A Q&A with Mindful Design author, Scott Riley

How did you get into design?permalink

I stumbled into it. Like a weary drunkard into the arms of a kebab shop bossman. I was a developer. I guess I continue to be one, in spirit if not in salary. But I got very bored very quickly of my work looking like — and sorry for getting too technical right at the start — absolute shit.

In the typical journey of a terminally online person of my particular vintage, I owe my career to Neopets, MySpace, and Dreamweaver, but the goal was pretty facile: make things look good.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and that’s still part of the goal, but the two things that have kept me hooked are:

1. Counteracting the absolute disdain with which the majority of the tech industry treats the people they’re asking to use their products.
2. Knowing that there’s a better way to make things outside of the neoliberal hellscape that is Silicon Valley (derogatory)

So, like many, I was enraptured by the ability to create something from nothing, and now I am good at doing that, I am fuelled by petty spite and pink Monster.

What even is mindful design?permalink

Mindful design at its core is responsible and ethical design. It’s an approach to design that makes explicit the implicit responsibility we have to the people who we ask to use the stuff we make. It’s about learning how humans work, and using that knowledge to empower rather than exploit.

It’s also a response and a challenge to behavioural design. An unserious and despicable practice built out by unserious people and championed by unserious practitioners with a vim and vigour that can only come from one particular brand of naive, hyper-optimistic Californians who believe we can save the world by [checks notes] boiling the planet and manipulating humans into clicking the buttons that make companies the most money.

Fundamentally, it’s an approach, a mindset, and a toolkit. It’s not some flavour-of-the-week framework that you try once before going back to Kanban With Extra Steps™.

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I’m a developer who wants to get better at design. Is this the course for me?permalink

One hundred percent yes. It’s a core audience I wanted to address with this course. This is my background, these are my people! I know that so many developer folks want to learn design, but might be discouraged by gatekeeping or the identity crisis design as a practice seems to be in the midst of right now.

It’s not ‘Design for Developers’, because it’s not just for developers, but a huge indicator of success for me would be if one person made it all the way through the course, designed something they loved, and then built that thing. If I see that, I’m happy.

Why did you choose a video course over a written course like the others on Piccalilli?permalink

Take it from someone who wrote two books on the subject: written design education is not enough. When we write about design practices, approaches, and methodologies, a few things happen.

Firstly, we tend to idealise the scenarios and output. We distill chaotic and divergent practices into tidy little paragraphs. That’s not a true reflection of the craft.

Secondly, we lose the key concept of being able to simply follow along with these micro-stages of a process. I can tell you that you need to get good at contrast by applying the von Restorff effect and learning Weber-Fechner’s law. That to apply contrast well you need to understand the logarithmic nature of processing change within an environment. I can tell you that you need to meet WCAG compliance while still communicating hierarchy, character, and relatedness. I can show you the result of what happens when you go about that and you can read all of that and feel like you can do it too.

Alternatively, I can tell you all of that same stuff, but then you can also watch a 32 minute video of me struggling to actually implement it while I design a blog post about how Shrek 2 is the best film ever made. Galaxy brain stuff.

That’s the big reason that I wanted to go video-first for this course: you get to follow along with me. You get to see that this is a fucking messy process and that design isn’t something you just learn facts and theories about, then systematically slap the best rectangles ever together in an interface. It’s a craft, it’s a conversation, and it’s a dance between the ideas in your head and your actual ability to get them out onto a screen.

I can’t show you that I’m kind of shit at colour with written words. I can’t show you how many mistakes I make to get to something good. I can’t show you that this is a craft and not a process unless you’re sitting there watch me deliberate over which green best represents Shrek. It’s just not possible.

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If you were to give a beginner one piece of advice, what would it be?permalink

Learn to really, thoroughly and completely enjoy being shit at something. The process of learning is chaotic, nonlinear, and uniquely human. Rather than asking a Markov chain in a beret to generate something for you, you’re getting stuck in and you’re deciding to learn a craft or technique for yourself. That is to be cherished and protected and loved.

Being utterly, hopelessly shit at something, but knowing that you’ve made the decision to dive into a journey of being slightly less shit at it, with every new thing you learn, touches on the very essence of what it means to be human. Fallibility and vulnerability are traits to be celebrated and venerated, not hidden or shied away from.

At some point very soon, you’re not going to be shit at that thing. Eventually, you’re going to be exceptionally good at that thing, but unless you’re some kind of savant, you have to be shit at it first, so enjoy that. Enjoy the fact that almost everything you do is going to make you a tiny bit better than before.

Don’t race to get good at things. Being active and conscious in embracing your shitness means you can be active and conscious in embracing your improvement. And there’s few things on this planet more human than that.

Away from design, what excites you the most about the web?permalink

Personal websites Babeyyy. UI and web design is so homogenised and optimised these days that the only way to tell what generic SaaS website you’re on is to look at the logo. Even then it’s probably the Linear logo so you might still be fucked.

The web was always, to me, a place for self expression and self documentation. That’s changed a lot because startups fucking devoured the world, but there’s a little personal site revival going on lately.

As we seem to be unpicking and detaching ourselves from centralised systems of communication and community, so too do we seem to be detaching ourselves from the weird distributed cognition phenomenon of all of us designing the same fucking web site.

It’s beautiful to see.

What do you think people will gain from taking the course?permalink

1. An understanding of how design can work to meet humanity where it is, to work to all the quirks and fallibilities of real humans with the goal of empowering them, not exploiting nor ‘fixing’ them or their worlds.
2. A toolkit of approaches, workshops, techniques and mental models that gives them just enough to do good work, without all the random bullshit that’s pointlessly woven into far too many processes.
3. A new found love and appreciation for Shrek 2 — the greatest film ever made.

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