Early-stage production decisions for infrastructure significantly influence consumption patterns throughout the system's lifecycle. Achieving a balance between initial production and lifecycle consumption becomes increasingly complex when factoring in unpredictable system faults during the use phase, particularly in the context of evolving sustainable and resilient systems. For example, consider disaster infrastructure response: how do we invest resources to respond to a disaster we do not know the details of yet, especially when performance is critical even under such unpredictable conditions? In response to this gap, we introduce a novel infrastructure design approach inspired by the kinship coefficientsKinship coefficients observed in eusocial animals like honeybees (Apis mellifera). The new approach is named Kinship Infrastructure Design (KID). Our goal is to enable infrastructure design that is both resilient and adaptable, even in the face of uncertainty. By using the kinship coefficientKinship coefficients to evaluate potential designs, we offer an approach for efficient resource allocation without detailed fault analysis. We hypothesize that by exploring low-fidelity disaster response architectures with varying kinship coefficientsKinship coefficients, we can identify their relationship to disaster response performance and validate the kinship coefficientKinship coefficients as a design tool. Specifically, this article performs the key first step of validating if a “Goldilocks Zone” for kinship coefficientKinship coefficients exists for artificial systems in the same way it does for natural systems. To test this hypothesis, we examined the performance of a set of 60 potential infrastructures for a simulated wildfire case study. The results indicate that, on average, 83.9% of the forestForest was saved in the goldilocks zone compared to 56.3% outside of it. This means using KID for infrastructure decisions saved 27.6% more forestForest. The proposed approach can be used to improve the design of a variety of large systems including emergency management, infrastructure planning, and energy systems. These findings provide a framework for designing resilient infrastructureResilient infrastructure design systems throughout the system lifecycle, enhancing their ability to withstand and adapt to unforeseen disasters, while ensuring operational continuity and minimizing resource waste during disaster response. KID aligns with INCOSE Vision 2035 by fostering adaptive systems, leveraging advanced modelingModeling, and balancing societal and environmental needs. Our approach seeks to make impactful interventions in the design phase to improve resilienceResilience during the infrastructure’s use phase.