By Humans, For Humans

By Humans, For Humans

Now, more than ever, we need to consider the real, human impact of the work we do. This is a fundamental principle of Mindful Design.

In more precedented times this would not even feel like something I’d have to write. Unfortunately for us we do not live in precedented times, and the years-long psy-op that is Artificial Intelligence (derogative) is in full swing.

It’s easy to feel like there’s no alternative to AI tooling and AI-filled products these days. ‘AI is here to stay!’, ‘AI isn’t going away, so you need to learn to use it and live with it!’ we’re told, by the people most likely to profit if AI is indeed here to stay and does not go away.

There are alternatives, though. Over 8.3 billion as of 2026. Every human on this planet has a unique perspective, a unique lived experience, and a unique mind. Some of them are fucking horrendous and manage to make their way into either politics or Silicon Valley. A lot of them are also actual babies, so the number of actually useful alternatives is a little lower. But even then, a few billion is a big number. Bigger than the dollar amount of profit AI companies have made in the last decade, at least.

While the attempts to collectively gaslight the entire world into believing this technology is anything more than an elaborate pyramid scheme branded in warm orange and transitional serifs continue unabated, there is a world of opportunities away from the noise and clamour. The prevailing principle of Mindful Design is that regardless of modality, regardless of structure, and regardless of underlying systems, there is a human experience at the end of every decision we make. Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?

Professional design has rarely, if ever, purely been about positive human impact. We’ve seen it with the deluge of abhorrent behavioural design approaches that plagued the practice a decade ago. We’ve seen it with the frankly unserious notion of Design Thinking. And we’re seeing it now, where people are more concerned with building for the amorphous blob they call an ‘agent’ than they are with any kind of human experience.

There are a million different ways to make good things, and many of them are not as alien or as inviable as Big Tech would have you think. Contrary to the SaaS drivel of which we face a deluge, making nice things that people appreciate, that go away when they don’t need them, and that solve actual problems is indeed a worthy and oftentimes profitable pursuit.

Nothing About Us Without Us

We also find ourselves rapidly approaching a place where a non-zero number of technical, product and design decisions will be made without a single human in the loop. The utopia of AI-first corporation growth would see as many decisions, as much ethical oversight, and as many contradictory data points as possible eliminated from their purview. Create a closed box that ingests half-baked ideas and produces even-less-baked outputs at the other side. Ship it.

Single-founder, vibe-coded monstrosities already exist. And vast swathes of Technology People (derogative) are swarming to celebrate, validate and imitate the practices. These people are almost exclusively grifters and charlatans. Without AI they would be spending most of their days on a Side Hustle subreddit looking for another low-effort, ethically unsound way to extract as much capital from as little labour as they possibly could. They are unserious people who should be treated with appropriate amounts of disdain and irrelevance.

Bypassing human input leads to the erasure of humans from the systems that they are forced to interact with. This erasure is nothing new. Silicon Valley exists because of it. Venture Capital relies on it. And capitalism as a whole is built on top of it.

Embracing the Anti-AI Approach

At Mindful Design, we teach good design practices. We have an extensive video course, a big ole book, and I’ve open sourced pretty much my entire design process. My goal with all of that is to show that it’s all really not that hard. I genuinely believe that anyone can be a good designer. It takes effort and empathy and giving a fuck about people, but it’s not complex; it’s just full of intangibles that folks find intimidating at first.

We’re also building products on the side (more on that after hibernation) and working on short-form educational content, with the express goal of showing what’s possible when you put in the time, and give a fuck about other humans.

My commitment with everything under the Mindful Design umbrella is to be actively and vehemently anti-AI. This means being AI-free in how we build, write, design, and create as a whole. While the hypers jizzlob their way to agentic omniscience, we’ll be here, taking it slow, making mistakes, and showing that it’s humans who are actually here to stay. For as long as we have a climate that’s actually habitable at least.

It also means actively combating the bullshit and the hype...