Welcome to Mindful Design

Well then. Welcome to Mindful Design.

First things first, thank you so much for taking this course. This stuff means a lot to me, and it’s amazing to be able to share it with you like this.

We’re going to cover a LOT over the course of these videos, but I just want to take a few minutes to let you know what you’re diving into.

First off; we’re going to learn how to design for real humans. Real humans are fallible, weird, unpredictable, and above all else, unique.

We have good days and bad days. We have days where we’re super excited to do big productive things and we have days where all we want to do is lie in bed and chill out.

Some of us are disabled. Some of us have neurodevelopmental disorders or cognitive impairments.

We’re from different cultures, we have different lifestyles, and we have different expectations and mental models for how we process the world around us.

The goal of Mindful Design is to work… can you guess? Mindfully. To be aware of everything that makes us wonderfully, uniquely human, and to cater to the human experience throughout our work.

To do that, we’re going to split things into two big parts. Part 1 is all about understanding how humans work.

We’re going right down to the cognitive level, with things like attention, memory, and visual perception, but we’ll always be going back to the real world to see how those things play out.

We’ll start with attention and distraction, then vision and perception, learning and memory, expectation and surprise, and finally motivation and reward.

Every module in Part 1 will be quite theory heavy. But we’ll always wrap up with a practical lesson.

That might be an exercise to follow along with, or a deep dive into how we design around certain aspects of cognition.

After Part 1 you’ll have a much deeper understanding of the mind, and how to design for it.

Part 2 is all about bringing all this knowledge together and exploring how we can work differently to better cater to real humans.

We’re going to take a project from idea to a designed prototype, diving into each stage of the design process, from research through to final prototypes.

What’s cool about this, is that we’ve built the course out in a way that you can follow as loosely or as tightly as you want.

You can build out the exact same prototype as me, each step of the way.

Or you can pick that one dream project that you just never got down to starting and take it through to done.

Whatever you pick, you’ll be able to follow along with every stage of the project.

Think of Part 2 as a big ole coursework section. If Part 1 is the theory, Part 2 is the practical.

We put everything we’ve learned together, and come out the other side with a fully-designed prototype that we hopefully love.

If you’re brand new to design, you’ll learn exactly how a project can go from idea to prototype, with tonnes of key learnings along the way.

If you’re an experienced designer, you’ll learn how to tweak the stages of your existing process to better accommodate mindful design practices, with revamped versions of workshops and artefacts that you’re probably used to already.

Either way, there’s something here for everyone, no matter what stage you’re at in your pursuit of design, I’m pretty sure we’ve got you covered.

Provided you give a shit about the people you’re building for.

This has been a blast to put together, I can’t wait for you to see the course we’ve built, I hope you’re even half as excited as I am.

Before we jump in though, we’ve got some housekeeping to do. Hop on over to the next video to learn about the tools you’ll need for this course. Don’t worry, they’re either free, or shit you probably already have lying around.

See you there.