Thinking

We are social animals. Our instincts for trust, attachment, and empathy were shaped over hundreds of thousands of years. To allow community and society. Rules and behaviour for people who had skin in the game. That wiring hasn't changed. What has changed is everything around us.

The world we live in now is largely artificial. We dismantled the meaning of space and time and connected everyone and everything at once. We still haven't managed to keep our digital representation under personal control, we just start to realize how vulnerable we have become through this. As everything can be connected, it becomes a design decision what to connect at which cost and benefit.

But technology is about to change its face again. It's no longer awkward buttons and forms. It's becoming social and emotional. The things that trigger our social instincts aren't human. We don't choose to respond to them as if they were real. We just do. And the systems on the other side are optimised to keep us engaged more than ever. This is now the eminent design challenge. Designing the influence on human behaviour and decisions, while interacting with systems that don't risk anything, while humans risk all.

Our civilisation is a complex system and within it the most consequential design decisions are the ones nobody notices, because they focus on the effect, not the surface. Whether personal data is hoarded or private by default. Does the user feel empowered or become dependent? Whether an AI is designed to be liked or to be truly empathetic. Whether the measure of success is engagement or wellbeing. These are design questions.

I design for humans living in an artificial world. That means keeping the human, with all their instincts, vulnerabilities, and needs, as the fixed point. I design the invisible layer.

This is how I think, and here's how I work.