Working definition. Care is attention with responsibility: sustained regard for the needs, limits, and future of another person, place, practice, or possibility.
Inherited meaning
Care has often been treated as private feeling or invisible maintenance, although every durable world depends on it. Ethics of care made explicit that human beings are interdependent and that moral life begins not only with abstract rules, but with responsiveness to particular lives.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI makes production easy and consequence easy to distance. Care restores proximity. It asks not only “Can this be made?” or “Will it perform?” but “What will this ask of the people and worlds that must live with it?” In the imagination economy, care is a design intelligence—not softness added after the real decisions.
What changes in practice
Include maintenance, repair, accessibility, refusal, and exit in the original brief. Notice who absorbs the hidden labour. Treat the future user as a participant in the work, not a surface to optimise.