There are a few ongoing debates in the world of digital design. Things like Should designers code?”, “What’s the value of design?”, “UX versus UI,” and, perhaps most fundamentally, “Is everyone a designer?” To get a taste for the flavor of that last one, you can step into this Twitter thread from a little while back (TLDR: It didn’t go super well for anyone):

To be clear at the outset, I don’t care if everyone is a designer. However, I’ve been considering this debate for a while and I think there is something interesting here that’s worth further inspection…

Three years ago, I couldn’t stand for any period of time without my lower back seizing up. I had chronic nerve pain running from my left shoulder to my left wrist. It was bad enough that I couldn’t sleep. I was at least 20 pounds overweight and more out of shape than I had been in a decade. I was 35 years old. My physical condition was not what I would call optimal.

I had fallen into the hustle trap. At the time, I was head of product for a tech company, and the long hours had caught up with…

We build a lot of technology and push it out into the world. When things go well, we rush to take credit for what we did. But when things go wrong, we hide our heads in the sand. This isn’t just about ignoring negative outcomes — it’s about maintaining the status quo.

Whenever I write a critical piece about technology and its impact on society, a certain kind of troll surfaces. I like to call them the “techno-whataboutist.” …

The process of user-centered design focuses a lot of attention on finding the right problem. There are many tools and processes that can be used to suss out user needs and motivations and boil it all down into clearly defined problems to be solved. But with all these tools at our disposal, how can we still end up with less than optimal and often negative outcomes for the people we are supposed to be helping?

The issue is that our obsession with solving the correct problem frequently takes our focus away from an even more important aspect of the project…

In our drive for speed, we have conditioned ourselves to ignore our most vulnerable users. We design for the happy path, and society pays the price.

The happy path

To create digital products, designers often start by developing a set of scenarios or use cases. These scenarios help determine the features, interactions, and technological infrastructure required in a product.

As an example, let’s think about Facebook. When Mark Zuckerberg was initially creating the social network he may have had a scenario like this in his head:

“An undergrad who wants to share pictures from a party with her friends.”

This is a straightforward…

Augmented reality (AR) is technology designed to enhance the physical world by integrating digital images into or on top of it. These composite experiences are often delivered through a heads-up display built into glasses or goggles, or in its current nascent form, via a smartphone camera.

AR differs from VR (virtual reality) in the way it integrates with the physical world. VR is a completely digital experience not tied to reality, like playing an immersive video game. AR, on the other hand, directly modifies a person’s experience of the real world.

This deep integration of the real and the digital…

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Noble Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman discusses the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion, which he, along with Amos Tversky, first identified back in 1979. At its core, loss aversion refers to the tendency of the human brain to react more strongly to losses than it does to gains. Or, as Wikipedia puts it, people “prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5 than to find $5.” This phenomenon is so ingrained in our psyche that some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.

In…