Hidden By Design

Someone shares their work, and the only honest thought you have is that it won't work. You keep quiet, or you say it and the room goes cold. This week: what makes design feedback land.The questionHow do you personally create the kind of environment where someone can say "I think this is a bad idea" without it turning into a whole thing or an argument?How it's said decides whether the next idea gets shared at all. Can that room be built on purpose?What we talk aboutA beautiful coffee cup with a bad last sip, and a yellow mug picked for its color alone. Then the cup goes into a meeting: critique that starts as a question, the five whys, the four stages of psychological safety, and one small word traced back to improv.How do you separate what you make from who you are? And how much of a hard conversation does the room decide before anyone speaks?Mentioned in this episodeAlso mentionedThe 4 Stages of Psychological Safety by Timothy R. Clark: the four stages we walk through.The five whys: borrowed from customer interviews."Yes, and": the improv rule behind avoiding stop words.Susan Weinschenk: research on how context shapes a conversation.Got a question of your own?Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

You've been nudging the same layout by a pixel for the last hour. Is it finished, or have you just had enough of it? Knowing when a design is done is the one thing nobody teaches you, and both ways of getting it wrong have a price.The questionHow do you decide when a design is actually done, versus when you're just running out of time or patience and calling it finished?Finished and out of time can look identical from the outside, and often from the inside too. Design thinking says iterate until it's done, which is fine until you notice that nothing in it tells you when a design is done. Anyone working without a client or a deadline runs into this one sooner or later.What we talk aboutBefore that, a debt from last episode. The rule of thirds and the golden ratio turn up in every guide to composition, usually as one idea with a shell drawn over it. We trace where they actually come from, through a phrase coined in 1797 about something else, a Victorian photography book and a US Army manual from 1979. Then what happens when someone checks whether untrained eyes prefer them at all.Then the thing every designer works out eventually. People say the process is what matters, and then they react to whatever looks nice. We pull that apart: why a polished prototype pulls a room into arguing about the details, what a deliberately ugly first version gets you instead, and where the line sits between how something functions and how it works.Which brings us to the question itself. We get into imposter syndrome as something to calibrate rather than cure, and why being fast and right about everything can make you worse at the part of the job that needs doubt. Then how requirements, a specification and a definition of done turn a feeling into something you can check against.And perfection, which doesn't exist. We chase what a deadline is for when nobody's waiting on you, and why saying one out loud to another person does something that setting it privately doesn't.Mentioned in this episodeFrom Hidden By DesignDesign thinking (S2E8): the iterate-until-it's-done loop that the answer leans on.What is intuitive design (Episode 7): intuition being different from person to person, referred back to on air without a number.Also mentionedMartin's audio drama: the self-written, self-produced passion piece with no deadline on it, which had to be called finished anyway.Steve Jobs on design: "design is not how something looks, it's how something works", the line the works-versus-functions split is built on.Remarks on Rural Scenery, John Thomas Smith, 1797: where the phrase rule of thirds is coined, in a passage about perspective and tonal mass in painting.Pictorial Effect in Photography, Henry Peach Robinson, 1869: the first to put the point of interest off dead centre, by observation and with no maths behind it.The Library of Amateur Photography, Volume 3: the first version that resembles the rule as it's taught today.Composition for Photographers, 1952 (link missing): where the golden mean gets attributed to Pythagoras.The US Army journalist's soldier manual, 1979 (link missing): where the rule of thirds and the golden rectangle get welded into one credible-looking thing.The nautilus shell: the reference everyone reaches for, and the one that gets checked here.Bartle's player types: killer, explorer, socialiser and achiever, used to settle who a piece of work is for.Rabbit Rocket Racing: the Polyspice game whose two pillars, fun flying and friendly chaos, work as the calibration example.Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion, looked up live at the end.Got a question of your own?Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

Why is no-one talking about AI ethics?Thorbjørn sent Martin a link. That link was for a company selling computers made of living brain cells. Nowhere does that company talk about the ethics involved here, which is a little bit worrying. Maybe even more than killer robots.What we talk aboutThe Anthropic research who said there's more than 10% chance AI will wipe out humans. Is that really going to happen? Well, Thorbjørn gives another of his famed predictions. Let's see if it comes true. Although maybe if it does, we wouldn't know anyway. Gulp. Think about how it would happen and the you end up going in circles, because... surely someone would stop it. So why is someone on the inside saying it out loud? They can't slow down. They're not allowed! Whoever stops first, gets left behind immediately, because the money has got them by the throat. Really, they're hoping someone on the outside steps in. But nobody has.We also chat about how AI sells itself. Things that look good get believed, that's the aesthetic usability effect, and AI writes in a way that feels human, which means... we trust it more than we should. Thorbjørn also brings up The Matrix (and how The Animatrix is better, no arguing please) and says we're somewhere within that world right now. So, who's scared? Martin completely forgets how to form words when the conversation turns to Cortical Labs. They're selling a computer made of living tissue. Lab grown neurons wired to silicon chips, available to anyone. I'll ask again, who's scared?Why does this need to be a thing? The answer is in the episode and although logical, still feels wrong.Mentioned in this episodeFrom Hidden By DesignAn earlier episode on the aesthetic usability effect (link missing): never named on air.An earlier episode on the brain and power consumption (link missing): same, no title.Also mentionedGeoffrey Hinton: walked away from AI over AI ethics.Anthropic: whose researchers keep saying this out loud.The BBC report on the 10% kill estimate: where this one started.Cortical Labs and the CL1: the lab grown neuron computer.The Matrix: the first reference anyone reaches for.The Animatrix: rated above the film.Got a question of your own?Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.

A joke works because everything is predictable until it isn't. Thorbjørn thinks breaking design rules works the same way.The question"What's something you were taught early on in your career that you later found out was actually wrong, or at least way more situational than you were originally told?"Off the hosts' own list. Martin's answer: every job used to be a pitch against rivals, and working alone now feels more like a team than employment ever did. Thorbjørn's: design school taught him that how a thing works counts more than how it looks, then he watched thinner ideas win on looks alone. He uses that lesson now, and hates it.What we talk aboutMartin asks where the rule of thirds came from. Thorbjørn reaches for the golden ratio, then admits he can't say why thirds please the eye. A tangent on green versus red.Breaking rules in a video game: at the start, and one at a time, because breaking it all at once makes noise instead of surprise. Martin's voiceover parallel.Then AI: posters that all look the same, and a novelty effect wearing off. Thorbjørn predicts subscription prices double once the fight for market share settles.Mentioned in this episodeFrom Hidden By DesignColours (S1E10): the green-versus-red questionAlso mentionedKahneman's System 1 and System 2: reasoning after the observationTrey Parker and Matt Stone on "but, therefore": South Park plottingPolyspice Games: Thorbjørn's studio, how the two mettalat: on-device transcriptionNatural Reader: reads papers to him on runsSpotify: the market-share comparisonPaul the Octopus: the football-predicting octopusGot a question of your own?Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a

What's the one thing about human attention that most designers never learn to use on purpose?The question"What's the one design principle that you think is massively underestimated even by experienced designers like yourself?"This one comes from Martin's own list, not a listener submission. Thorbjørn takes it as a chance to name three principles he thinks go under-used outside game design: flow theory, actually understanding a problem before jumping to a solution, and emotional design. Flow theory ends up carrying most of the conversation from there.What we talk aboutThorbjørn walks through what actually produces a flow state: a clear goal, a challenge that matches your skill, and feedback that comes back immediately. He and Martin tie this to three different kinds of design problems that each create those conditions differently: games (where the designer defines the goal outright), personal apps like Duolingo (solving one immediate desire), and enterprise software (solving the business's problem through a tool built for someone else to use).Some apps are built to produce a flow state on purpose. Thorbjørn points to TikTok and YouTube Shorts as the most dominant examples, engineered to make you lose track of time entirely. Other designs exist specifically to break that state: Netflix's "are you still watching?" prompt, session-limit warnings on gambling sites, and even something as small as a delete confirmation, which counts as friction doing its job on purpose. They also touch on genuinely dangerous, high-stakes situations, like bomb disposal, where flow is still useful but has to come from real experience rather than an interface trying to induce it.Daydreaming comes up as a way into flow that needs no outside help or equipment at all, something Thorbjørn calls a superpower for creative people. That leads to a bigger question: can a whole stretch of someone's life, being a teenager, being in love, count as one long flow state, rather than something that only happens task by task.Mentioned in this episodeFrom Hidden By DesignFlow (S1E5) — the earlier Hidden By Design episode on flow theory that this conversation keeps referencing; Thorbjørn and Martin disagreed on air about which season it was in (Thorbjørn was right).Emotional Design (S1E11) — the earlier episode on the visceral/behavioral/reflective framework, named on air only as "we had an episode about emotional design."The Brain (S1E3) — the early episode on how the brain works and Kahneman's automatic vs. reflective thinking, remembered on air only as "episode two or something."Also mentionedDuolingo — cited as a B2C example of an app solving one immediate, individual desire.Claude — mentioned as an example of how easy AI tools now make it to build something before checking there's a real problem behind it.TikTok — cited as one of the most dominant examples of an app engineered to produce a flow state on purpose.YouTube Shorts — cited alongside TikTok for the same reason.Netflix's "are you still watching?" prompt — cited as a deliberate flow-breaker for long viewing sessions.Got a question of your own?Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.