matter experts and scholarly research are invaluable supplements to direct observation. The goal is to understand what actually serves people, not merely what they say they want. (This point is made particularly well with reference to the medical context in Joseph and Paganis Designing for Health: The Human Centered Approach.) Build in human audit layers. The temptation with AI is to automate completelyto remove humans from the loop in pursuit of efficiency. Resist it. Introduce human checkpoints that look for systemic biases, catch edge cases, and intervene where required. This is not a failure of automation but a recognition that partnership between humans and AI produces better outcomes than either alone. The Orchestration Challenge As organizations deploy multiple AI agentshandling sales, compliance, operations, customer servicea new challenge emerges. These agents can conflict. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will use multi-agent systems by year-end, and a common failure mode is already apparent: agent deadlock, where agents with different objectives provide contradictory instructions and freeze the workflow. The solution is not purely technical. Orchestration layers can help resolve conflicts algorithmically, but they cannot substitute for human judgment in ambiguous cases. Human-centered design here means designing the human role in the system, not just the AI components. Someone must be empowered to adjudicate when the sales optimization agent and the regulatory compliance agent cannot agree. That role requires clarity about authority, access to relevant context, and the judgment to weigh competing priorities. Organizations that neglect this human layer will find their sophisticated multi-agent systems grinding to a halt. Practical Steps Five actions can move human-centered design from abstraction to operation: 1. Map your human touchpoints. Before any AI initiative, document every human who will interact with or be affected by the system. This includes direct users, indirect data consumers, and those with regulatory or reputational stakes. If you cannot name the humans involved, you are not ready to build. 2. Observe before you build. Spend time with actual users before defining requirements. Watch what they do, not just what they say. The gap between stated preferences and revealed behavior is where design insight lives. 3. Design your personas deliberately. For each AI system, specify how it should interact differently with different stakeholder types. Document these choices and revisit them as you learn more. 4. Build in human audit points. Identify where human judgment must remain in the loop and design those roles explicitly. Specify what authority they have, what information they need, and how their interventions feed back into system improvement. 5. Dont stopcycle. Treat testing as the beginning of observation, not the end of development. Build feedback mechanisms that allow continuous refinement as human needs evolve. Conclusion Human-centered design is not a constraint on AI ambition. It is what allows that ambition to create real value. Technology alone creates nothingfinancial value emerges only when capabilities provide value that is meaningful for humans. Human-centered design is the discipline that makes that meeting possible, the bridge between what your systems can do and what actually matters to the people you serve. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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The 42nd Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week in Park City, Utah. It will be the last edition in its longtime home and the first without its founder Robert Redford, who died in September at age 89. But even in this time of transition and change, the festivals main focus the movies remains as vibrant and fresh as ever with 90 features premiering through Feb. 1. And three of them feature pop star Charli xcx. Its a broad, eclectic and bold program, Sundance public programming director Eugene Hernandez told The Associated Press. Hernandez said the lineup for the festivals final year in Park City has a mixture of new, exciting voices paired with some really, really great familiar faces from Sundances past that I think will create a great alchemy for this really unique edition in Utah. When is Sundance? The festival runs from Thursday, Jan. 22 through Sunday, Feb. 1. There are 90 features premiering throughout, with screenings starting early in the morning and running through midnight. Award winners will be announced on Jan. 30. What celebrities are expected? Some big names who may make an appearance in the mountains include Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Brittney Griner, Seth Rogen, OShea Jackson Jr., David Duchovny, Olivia Wilde, Daveed Diggs, Channing Tatum, Courtney Love, Chris Pine, DaVine Joy Randolph, Salman Rushdie, Alexander Skarsgrd, Olivia Colman, John Turturro and Catherine Zeta-Jones. How is Sundance honoring Robert Redford? Redfords legacy will be a main spotlight at the festival, including at Friday nights annual fundraising gala where organizers will pay tribute to the Sundance founder. Later in the festival, there will also be a screening of his first truly independent film, the 1969 sports drama Downhill Racer, and a series of legacy screenings of restored Sundance gems from Little Miss Sunshine to Barbara Kopples documentary American Dream. What are the buzzy movies? Wilde directed her third feature, The Invite, in which she and Rogen play an unhappily married couple who host a dinner party for friends (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton). Gregg Araki made a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z with I Want Your Sex, also starring Wilde as a provocative artist who takes an interest in a younger intern played by Cooper Hoffman. Portman, sporting platinum blond hair, leads the big ensemble cast of Cathy Yans art world satire The Gallerist, alongside Zach Galifianakis, Jenna Ortega and Zeta-Jones. Both I Want Your Sex and The Gallerist feature supporting turns from Charli xcx, but the pop stars big showcase is The Moment, a self-referential mockumentary. Colman stars alongside Skarsgrd in Wicker, a whimsical tale of a fisherwoman who asks a basket weaver to weave her a husband. Crowe plays the warden of a work camp in 1930s Oregon where Hawke is toiling in The Weight. And Gemma Chan and Tatum play parents to a child who witnesses a crime in Josephine. In the nonfiction space, Navalny director Daniel Roher co-directed a film about artificial intelligence. There are also documentaries about Love, the lead singer of Hole and widow of Kurt Cobain, and Griner, the WNBA star who was detained for nearly 10 months in Russia. Can you stream Sundance movies? Yes, but not until Jan. 29. Access to the movies premiering at Sundance doesnt necessarily require an expensive trip to Park City anymore. The festival has fully embraced an online component for many of their films. What started as a necessary COVID-19 adjustment has become a vital part of the program. From Jan. 29 through Feb. 1, audiences can watch the films in competition online. Prices start at $35 for a single film ticket. When will the Sundance movies be in theaters? It depends. Some have distribution and will soon be in theaters, like The Moment, which A24 is releasing on Jan. 30. Others that might secure distribution deals out of the festival can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a year to hit theaters or streaming services. Is the festival still moving to Colorado? Yes, this is the final edition in Park City, Utah. Next January, the festival is relocating to a new home in Boulder, Colorado. ___ For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/sundance-film-festival Lindsey Bahr, AP film writer
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E-Commerce
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