Introduction

Well shit, here we go again. How are we? To say a lot has happened in the five (yes, five!) years since the writing of the first edition of this book would be something of an understatement, would it not? From a personal perspective, I’ve been married, adopted the cheekiest little street dog you’ll ever meet, became an uncle, started (and left) two jobs, bought a house, lost friends and loved ones, gained friends and loved ones, and have regenerated somewhere between 50 and 60% of the cells which made me up at the time. A different person in almost every conceivable way.

In the wider world, we’ve had a years-long pandemic to contend with, robbing us of friends and family, quality of life, time with our loved ones, and any semblance of truth to the idea that politicians have our best interests at heart. We’ve stood in horror to a backdrop of genocide, war, and invasions, and endured the ever-churning machinations of propaganda that strives to paint these as normal or acceptable. Politicians have hoarded more power, the ultra-rich have hoarded more wealth, landlords have hoarded more property, and our social platforms have hoarded a user list of apologists and sock puppets for them all.

And what of our beloved tech industry? Augmented and virtual reality were the next big thing, until they weren’t. Then Web3 and Crypto were the next big thing, until they weren’t. Now, AI is the next big thing, and I can’t help but wonder where that one’s going to wind up. Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn to show the world how well he was coping with a divorce. 140 Twitter clones were built in the weeks and months after. None of them were good. Adobe was acquiring Figma, until they weren’t. Facebook rebranded to Meta to try and launder their reputation (that went well). An entire bank went bust and VCs lost the actual plot, wreaking havoc on an industry whilst simultaneously revealing the rather suspiciously sandy-looking foundations on top of which it is built. Is that everything? Probably not.

And finally, what of Mindful Design? I’ve had the privilege of being able to roll out many of the practices and methods touted in the first edition, across many products in many verticals. As such, the concepts have evolved, the process has been optimized, and the cream has risen to the top, so to speak. Furthermore, the attitudes and approaches to which Mindful Design—as a thing, not just a book—strives to be antithetical or antidotal are still as pervasive in our industry. We still have cult-of-personality leaders spending money earned nepotistically in terrifyingly irresponsible ways. Technology still outpaces regulation. Untempered growth, inaccessible products, systems of self-perpetuation and grossly non-diverse teams still pervade. Designers are encouraged to design for predictability and coercion, still relying on outdated and disproven behaviorist approaches, and ‘persuasive design’ is still a thing.

While I’m loath to add to the arrogant noise that lives in the dusty corners of the idea that being a designer somehow makes us special, it remains impossible to ignore the fact that design decisions, even—perhaps especially—in their absence, impact the world. As such, us designers find ourselves in a position where our decisions, ideas, failings, and oversights will, invariably, affect other humans—they’re supposed to.

When we consider that any interface is a product of thousands of these decisions, ideas, failings, and oversights, we are faced with little choice but to accept the responsibility that comes with that.

Design, in its most abstract sense, is emotional manipulation. It is a mechanism for eliciting changes in the brain. This doesn’t, however, make design unique, or evil, or inherently problematic. Music, art, video games, food, literature, film, photography, and myriad other indulgences to the senses all instigate their own, visceral reactions—lighting up neurons, exciting receptors, uncovering buried memories, and exploring the pathways that form new ones. Whether knowingly or unknowingly to their creator, they are odes to the plasticity of our brain, to the malleability of our mind.

Design’s quirk—what makes it something of an outlier among the arts—lies in the perverse desire to knowingly and measurably manipulate. We want people to tap the right buttons, we want them to share links, to use our interfaces in certain ways. And, usually, we want people to do these things in the ways which make our products the most profitable.

While so-called “real” art encourages emotional exploration and ambiguity, basking in the in-betweens, design strives for surety, for absolution. This is evident in the buzzword-laden landscape of how we talk about our work. We might funnel people into our product, then convert them to users, and subsequently activate them into paying customers.

We often fall into the trap of treating our work as linear, constraining our design thinking into a neat little one-lane road of successful micro-interactions with various milestones along the way. We even create nice little user flow diagrams, like an electronics engineer planning the nodes their signal will pass through between origin and destination. We sort people into personas and categories and deal with them in averages and denominations, often blighted and constrained by our own biases and assumptions.

The question here is, bluntly, where does real humanity fit into this equation? When “empathy” is our buzzword, our yardstick for abstract adeptness as a designer, why are we diluting our understanding and appreciation of humans down into decision trees and reductive personas? Why can your average designer write an atomic user journey, but tell you little to nothing about the workings and the wonders of the mind?

Through the reading of this book, however deep you delve, I’d like to propose we flip conventional design vocabulary, in relation to people, on its head. Rather than thinking about how we can manipulate people to buy into our products—using product-centric verbs like activation and conversion—I’d like to explore what products and interfaces can give back to the people who use them. Not necessarily in a broad, feature-level sense of addressing needs and solving problems, but in a more empowering, emotional one. I want to introduce new questions to our decision workflow, mainly, “How could this make people feel?”

We all have the ability to knowingly add to the world, yet we often refuse to acknowledge just how much we can potentially take from it. Design can solve problems, but we rarely accept that it can create them as well. It can empower millions, but we rarely accept that it can equally, aggressively oppress. Design is a responsibility.

I feel, passionately, that an understanding of the mind—however basic—is increasingly essential to anyone who wishes to design. If you champion design’s ability to empower, if you fetishize its capacity to “change the world”—consequently, I feel you have no choice but to accept its potential to damage, to accede to the fact that your decisions can alienate, that your negligence can marginalize.

Now, this is no attempt to denigrate the pursuit of design, nor is it a doom-and-gloom psycho-novella about the impact of poor design. Both of those exist already, written by people far more capable of such than myself. My intention with this book is to provide a spark. To distill the often-saturated worlds of cognitive psychology and neuroscience down to concepts and knowledge that I feel can best inform a pursuit of empowering and positively impacting real humans. To pass on a sense that has grown and been shaped by the study of these fields. A sense of togetherness, of a self-imposed obligation to be diligent and cognizant of our design decisions’ impact on others.

Writing a second edition of this book is unequivocally a privilege that I’m delighted to have been afforded. I’m a better designer, a better manager, and (hopefully, let’s find out!) a better writer than I was when the first edition was published. If you’re on board with understanding the human mind, if you’re open-minded to different ways of thinking about and approaching design, and if you’re willing to try things that fly in the face of conventional industry wisdom, then let’s not waste any time.