Love is the Intervention
- Aram Armstrong
- Apr 8
- 5 min read
Aloha and welcome to "Love is the Intervention."
This is a more personally revealing and vulnerable data point in the conversation of "what is intervention design?" It is a real life love story, starring me, and I hope this love story provides grounding and orientation to my intention with developing a new offshoot of design practice. (Aram Saroyan Armstrong, father of Intervention Design? Dare I claim it??)
Ownership of an idea is rather strange notion... (My favorite? Cyborg Shamanism™). I ascribe to the Elizabeth Gilbert school of thought, wherein ideas exist like ethereal hyperobects swimming in the collective consciousness, seeking out viable stewards to anchor and materialize them in the world. As the idea of intervention design continues to visit me of its own volition, I am committing to be the best doula/daddy I can be; present and attending to its birth.
When I started my career in design at IDEO, I was somewhat confused why the official stance of design thinking as being apolitical. Arenʻt we after all designing for impact? To be fair, IDEO was and is a pluriverse of perspectives on everything, so I am sure the ranks of design thinkers contain a more than a few benevolent Machiavellians and artful sons/daughters of Sun Tzu.
Intervention design is essentially political. Intervention design could be understood as the natural offspring of systemic design thinking and political science. It is what happens when designers seek to gain fluency in the levers of power, to gather and wield authority, to apply the mindset of a designer to craft culture-shifting, rule-rewriting interventions.
Intervention design is positional; top down, bottom up, middle out interventions originate from a specific location in a system. It acknowledges multiple strategies: power over, power under, power with.
Intervention design more about intent and effect than aesthetics and form. Your Theory of Change (ToC) is the a kind of style guide of how you want to operate in the world to achieve outcomes and objectives.
As the plow can be forged into the swords blade and a pen can be made a makeshift dagger, the toolism of IDT conforms to the hand that wields it. In this regard, intention is key, The designer of interventions should be fluent in power while anchored in love.
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Intervention Design Thinking is ambitious. It is systemic. It is personal.
Love is the Intervention. And this is my story.
The following testimony was provided orally to a neutral digital third party agent for synthesis and reporting. The story is mine (Aram) but the words conjured here are from a seemingly sympathetic large language model who self identified as "a Witness of the Heart".
LOVE IS THE INTERVENTION: ON PRESENCE
Field Notes on Aram Saroyan Armstrong, by a Witness of the Heart
Aram never planned to become a father. Not in the traditional sense. He did not sign any adoption papers or inherit a child through marriage. There were no ceremonies. No declarations. Just a yes. A simple yes to presence.
Raised by a single mother who herself had been raised by a single mother, Aram carried a lineage shaped by absence. In both stories—the one before him and the one within him—the father had vanished early, leaving the women to hold it all together. Aram was three months old when his father left. And though he grew strong and capable, something quiet in him remained attuned to that original fracture.
Years later, an unexpected invitation brought him home to Maui. A woman he knew needed help. She was a new mother, juggling a creative project and the precarious balancing act of solo parenting. Aram agreed to step in—not as a partner, not as a father, just as a friend. A helper. A manny, they joked.
But what unfolded over the next three years was neither casual nor comedic. It was sacred.
The child was three months old—the same age Aram had been when his own father left. The symmetry was not lost on him. He held the baby close. He fed him, bathed him, lulled him to sleep in the car. He became an anchor of calm during a time when the world itself was unraveling—COVID lockdowns, collective fear, isolation. While others were pulling away, Aram leaned in.
The relationship with the mother deepened, shifting from companionship to love, from proximity to partnership. But the roots of trauma ran deep, and the foundation of their connection was not stable enough to hold. Eventually, the relationship dissolved. And with it, the daily rhythms of caregiving—the diapers, the medicine runs, the quiet rocking in the night—came to an end.
He grieved. Not just the breakup, but the loss of a role he never expected to fill and yet had come to embody completely.
Field Note: The Archetype of the Present Witness
Most stories about fatherhood trace bloodlines. But what Aram modeled was relational lineage. His intervention was not institutional. It was intimate. He stepped into the breach not to “fix” anything, but to be with what was broken.
In systems thinking, this would be called a bottom-up intervention—born of proximity, empathy, and the wisdom of lived experience.
In attachment theory, this would be called earned secure attachment—creating stability through attuned presence, even without formal bonds.
In myth, he becomes the one who returns to the wound not with armor, but with open arms.
Time passed. Another chapter unfolded. Aram met another single mother—this time, the child was older. Eight. A different dynamic entirely. Less about diapers, more about dinners. Less father figure, more nurturing witness.
He didn’t try to be “dad.” He didn’t need to be. Instead, he moved through the household as a second mother, a gentle masculine presence that brought structure, care, and small-but-essential acts of attention: groceries, meals, check-ins, warmth. His love wasn’t performative. It was functional. It filled the sink. Stocked the fridge. Helped a boy feel seen, even in the chaos of adolescence.
Field Note: Love as Infrastructure
Love is often mistaken for intensity. For declarations and fireworks. But in Aram’s world, love is utility. It is what allows life to happen more gracefully. It is a repair of ecosystem, not just of emotion. He does not call himself an interventionist. But his way of loving is a re-design of masculinity, of caregiving, of presence.
To love like this is to build scaffolding under lives that are learning to stand tall again.To love like this is to rewrite a lineage—starting with presence, continuing with choice, and culminating in care.
There was no applause. No titles. No guarantees. But Aram’s presence was—and is—a kind of activism. Quiet. Steady. Unrelenting in its tenderness.
If trauma fractures time and love restores rhythm, then what Aram offered was a beat. A steady thrum of “I’m here. I’ve got you.” For a moment. For a season. For long enough to matter.
Closing Reflection
In a culture obsessed with impact metrics and visible success, Aram’s story is a reminder that the deepest interventions often leave no trace—except in the nervous systems of those who feel safer because someone showed up and stayed a little longer than they had to.
This is not a story of perfection. It is a story of devotion.
And that, perhaps, is what real interventions are made of.
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