UX has a forgotten ancestor and his system was better

Before kindergarten was a classroom, it was a design lab for the mind. Froebel built it. We buried it.

I’m Nate Sowder, and this is a story about a forgotten system of thought and what it still has to teach us. It was a system that was elegant, strange, and nearly lost. Until now. (Edited by Pat Hoffmann)

In 1837, a German educator named Friedrich Froebel opened the world’s first kindergarten.

It wasn’t the kindergarten we know today.

No alphabet charts. No songs about the weather. No cotton-ball clouds on bulletin boards.

And it didn’t start at age 5. Kids got with the program when they were as young as 6 months old.

For Froebel, early childhood wasn’t a warm-up act. It was the most critical window for shaping how a person perceives the world.

His “children’s garden” was a structured environment where learning would emerge through play, but not by accident. Children folded paper into geometric patterns. They arranged spheres, cubes and sticks into balanced forms. They learned to see structure before they had the words to describe it.

Froebel believed cognition was something you cultivated. His method wasn’t a curriculum, but a system — a progression that created a way of developing attention, perception and form.

It worked.

And for a brief moment, the world listened.

A system hidden in the woods

Let’s back up.

Froebel wasn’t a teacher by training. He started out in forestry, moved to land surveying and eventually apprenticed in architecture under Friedrich Gilly. I know what you’re thinking. Cool, right? But there’s more: Gilly also trained Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the guy credited with rebuilding Berlin. Once again, ‘Cool!’

Froebel never built a structure himself, but he took something from that world: the idea that form wasn’t just aesthetic — it was instructive. Structure wasn’t the opposite of creativity, but the condition for it.

That’s not how most people think. We’re taught to admire form, imitate it, maybe even manipulate it, but rarely to understand its logic. Even more rarely, to step outside it.

Froebel wanted to understand what made it work.

It’s the distinction between recognizing a structure and abstracting from it. Subtle, yes, but it’s everything. Most systems are learned through repetition, but breakthroughs happen when you can see the system, not just use it.

Froebel knew the shape of the thing was important. That’s when the real influence started to show up… not in classrooms, but in nature.

He became obsessed with natural patterns — everything from the geometry of crystals, the spirals of leaves, the symmetry of snowflakes. To him, these weren’t spiritual or simply beautiful, they were instructional, and they revealed a deeper logic.

He started to see cognition the same way.

Froebel believed a child wasn’t an empty vessel waiting to be filled with information, but a form waiting to emerge. Poetic, isn’t it?

The thought is that if the mind grew like a plant, not a storage unit, maybe education didn’t need to begin with content at all. Maybe it could begin with perception.

Froebel began designing a system with sequence and structure that helped someone see before we ever thought about asking them to explain.

It was a system for perception, long before we started mistaking process for thought.

Froebel’s gifts

The materials he created were simple, and that was the point.

He called them “Gifts,” and introduced them in a specific order. It wasn’t by age or subject, but by complexity. Gift 1 was a soft wool ball. Gift 2 introduced geometric solids: a cube, a sphere, a cylinder. Gift 3 divided the cube into eight smaller cubes. Each new Gift extended the language of the one before it.

Children played with these objects. They rotated them, mirrored them, arranged them into patterns. They explored how parts related to wholes. How balance emerged. How tension resolved.

This pre-math, pre-logic system trained the eye and the hand before the vocabulary ever showed up. Meaning wasn’t imposed. It emerged. The point was progression.

Each Gift prepared the child for the next. Not because of content, but because of structure. The system built up from shape to pattern, from pattern to meaning, and from meaning to method. It was perceptual scaffolding. A full operating system for cognition.

Shapes → Patterns → Meaning → Methods

And it worked — until we stopped using it.

Intellectual offspring

Froebel’s kindergartens spread quickly across Europe and into the United States. But his ideas didn’t stop there.

Frank Lloyd Wright credited the Gifts with shaping his understanding of geometry and structure. I grew up with a coffee table book of Frank Lloyd Wright houses and recently got to tour another one called the Boulter House in Cincinnati. Owned by the Brackeen’s, who are venture capitalists who manage Lightship Capital, a firm that invests in startups owned by women and minorities, the house is used as a retreat space for creatives and entrepreneurs.

Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky brought Froebelian play into the foundation of Bauhaus design.

Maria Montessori extended his sensorial approach and applied it across early childhood.

Even Buckminster Fuller credited Froebel with his early sense of systems thinking. Shown below is NOT one of Fuller’s creations, but it is one that was heavily inspired by him. Fuller even coined the name ‘Spaceship Earth’ that the ride is named.

Froebel didn’t just influence classrooms. He laid the foundation for modern design, architecture, and interaction theory. His real legacy wasn’t kindergarten. It was cognition.

The slow dilution

After Froebel’s death, kindergartens continued to spread, but his method didn’t.

The Gifts were repackaged by toy companies, stripped of their sequence and logic, and sold as general-purpose learning aids. The structured follow-on activities Froebel called “Occupations” (which were meant to extend perception into hands-on expression) were replaced with coloring books and crafts.

The system lost its purpose.

What had once been a developmental progression became less about forming perception and more about managing behavior.

Kindergarten was once a “garden” of form and attention. It became the opposite of what Froebel intended. Instead of a staging area for academic readiness, it was a meadow of surface knowledge.

Teaching to the test, they’d say.

We didn’t just forget Froebel’s method.
We turned his garden into a sandbox.

What we forgot

The tragedy isn’t just that Froebel’s name faded. It’s that we still haven’t replaced the system he built.

Some of its DNA survives, especially in Montessori, but the deeper logic — the sequence structure and cultivation of perception as a cognitive foundation — largely disappeared.

Today we talk about design thinking, systems thinking, prompt engineering and creative leadership as if they’re modern inventions. But Froebel was there first.

Froebel built us a method for organizing thought through form and then trusted the mind to do the rest.

Today, in an environment where we’re obsessed with AI, cognitive load and interface design, it might be worth asking why we abandoned the first real system for training perception.

What we get wrong about problem-solving today

Most modern problem-solving works from the top down.

We start by defining the problem. Then we set a goal, brainstorm ideas, and make a plan. It sounds productive, but it skips the part where we learn how to see what’s going on.

We treat problems like puzzles, but most of the time we don’t even know what we’re looking at. We’ve been trained to look at the big picture from 10,000 ft, but not the pieces that make it up.

So when a challenge feels complex, we react. We build. We add. New features, new incentives, new bullet points. Especially inside companies, where adding features feels like progress and removing feels like failure.

But that only makes sense if you were never taught how to break something down.

Here’s the difference:

Modern problem-solving
Top-down. Fast. Comfortable. Incomplete.

Define the Problem → Set a Goal → Brainstorm → Execute

• Ambiguity is treated like a risk.
• The faster you move past it, the better you feel.
• Everything starts with what’s visible and builds from there.

Froebel’s method
Bottom-up. Visual. Slow. Durable.

Shape → Pattern → Meaning → Method

• Ambiguity isn’t avoided — it’s embraced.
• Clarity comes from noticing, not naming.
• You don’t rush to solve. You learn to see.

Why is it that we think small problems aren’t worth solving? We think the only ideas that matter are the ones that “think outside the box.” But that’s not innovation. That’s guessing.

Real innovation doesn’t start with ideas on post-it notes. It starts with structure. You work with what’s already there — and you learn how to see it differently.

That’s what Froebel knew.

He wasn’t running a brainstorm. He didn’t put kids in a conference room and say, ‘Okay, no wrong answers! Let’s come up with as many ideas as possible.’

He taught them how to pay attention. How to find structure in ambiguity, and how to build understanding from the ground up.

And I think that’s what we’ve forgotten.

We don’t need more grand ideas just for the sake of having them. We need better perception. Because until you can see the shape of a problem, all you’ll know how to do is add more because that always feels like the right answer.

We don’t build better thinkers by handing people better tools. We build better thinkers by teaching people how to stack.

UX has a forgotten ancestor and his system was better was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post first appeared on Read More