Hello dear readers,

I’m a bit late in publishing this week’s Friday Gems so I’ll keep it short. Have you ever come across an article or a post that you needed in a specific moment in your life? The first gem this week, The Stability of Uncertainty, was that article for me.

When you’re world is swirling around and you feel like you’re in a whirlwind of emotions, it’s good to remind yourself that there is opportunity to be still and reconnect with yourself and show up with inner strength to make the most of each moment, whether good or bad.

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Mindfulness: The Stability of Uncertainty

2. The Mindful Designer: The Anatomy of an Exhibition

3. The Mindful Designer: Introducing UX Smells

4. Color: Mindfully curated color palettes

Mindfulness

The Stability of Uncertainty

When you have an attitude that resists change that wants things to always be the same, this attitude rubs against the natural processes of reality, creates a lot of friction and upset simply because we want and desire things to be one way (certain and fixed) when in reality they are fluid and changeable.

Change is a constant, we know that, but still when we are face to face with change our inclination is to resist it and push back on it. We want things to go our way otherwise we aren’t satisfied.

To ride the waves of change without them blowing us over we need to bend and be flexible so we ourselves don’t break.

Uncertainty, change, failing, feeling out of control, and nervous about what will happen are part of life and not only happening to us. Instead of pushing back we can learn to harness that energy to use it for our benefit.

We can find the good in the bad. The strength within the fear. The aliveness in the uncertainty to become like the seagulls above the whirlpool knowing we have weathered so many storms and will stay grounded through the next.

In the sky and above the whirlpool you live, confident in your ability to find what you need to survive, and able to enjoy what comes your way in the moment. You have made tension your friend, and so you feel free, relaxed, the sovereign of your world. You are connected to your natural intelligence and dignity.

Source: Toby Ouvry

The Mindful Designer

The Anatomy of an Exhibition

Awareness is the first step to change.

Looking at anything from the outside makes things seem like magic but once we spend a little time learning about how things function, the shared vocabulary, and the method to the madness we step into the realm of understanding and grow as a result.

In Anatomy of an Exhibition, takes us casually looking from the outside to inside her world of exhibition design to better understand…

the sheer volume of thought, time, work, and resources that go into putting a show together.

Exhibition designers, artists, and curators orchestrate a wide range of elements to create the wonderful symphony we experience when we visit a show.

Just look at everything that goes into the planning of a successful show. From the placement of the art, the flow of traffic inside, the color of the walls behind the art, temporary walls, the objects used to display the art which include pedestals, vitrines, platforms, the lighting. Then there are the people critical to the show which include the registrars, conservators, exhibition managers, construction team, fabricators exhibition designers, artists, and curators, phew!

Alya helps us appreciate all the work done behind the scenes by dedicated professionals who make it possible for us to enjoy an artist’s creation.

And to remind us

Nothing here happened by accident. Nothing here happened by magic. Every single detail was someone’s job.

Source: in

The Mindful Designer

UX Smells

Imagine you’re in a design review looking at a design being presented. As the designer walks you through the design you get a sense that something is off. The design fits the story requirements but still you can sniff an issue with the design.

Maybe there are too many modals, or too much reading for the user, too many form fields or maybe too many steps in a process.

Even though the solution being presented works in isolation you have this nagging sense that over time this would degrade the overall experience.

In the coding world there is a term for similar situations when something just feels off in the code, it’s called a code smell. Code smells aren’t wrong in and of themselves, they only hint at something being wrong. Ideally the code smell would be fixed before the code is reviewed, tested, and put in production, saving time, effort, and rework.

Perhaps we can apply the coding smell metaphor to the UX process?

We could call it a UX smell to indicate something is off in the design and define a UX smell as a design solution that appears to solve a problem but ends up undermining the user’s task.

I’ll explore the idea of a UX smell, it’s boundaries, what it is and isn’t, what sets it apart from similar concepts some more in an upcoming post but I wanted to share the early concept with you to see what you think about it.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Color

Mindfully curated color palettes

Color makes me happy. It’s soothing to the soul and scrolling through this collection of curated color combinations is a joyful and heartwarming experience.

Check it out.😍

Source: MyMind

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”

― Scott Turow

A few years ago I was asked to apply for a job at a tech company I admired. My confidence in my abilities was at a low point and I didn’t think I could get the job so I talked myself out of applying.

When I think back to that opportunity, I realize I was stuck in a story for a long time, of my own making, and should have just gone for it. It’s easy for me to say that now but at that time I am sure I was deep into that story about not being “qualified enough” that I couldn’t step back to see the opportunity clearly or objectively.

We don’t see reality.

We see our own specific version of it.

We miss a goal, feel tense, and think to ourselves, “I’m not good enough”. Done multiple times, our minds turn that feeling and thought into a belief which becomes a lens we experience life through. The belief feels real because we feel it in our body along with the thought.

The doubt we carry ends up talking ourselves out of opportunities that could be great for us.

In the example, the layers I was seeing reality through were:
Past failure made me feel tense and think negatively which repeated often enough became a belief and ends up in me avoiding the opportunity because I didn’t feel confident in myself.

Cutting through that layers of doubt to see clearly

The first step is to catch the layer you’re seeing through the moment your mind moves from what happened to what you think it means.

In my example, I probably didn’t pursue the opportunity because of something that happened before but the layer, the meaning, I added on was “I’m not good enough.”. At that very moment that I had the thought, I needed to pause. By catching the thought and any feelings associated with it, we can create some space between ourselves and the belief. We can see the belief for what it is, an automatic response, or signal to examine the situation objectively.

The next step is making space.

In my example, I could have explored this thought through writing or even sketching it out. By externalizing the thought I could have looked at my skills and the job requirements to see how well they matched up. I would have realized that I did in fact qualify and that the thought I had was not real.

Once we see the belief from a distance, we can examine it, question it, and choose a response that aligns with how we want to show up.

We can choose to look at what happened without the pull of our emotions. We can use the information we learn and take positive steps to do something about the situation instead of getting lost in an unhelpful story of our own making to be able to see things clearly and how we respond.

It’s much easier to look back and think I could have looked past the story I was telling myself but as you know once you’re deep in a story, it’s hard to see any alternatives.

This isn’t an easy process by any means and we will fall into the stories a few times along the way but each time we practice catching the stories our minds create by making space to look at situations objectively we will develop our muscles to begin cutting through the layers of meaning we add on to what is actually happening.

So the next time you’re facing an opportunity, don’t push it away or negate it automatically. Take a step back to make some space where you can think through it, examine it objectively, and then choose the step you want to take with thoughtfulness and intention.

May curiosity be your guide.

Rizwan

As we move throughout the day from one task to the next, it’s good to slow down to observe the what that is right in front of us, to notice the vivid details and the wonder in the ordinary moments.

Ordinary everyday moments. They pass us by with a blink of an eye.

A couple sitting in the background. A red bike with its front wheel turned left. The walking stick on the green bench. These details bring the moment alive but we can easily overlook them.

We glance, we categorize, assuming we know it already, and then we move on.

By being present and noticing we can show up in each moment with intentionality, curiosity, and creativity to pay attention to what we hear, see, feel, and make sense of the world around us.

This exercise is an invitation to practice something different, to notice the details

Instructions:

1. First Look (10 seconds)
   Glance at the image. Write down everything that comes to mind immediately. Don’t filter.

2. Slow Look (10 minutes)
   Now really look. Go edge to edge, corner to corner, top to bottom, front to back.

   
   Reflect on these questions:

   1. What else is here?

   2. What details live outside the obvious?

   3. What did you assume was in this image that you never actually verified?

Now think about your last meeting or design review. What were you so sure you already understood that you stopped listening?

What details did someone offer that you filed away as not important and moved past?

Train yourself to see beyond the obvious to notice everything else.

Every time we practice slowing down in this practice, we build the muscle for slowing down for a moment of noticing out there, when needed.

May curiosity be your guide. ✊🏽

Rizwan

Artwork
Title: From Scenes Unseen: From the Summer of ‘78
Date: 1978
Artist: D. Gorton
Medium: Photograph
Source: The New York Times

Hello dear readers,

There is a lot of news about bad things happening to humans by humans every day which can easily bring us down. But there is also goodness around us that lifts our spirits up even in the darkest moments.

If we step back and look at our lives, the people around us, the beauty of the flowers, the grass, the birds chirping, which helps us realize, every day is a good day.

How?

We are alive to experience it.

When we bring our attention to our breath and the the moment we are in we can actually take action. We can change our lives and the lives of others for the better. We can appreciate this one life we have and the new day in front of us and remember that every day is a good day.

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Mindfulness: 9 Things to Write in a Pocket Notebook Every Day

2. The Mindful Designer: Prompting for a Human Designer

3. Listening: What You’re Listening For (And What You Might Be Missing)

4. Mindfulness: A Mantra For Anxiety

Mindfulness

9 Things to Write in a Pocket Notebook Every Day

How can we be more present, aware, and intentional in our day instead of rushing from one task to the next?

By noticing and writing daily in a pocket notebook.

I love this idea by from Myth and Meaning because it helps us notice those things that add meaning to our lives and which we often overlook.

Mark presents a list of things he adds to his notebook such as the weather, sunrise/sunset time, gratitude list, among other things that are important for him and good starting points for anyone. You could also use your own list of things to track and be more aware of throughout the day such as:

• one thing that caught your eye

• what you ate for breakfast

• a highlight of your day

As you start writing daily you will inevitably come up with more ideas to bring more mindfulness into your day.

Source: in Myth and Meaning

The Mindful Designer

Prompting for a Human Designer

We don’t need quick polished answers by the AI tools, we need designers who will use their judgement, expertise, craft, and skill to question the answers AI provides.

Defending our design decisions because we have more information, more context, and a more human understanding of the problem we are designing for.

Listening

What You’re Listening For (And What You Might Be Missing)

We can notice our filters, experiment with new choices, and adapt our listening to what the moment requires.

Listening isn’t a fixed trait. Like creativity, it’s a skill we can develop and grow. But the first step is to become aware of how we listen.

It turns out that we fall into habits for how we listen, what we pay attention to and what we leave out.

When we have disagreements we’re usually listening for different things, our listening habits are different so we miss what is important for each other which causes breakdowns in communication.

Here is an example of the different types of listeners:

For example, imagine a teammate says, “I’m worried we’re moving too fast. Some people in the group looked uncomfortable, and I don’t think our plan will land the way we want it to.”

A connective listener may pick up first on the relational signal—people looked uncomfortable—and think, Who needs follow-up? What would help people feel safer or more seen?

A conceptual listener may go to possibilities: What’s another way to structure this so it invites more buy-in?

A reflective listener may quietly compare it to past experience and try to make meaning: I’ve seen this dynamic before—what helped then?

And an analytical listener may want clarity and evidence: What exactly tells us we’re moving too fast? What information do we have?

There are no right or wrong listening styles instead think of these as entrypoints into the conversation.

We don’t need to be set in our ways of listening, we can experiment and change things up so we can make the most of our moments together.

When people take time to truly listen, they’re far more likely to act in ways that restore dignity, reduce harm, and strengthen trust.”

Source: Juliana Tafur in The Greater Good

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

As we move throughout the day from one task to the next, it’s good to slow down to observe the what that is right in front of us, to notice the vivid details and the wonder in the ordinary moments.

There are three boats in this painting. People in them. And Mount Fuji is hiding in plain sight.

I’ve seen this image a hundred times but never noticed those details until I stopped and paused to look slowly at the details. I was moving past the image too fast assuming a wave was all there was to it.

The wave registers but everything else disappears.

That’s not just how we see art.

That’s how we move through our days, our meetings, our design reviews.

We glance, we categorize, assuming we know it already, and then we move on.

By being present and noticing we can show up in each moment with intentionality, curiosity, and creativity to pay attention to what we hear, see, feel, and make sense of the world around us.

This exercise is an invitation to practice something different, to notice the details

Instructions:

1. First Look (10 seconds)
   Glance at the image. Write down everything that comes to mind immediately. Don’t filter.

2. Slow Look (10 minutes)
   Now really look. Go edge to edge, corner to corner, top to bottom, front to back.

   
   Reflect on these questions:

   1. What else is here?

   2. What details live outside the obvious?

   3. What did you assume was in this image that you never actually verified?

Now think about your last meeting or design review. What were you so sure you already understood that you stopped listening?

What details did someone offer that you filed away as not important and moved past?

Train yourself to see beyond the obvious to notice everything else.

Every time we practice slowing down in this practice, we build the muscle for slowing down for a moment of noticing out there, when needed. ✊🏽

May curiosity be your guide.

Rizwan

Artwork
Title: Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
Date: 1831
Artist: Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)
Medium: Woodblock print; ink and color on paper
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Just this week I sent an email to my client to share some designs and to get their feedback.

The very next morning, my anxiety kicked in.

I woke up way too early and my mind started playing catastrophic scenarios of them not liking what I shared.

I imagined they would send back a harshly worded email demanding that I redo everything.

Sounds a bit over the top right? That’s my brain on anxiety.

It may be trying to keep me safe but all it’s bringing me is apprehension, worry, and stress, nothing helpful.

There are effective ways to keep our worrying minds from taking over that help in the moment such as meditation to create space between our thoughts and reactions, mindfulness techniques to ground ourselves in the moment, breathing exercises to slow our heart rate and signal safety to our brain.

For me quotes by philosophy, Zen, Budhism, Stoicism, and spiritual teachers are also helpful reminders in the moment I am deep in the anxious episode, which is why when I read the quote below by philosopher Alan Watts, his words pierced through the layers of worrying my mind puts me through and helped me see what was going on.

The quote by Alan Watts is:

“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

This is one of those reminders that gets to the core of our experience and cuts through the layers of meaning we add to reality. It is definitely one that I struggle with as I let anxiety about something that is going to happen stress me out. I’m keeping this quote as reminder and printing it out so I can see it right in front of me on my office wall.

My own experience has been that all the anxiety I go through ends up being for nothing because the event that I had been stressting out about wasn’t as bad as my mind made it out to be. It came and and it passed without the world ending or something catastrophic happening. I feel a sense of relief for a few moments and my mind latches on to something else to become anxious about.

The cycle continues.

Until now.

This quote is a good reminder that we can stop the constant anxiety because it will not matter in the end. No matter how much we stress out, no matter how much we worry, no matter how much time we spend thinking about the event, the calories we spend overthinking about the event will not affect the outcome at all.

So the next time find yourself worrying about an outcome, pause and remind yourself “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

Let those words cut through the story playing in your mind so you can get back to reality and be your best so you can do your good work.

May curiosity be your guide!

Rizwan ✌🏽

Hello dear readers,

How can something that is ephemeral, has no physical weight, and can’t be seen have so much power over us? Our thoughts have the power to lift us up or keep us locked into a small box. This week I explored this phenomena in What Gives a Thought Its Power?

By better understanding the process of how a thought develops within us we can manage it more effectively. We can create space

between the thought and our reaction

between the thought and our identification with it

between the thought and mistaking it for reality

Awareness is the first step to true freedom.

May curiosity be your guide!

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Life: Tiny Experiments vs Setting Goals

2. Resistance: A Manifesto for Monstrous Times

3. Mindfulness: The Mirror

4. Brain: What gives a thought its power?

Life

Tiny Experiments vs Setting Goals

Usually, when we modern humans want to experience change in our lives, we set goals. Goals can work really well in many life circumstances, but in a developmental process like matrescence [becoming a mother], goals are pretty useless. In a developmental process, you are, by definition, growing and changing at the very marrow of who you are. The self that creates a goal will not even be the same self that reaches it, thereby likely rending the goal itself irrelevant.

Life is anything but predictable so why commit to something big that doesn’t fit our reality. Instead of creating big audacious goals, why not create tiny experiments to help guide us through life? I guess we could still have goals as an overarching theme but it’s the details that matter. The day to day test and learn, the exploration of what we like and don’t like, what fits and what doesn’t fit how we want to live that makes tiny experiments less burdensome and confining.

Tiny Experiments are the opposite of broad, sweeping changes, the opposite of On Monday Things Will Be Different, the opposite of a pill that fixes everything. Tiny Experiments are just that: little incremental changes and explorations that might inch you closer to the shift you’re trying to make.

The last line is key, “little incremental changes and explorations that might inch you closer to the shift you’re trying to make.” Making tiny incremental changes feels right. Taking small steps forward, sideways, or even backwards feels less intimidating than big leaps that can take time to recover from.

Perhaps you can hold your goals loosely while you try tiny experiments along the way to make sure that goal you set when weeks, months, or years ago is in fact what you want since you will not be the same person as the one who set the goal in the first place.

Here’s to living in the present with tiny experiments.

Source: Harma-Mae Bott Smit

Resistance

A Manifesto for Monstrous Times

We are in monstrous times. Chaos is being used as a tool to undermine and dismantle everything that brings us together.

But we are not powerless.

We are powerful!

We will resist!

We will overcome!

Sharon Frances’ zine is a good reminder of our collective and individual power we must work hard to keep. Inspired by Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny, Sharon has created this handy zine you can print out, fold, and share with everyone so we can work together and protect ourselves during these monstrous times. ✊🏽

A Manifesto For Monstrous Times

1.23MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Source: Sharon Frances

Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Rules on Tyranny

1. Do not obey in advance

2. Defend institutions

3. Beware the one-party state

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world

5. Remember professional ethics

6. Be wary of paramilitaries

7. Be reflective if you must be armed

8. Stand out

9. Be kind to our language

10. Believe in truth

11. Investigate

12. Make eye contact and small talk

13. Practice corporeal politics

14. Establish a private life

15. Contribute to good causes

16. Learn from peers in other countries

17. Listen for dangerous words

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives

19. Be a patriot

20. Be as courageous as you can

Mindfulness

The Mirror

If our circle of friends see us as the clown of the group, or we imagine they do, then we may double down on that aspect of our personality. To cement our position within our community (survival instinct) or receive validation, we crack more jokes. We become The Clown.

As interconnected beings our personality emerges through the interaction we have with the groups we are a part of. We validate ourselves by how others see us, creating either a positive or negative feedback loop that can lift us up or hold us down.

The persona we create helps may help us survive by being a part of a larger group but what if we stepped away from it to understand who we are without it.

Who are we without the mirror of other people’s expectations and assumptions about us?

What is our identity in a vacuum, when no one is around to witness it? Who are we when no one’s watching?

How can we grow and become who we are meant to be?

We can shut the door to the outside world to make space for our own voice, our own light to shine the path forward. We could try tiny experiments and learn from them without announcing them to the world. We can find out what we want without the weight of other people’s expectations.

Who are you without the mirror? Who could you become?

It’s time we learned more about ourselves to find the gems hidden within.

Source: Mind Palace

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

I can’t do it!

It’s a common thought we all have at some point in time. The weight of those words can keep us from moving forward even if we know it is better for us.

How can a simple thought hold us back?

Our thoughts can influence us more than we realize.

Thoughts can lift us up or keep us down effectively controling how we feel about ourselves, how we interact with others, and how we show up in the world.

That’s strange when you think about it because a thought doesn’t have a physical form yet it can stop you in your tracks.

A thought can’t hold you down physically but it can become a seemingly solid barrier for you in moving forward.

So what is a thought?

At the most basic, biological level, a thought is a pattern of electrical and chemical activity in our brains caused by networks of neurons firing off together.

But, how can a thought have so much power over us?

If we zoom out a level, once we have a thought, our brains turn that mental activity into both chemical and physical reactions.

When the brain interprets a thought as meaningful, it triggers chemical signals like dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, or adrenaline. These shift the state of the body. The body then feeds that state back to the brain as a feeling.

In other words, a thought doesn’t just stay in the mind. It becomes something you feel in your body, biologically shaping your hormones, heart rythym, and muscles.

And once you feel it, it starts to feel true, it physically feels real.

At that critical moment we can either believe the thought as a fact and let it decide what we do or we can create distance from it and see the thought for what it is, an electrical event that has no objective truth and not confuse it with reality.

By understanding what a thought is at a biological level, we can remove the mystery behind the process which helps to loosen its grip on us, we stop listening and following them blindly, and most importantly we stop mistaking our thoughts for reality.

The next time you thing, “I can’t do it!”, pause to make space between your thought and the action you take and ask yourself, is this a fact or just a thought feels true?

May curiosity be your guide!

Till next time,

Rizwan ✌🏽

Hello dear readers,

Another week of AI everywhere all the time and the daily chaos brought on by the current US regime. It’s enough to take what was low level anxiety about our future and push it into our faces.

This seems to be the norm and the speed at which we are moving and consuming can dial our anxieties up to max.

But there is one tool we can use to fight back, our intentionality.

We can choose what we give our attention to. Instead of being swept away by it all we can be intentional in what we work on, how we work, what we consume, and how we use the information coming at us in a thoughtful and mindful way.

Never forget, we hold the power!

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Work: Is anyone taking lunch breaks anymore?

2. The Mindful Designer: The AI Vampire

3. Mindfulness: 38 ways to create more than you consume, while you consume

Work

Is anyone taking lunch breaks anymore?

Humans have been hungry and time-strapped for as long as we’ve existed. So why haven’t we sanctified the concept of a lunch break like folks in Europe, Latin and South America, or China?

Will the real lunch-skipper please stand up?

Ok, I admit I’m one of those who doesn’t take lunch. I work from home and can’t even remember when the last time I took an hour lunch. Usually I’m eating smaller snacks during the day so I take a quick meal around 12. From the surveys mentioned in this article, it looks like I’m in good company.

Remote work allows us to complete various at-home tasks in our life with greater ease and flexibility (laundry, quick appointments, caring for pets), but it has damaged the dignity of the lunch hour.

This is a good reminder to take the break we need during the day instead of plowing through and not taking care of ourselves first.

57 percent of participants also said they focus better on complex tasks after even a 30-minute lunch break.

Our minds need the break from the screen and the desk to get up, move around, and enjoy a precious moment we have every right to enjoy.

That does it! My goal for today is to take a 30 minute lunch break and not feel guilty about it. ✊🏽

If you work from home, do you take a break for lunch or has it disappeared for you as well? Let me know in the comments!

Source: Eater

The Mindful Designer

The AI Vampire

With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.

In the Eater story above, the author mentioned the “curse of competence”, which is when even more work is piled onto those who demonstrate efficiency. That sums up the challenge with the efficiency gains form AI.

AI may make us efficient but at what cost? Burnout, confusion, stress, not to mention being out of a job because who actually gets to keep our efficiency gains?

Hint: It’s not you or me.

Companies are capitalistic extraction machines and literally don’t know how to ease up.

The AI train is barreling through our workday, steamrolling over anything and everything in its way but we are not helpless.

We can control how we act and react.

We can step back to take care of ourselves first and foremost.

Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.

Source: Medium

Mindfulness

38 ways to create more than you consume, while you consume

the average person processes around 74GB of information a day; that’s comparable to watching 16 movies daily.

That is a lot of information that we are exposed to. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed it is estimated that we spend almost 7 hours of our day consuming. But how much of it do we actually retain?

I love this post by artist, , in her newsletter , where she provides a practical guide to slowing down our media consumption. To become more intentional with what we let in to our minds, to notice more, to think more, to consider more.

The mantra Tuğba shares is:

Create more than you consume while you consume.

While all of the ideas Tuğba shares are great, I want to focus on a single action I can start with and this is the one that I will work on next:

Active album listening. I will not feel guilty of breaking out of a playlist to learn about an artist and listen to their whole album, so I can remember what I consume and appreciate the creative acts.

Source: As Slow As Possible

Drunken noodles are so-called not because the recipe has alcohol, but because they’re so hot you’ll get drunk chugging beer trying to soothe the burn!

From the recipe comments for Drunken Noodles 🍜

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Hello dear readers,

I recently looked back at the art I have created (I highly recommend you do it too) and I noticed a pattern. I’ve been drawing a shape that is amorphous, flexible, ever changing, and adapting to its environment. As I recently shared one of the illustrations on Substack I wanted to do more than just post it and walk away, I wanted to use the artwork as a way to develop my writing and storytelling skills.

I have talked about how what we do one thing can be applied across other parts of our lives. So improving my storytelling skills through this series will help me present designs to stakeholders and even in conversations at home with my family.

How we do one thing is how we do everything.

👋🏽 Introducing Morf

Today I present to you Morf, a character I created that embodies everything Low Fidelity is about.

Morf is what a curious, growing, adapting mind looks like if you gave it a body.

Morf is an amorphous, shapeshifting otherworldly being drawn here by our little blue planet’s impermanence, color, chaos, and beauty.

Morf explores the places, people, objects, and moments in this world and communicates through shape, color, and transparency.

I invite you to follow Morf’s sightings on Substack and in this newsletter. Better yet, have a favorite place you want Morf to visit, suggest it in the comments!

Let’s go on a journey together with Morf and see where our curiosity leads!

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Visual Thinking: A Better Way To Learn In Organizations: Visual Thinking Strategies

2. The Mindful Designer: How to operate as a Staff Product Designer

3. Clown Show: Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz

Visual Thinking

A Better Way To Learn In Organizations: Visual Thinking Strategies

Our minds don’t seem very willing to digest regurgitated expertise no matter how profound, wise or clever it is.

How can we make information we are given or consume really stick? Think back to a presentation or a handout you were given.

How much of the information shared do you remember versus a moment when you were in a conversation with others about a topic?

Chances are the times you engaged in a discussion and actively sought answers to what you saw visually, you remembered more and it made a bigger impact on your thinking.

This is where the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) approach helps us get off the sidelines and into the conversation so we can be intentional with the information we come across and take more of it in. VTS provides us with tools for shared inquiry and to spark our curiosity for deeper thinking and engaging with others to build our perspective-taking skills.

The approach is simple. Look at an image, a piece of art, a design, anything presented to you visually together with a group of peers.

In VTS, teachers ask three consecutive questions:

1. What is going on here (in this picture)?

2. What do you see that makes you say that?

3. What more can we find?

The teacher/facilitator then does prompts the conversation:

• They repeat what participants answer in response to the questions, but using their own words. This allows teachers to acknowledge what was said and to anchor responses into whatever model is important (e.g. art history, natural sciences, etc);

• They create a space where everyone has the opportunity and safety to respond

• They use open-ended questions to encourage deep thinking

While this approach uses art as the medium for the explorations the principles learned can be applied across all parts of life to engage with what we see at a deeper level, which helps us retain more information and is a more rewarding experience because we are changed as a result instead of passively consuming information.

🔗 Medium

The Mindful Designer

How to operate as a Staff Product Designer

Becoming a staff designer isn’t a switch that gets turned on after a certain amount of years as a senior designer, the title is earned by the intentional actions you take. If we move past the title we can see how we need to be thinking not just within our small area, we need to zoom out to see the product as a whole to help with the overall direction.

In practice, it’s about thinking in systems and bringing clarity to the future of your product area.

You don’t need permission to operate at the next level. You own your career trajectory and the confidence that comes from taking action and doing what you think is right is priceless.

Focus on your craft, your curiosity, your collaboration, your listening skills, and your visual thinking to elevate yourself to where you want to go next.

🔗 Verified Designer

Also…

Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz

Does it feel like every single news story, every article, every think piece, every bit of media content revolves around your leader, almost as if, no matter how hard the country tries to talk about literally anything else, he seems to keep finding ways to pop back into the spotlight and suck all of the oxygen out of the room, to the point where it feels like you’ve spent every waking moment of every day for the past ten years hearing about every single stupid and/or evil thing this guy’s done, and you’re just so fucking exhausted?

Each day there is some news about how the current US regime is chipping away at our democratic foundations. Some days it’s not even hiding about its agenda by taking a sledgehammer to the institutions that have been built for safety, support, freedom, and our basic human rights.

This fascist regime likes to point the finger at other nations to distract from the chaos they are inflicting.

If the answer to most or all of these questions is yes, it may be time for a massive nonviolent resistance movement.

Does Your Country Need Regime Change? My answer is a HELL YES! ✊🏽

🔗 McSweeney’s

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Hello dear readers,

We are complex beings living in a complex world with other complex beings and within complex systems. So imagine how much more complexity arises because of our interconnectedness, our constant evolution, and our emergence as we interact with each other and the beings all around us. This complexity brings challenges, volatility, uncertainty, but it also brings amazing opportunities for us to connect with each other and the world in new and creative ways that unlock infinite potentials.

Together we can navigate uncertainty, find meaning, and flourish not in spite but exactly because of the complexity that defines us.

Today's Gems

1. Systems Thinking: Complexity Blindness

2. The Mindful Designer: The Aura of Care

3. The Mindful Designer: Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions

4. Spotify Playlist: Tom Morello’s Fuck Ice playlist

Systems Thinking

Complexity Blindness

Why do we remain stuck, unable to effectively address the world’s most challenging problems? Why do capitalist and conservative paradigms persist despite intensifying threats like climate change, systemic inequality and other deeply rooted issues? Why do so many people turn to conspiracy-driven ideas to make sense of the world, and why is there such widespread faith in technology’s power to solve our most pressing challenges? While these questions seem disconnected, they are actually deeply interwoven, revealing a fundamental shortfall in our conventional ways of understanding and responding to the world.

The world we live in is complex. The people we interact with are complex. We ourselves are complex. When we put all of this together we end up dealing with a lot of complex issues yet we approach issues we think in simplistic terms,

A leads to B.

This is causing that.

We think we are dealing with isolated individual parts that can be controlled and we can predict interactions.

But we don’t live in a simple world.

We live in a complex, deeply interwoven, interconnected, dependent, and emergent world.

Our education and socialization have primed us to break down problems into isolated parts, relying on simple cause-and-effect relations and assuming control and predictability—qualities often absent in complex systems. Yet we live in a world of deep interconnections, feedback loops, nonlinear dynamics, emergent phenomena and nested systems working at multiple scales.

How can designers overcome complexity blindness?

Seven helpful practices are recommended:

1. Create networks of collaboration

2. Refine their work through real-world feedback

3. Draw ideas from different contexts to spark innovation

4. Work to balance various impacts on stakeholders to prevent favoring one group excessively

5. Create mutually supportive connections between system elements

6. Guide stakeholders through complexity by illuminating intricate connections

7. Foster gradual change, recognizing meaningful transformation often requires patience.

We are deeply woven into the fabric of life, inseparable from the flow of complex planetary ecosystems. Embracing our own complexity and interconnectedness, we can engage in a deeper, more genuine relationship with the intricate world we inhabit.

As designers we need to be comfortable with complexity and harness tools and techniques that enable us to work and lead through uncertainty and the complex nature of the systems we are a part of.

🔗 Whispers & Giants / Complexity Blindness

The Mindful Designer

The Aura of Care

If we look at industry-wide examples we can see how intrinsic care replaced with business incentives leads to low quality black-and-white photocopies of the original ideas. Everything becomes optimised to meet business requirements and any surviving sense of care that remains is there by chance.

Each day there is news about a company finally owning up and doing things right for its customers. However they conveniently overlooked any dark patterns and shady practices on their way from 0 to 1. This article highlights this pattern that is all too familiar with tech companies.

UX ignores questionable usefulness and the bright aura of care distracts from real questions of ethics and harm.

The “Aura of Care” is the idea of companies gaining false legitimacy through UX. It’s about absolving a company of practicing dark patterns and ignoring the voices that called for better experiences to help it’s customers instead of misleading them for corporate profits only after they are caught and have bad publicity.

Basically, seeking forgiveness from the public after the fact, after the damage has been done and after being caught red handed. Renewing focus on a better UX helps legitimise products that are intrinsically bad for people who use them.

UX needs to make clear distinctions between commercial design work and design as a social good so the aura of care is not just an aura. Until that happens we’ll continue to see the worst companies hire the best people to help them make the worst things.

🔗 THE AURA OF CARE

The Mindful Designer

Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions

As the speed of work gets faster each day and we deal with more complexity there is a tool that can help us make better decisions and solve problems more efficiently, that is taking the perspective of others. This stance helps us get out of our own heads, assumptions, and biases to see how others view the same situation or problem, which I learned from this article is also supported by neuroscience.

Importantly, perspective taking may improve business outcomes not only by giving us access to more information than we would have without it, but also by ramping up activity in core brain regions involved in creative problem-solving and innovation.

Turns out that perspective taking activates the same core parts of the brain that are used for creative problem solving. So taking other people’s perspective helps us open up to new possibilities and ignite our own creativity.

As designers it is important for us to be comfortable with understanding other points of views so we can collaborate across teams to solve the complex challenges we face.

Want to strengthen your perspective taking muscles? Try the exercises listed in this Wharton @ Work Nano Tools For Leaders: REAL BRAIN TRAINING: FIVE MINUTES TO BETTER DECISIONS

🔗 Knowledge at Wharton

Also…

Here’s a playlist by Tom Morello, from Rage Against the Machine. “A rocking little soundtrack to enjoy while you drive those bastards out of your neighborhood!”

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Hello dear readers,

I hope your week went well. This week I started a new project at work where I shifted from designOps to product design. It’s interesting to think broadly about how teams use design tools and how to improve the employee experience and how teams collaborate to then dig into the details of designing features and using Figma Make in the process.

So today, I share a few gems that touch on the topic of learning by doing and what we lose when using AI in the process, which is the tacit knowledge we gain by making things ourselves, instead of AI doing the work for us.

Peace ✌🏽

Today's Gems

1. Product Design: Designing Selection Colors

2. The Mindful Designer: Maker’s Knowledge

3. Visual Thinking: Design is political

Product Design

Designing Selection Colors

I stumbled upon this post, a collection of tweets, by Marcin Wichary, who I just learned designed the Selection Colors feature in Figma. This feature alone has saved me countless hours working with color. Reading through the tweets, it’s interesting to learn just what it takes to get a feature that on the surface seems simple, but the tweets show just how complicated the process was. Reading through the decisions that needed to be made, the feedback, the iterations, the development challenges, you realize how much effort each part of an app actually takes to bring to life.

I have a newfound respect for designers who are able to deliver experiences that help even against great odds.

🔗 Designing Selection Colors

The Mindful Designer

Maker’s Knowledge

The AI tools I use may help me get results quickly, make my work seemingly efficient, help me begrugingly skip over critical parts of the design process, what I lose in the process is the tacit knowledge that I gain from the active, hands on learning that comes from thinking, making, sketching, comminicating, iterating and going through the ups and downs of the process building my knowledge one step at a time.

In a client meeting this week I heard someone speak to this exact idea that we lose the understanding and knowledge of what we are working on because we end up with the results ready to be used.

We get to know things not by reading or hearing about them, not by observing and studying them, but by creating or recreating them with our own hands. At first, his strikingly simple claim, often also referred to as Verum Factum, sounds like nothing new. It seems common sense. And, indeed, in its most basic form, it is generally accepted: theory is nothing without practice. Experience trumps mere words.

🔗 Maker’s Knowledge

Visual Thinking

Design is political

Visual thinking is a powerful tool for conveying ideas.

The above illustration is an example from Italian Radical Design, a movement that sought to use design for social critique.

Designed by Enzo Mari, an Italian designer, who collaborated with Francesco Leonetti, a poet, to distill dense Marxist and Leninist political theory into a visual to make the idea accessible and digestible.

The red line represents the revolutionary path for the working class and how it can bypass existing structures to seize more power. The purple line shows a reformist approach to capitalist hierarchy.

Design is political.

This illustration is a good example of how we can use visual communication to share ideas and make them easy to understand.

Also…

Within the final and true world image, everything is related to everything, and nothing can be discarded a priori as being unimportant.

– Fritz Zwingy 1969

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Good morning dear readers,

I’m returning after a long hiatus. I hope all is well with you considering the global turmoil. Yes, America is burning, our government is a clown show, hate, bigotry, fascism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, is on the rise, wars are being forced upon us, and the only thing that seems to matter are the gas prices, not the devastation to precious human lives no matter their skin color. Despite the bleak outlook, we move forward and pick up the strength to come together and help each other through these challenging times. ✊🏽

Today's Gems

1. Visual Thinking: The Building Blocks of Deep Thinking

2. The Mindful Designer: What is Systems Oriented Design: An Animation

3. Communication: Writing is Design

Visual Thinking

The Building Blocks of Deep Thinking

“True human genius lies in the way we are able to take facts and concepts out of our heads, using physical space to spread out that material, to structure it, and to see it anew.” - Annie Murphy Paul

Visual thinking is about getting ideas out of your head and onto an external surface, like paper or a digital whiteboard. In this video Doug Neill from Verbal to Visual shares a simple tool to help you wrangle complexity and remember the important information.

You may have experienced this yourself when reading a book with lots of great information that you wanted to remember but there is just too much information and yes you can take notes but sometimes those get lost in the shuffle and you forget the information you wanted to remember.

The solution?

Create a visual reference of the information on a 3x5 or 4x6 card to help you remember it so you can use it in your own creative work.

I used four-by-six index cards to identify the key topics and capture some of those details with sketches and words and page references.

I think you’ll benefit both from the modularity of these tools (how you can move them around) and also the disposability of them. If you don’t like how one index card or sticky note turns out, you can recycle it and then quickly grab another one. Each of those individual chunks is a much lighter lift than trying to capture, all in one go, everything about the topic you’re working on.

This is a great way to quickly capture and remember the important pieces of information you come across in your day, whether it’s a process, a meeting, a video, a book, or any other complex topic you’re trying to make sense of.

🔗 The Building Blocks of Deep Thinking

The Mindful Designer

What is Systems Oriented Design: An Animation

Continuing the thread of visual thinking, the video above does an amazing job of helping you quickly understand what System Oriented Design is.

After watching the video, you just get it. No long explanations that dive into too much detail, that’s the power of visual thinking and visual communication.

Systems Oriented Design helps us examine complex issues through different lenses, from interconnected problems to known unknowns, to understanding which groups of people are having problems and which people can help. Mapping all this complexity helps identify the root causes so you can implement solutions that address the root problems.

🔗 Systems Oriented Design

Communication

Writing is Design

Design is writing, and writing is design. Writing is critical for conveying our ideas and designs. It helps us gather and organize our thoughts so we can communicate clearly and succinctly. The better our writing is, the more effectively we can communicate with our team members to convey the importance of what we design.

In this article PJ Onori, shares principles that illustrate how good writing and good design are the same.

Designers devote endless hours to make their solutions more elegant. They understand the importance of detail. They cherish clarity and simplicity. The same isn’t often said about their craftsmanship of words.

🔗 Writing is Design

The Homework Machine

by Shel Silverstein

The Homework Machine,
Oh, the Homework Machine,
Most perfect
contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’
Three?
Oh me . . .
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

You’re right, it has been a while since I published a Friday Gems post. I fell off the track, and I’m just now getting back to my writing, which feels really good.

Life has a way of showing us what we need to work on, and for me, it seems like beginning again is the lesson I must learn. I need to be comfortable starting again when life gets in the way.

Just because we stop doing what we love for a period of time doesn’t mean anything other than life got in the way.

We need to become great at beginning again. To get back to what we love, once we are distracted, without judgment.

Let’s become great at starting again! ✊🏽

Today's Gems

1. Personal Growth: The Scam called “You don’t have to remember anything”

2. The Mindful Designer

   1. America by Design Fail

   2. Disaster Artist: How To Survive When A Project Gets Ugly

3. Wisdom: Do small things with great love

Knowledge

The Scam called “You don’t have to remember anything”

That grinding, repetitive friction built something no language model can download into you: muscle memory for excellence.

This is the resistance training nobody talks about anymore. The more the world automates, the more value accrues to people who continue to condition their fundamental capabilities.

Admittedly, I have been using AI a lot more than I thought I would, both at work and in my personal life. AI is everywhere but as Paul reminds us, putting in the effort to go slow, to embrace the friction in our lives, to do the hard things that build up our muscle memory is what keeps us grounded and human.

Let’s continue to develop our fundamental capabilities to create originally, think creatively, and read deeply, so we use AI as a thought partner instead of a copy-and-paste resource to take the easy way out.

🔗 The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”

The Mindful Designer

America by Design Fail

How did you manage to fail so epically at making the most basic website?

I may be late to the game on this. I don’t follow the disastrous news coming out of the White House every day but when I found out that 18F had been disbanded and a new agency had been propped up by the current regime, I felt sadness and anger.

18F had some of the best and brightest designers on the team with an impossibly large job in guiding government agencies to build, buy, and share technology products. 18F developed the US Web Design System, which helped build accessible and mobile-friendly government websites. 18F had been doing a great job as the US government’s digital agency.

Now we have this! 🤦🏽‍♂️

As designer Christopher Butler put it, “President Trump’s appointment of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as ‘Chief Design Officer’ of the United States is a sickening travesty. It not only proves a fundamental misunderstanding of both design and governance, but an unbound commitment to corruption.”

As with everything this President does, it will turn out a disaster and the American public will be left to pick up the pieces.

🔗 America by Design Fail

The Mindful Designer

Disaster Artist: How To Survive When A Project Gets Ugly

Whether you’ve been at it for 10 months or 10 years, the only certainty in life for creatives is that at some point, you’ll find yourself working on a project that disintegrates into the kind of diabolical shit-show that makes you question reality.

When I started my design career, I encountered numerous projects that went awry. At that time, I didn’t know any better and thought that’s just how things were done. Micromanagement, indecision, rudeness, spec work, and unpaid bills seemed like the price of doing business, that was, until I read Mike Monteiro’s book, Design is a job. Mike’s book helped me gain self-confidence to stand up for myself and see myself as being equal to the client and not someone who is at the mercy of a client. My relationship changed from then on out, which is why this article resonated with me.

Hearing the stories of how projects went south brought back painful memories from the past. This article is a must-read, especially for those starting, so you aren’t taken advantage of.

Here are a few of the examples shared in the post:

“For me, the projects that went sideways always had the same problem,” says brand design powerhouse James Martin, better known as Made By James, “I rushed in too fast. I jumped into design before we nailed the basics like scope, roles, and who actually makes the call.”

“It quickly became apparent that neither the client (a multi-national sports brand) nor their agency knew what they wanted. The project was re-briefed from scratch three times in as many weeks, including 48 hours before the print deadline. I was stressed out of my mind. It cost me a lot of sleepless nights and really shook my confidence for a time.”

What can you do to prevent a shit-storm from happening in the first place?

Here are a few ideas shared:

• No contract = no leverage

• Don’t rush in too fast; nail down the basics such as scope, roles, and who makes the calls

• Red flags (run the other way):

  • When you hear things like “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  • People who aren’t on time

  • People who can’t spell

The key thing to remember is:

As much as you care about what you put your name on, no job is worth damaging your mental health or losing sleep over (maybe a few hours here and there).

Of course, we also have to bring our best selves to each project to keep our cool, be professional, and most of all be a good human.

✊🏽

🔗 Disaster Artist: How To Survive When A Project Gets Ugly

Motivation

Do small things with great love.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Low Fidelity explores the inner game of creativity through mindsets, mindfulness, and personal growth, drawing on honest stories and lessons from lived experience. Inspired by a Zen approach, it invites presence, patience, and simplicity into the creative process.

Founded and led by Rizwan Javaid, Low Fidelity offers reflections and insights to help readers navigate their own creative and personal journeys with clarity, intention, and a sense of calm focus.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking,

“It’s too late.”

“I’m already too far in.”

“I should’ve started differently.”

I love new beginnings. They bring fresh ideas, energy, and hope, a clean slate.

We feel light and unburdened by the heaviness of worry, judgment, or regret.

But what if that feeling didn’t belong only to the start?

What if we could access it at any moment, not just when something is new?

No matter how far along we are, we can always begin again.

We can return to that same excitement and openness we had at the start.

It might sound unrealistic because our egos will resist, whispering that it’s too late.

But it never is.

A mantra I’ve been carrying with me lately to remind myself in those moments is:

“It’s never too late to begin again.”

We always have the choice.

Wherever you are in the journey, you have the choice to begin again with lightness, curiosity, and care. ✊🏽

“Each time you breathe, you are beginning again.”

This morning, the first notification I saw on my phone was this quote by the painter Hans Hoffman.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

This quote resonated with me because, letting the necessary speak, for me, is the essence of what a designer sets out to accomplish, whether they are building products, improving experiences, designing better services, seeking feedback, or communicating their ideas.

Removing the unnecessary to get to the necessary is not a simple task.

Complexity comes in different forms, from rules both apparent and unwritten, culture, expectations, time, budget, skill, assumptions, the past, the future, goals, internal and external pressures, just to name a few. Think of these as layers that cover up the necessary and keep it from surfacing.

It takes effort, courage, patience, passion, skill, mindfulness, and determination to peel back the layers of complexity to access the necessary so it may speak.

And once the necessary speaks, we must continue to protect it from the pressures of the unnecessary with all our might, which is why design is never finished.

A designer’s job is never finished.

May you keep simplifying for what truly matters! ✊🏽

On the weekends, I usually go on a long run on the trails. Every run has its challenges, such as steep climbs, heat, long stretches alone, fatigue, or simply not feeling up to it. There’s always some obstacle that can derail me, that is, if I let it.

The truth is, I have a choice.

Instead of resisting the obstacle, I can lean into it. I can appreciate it. I can even like it.

It’s easy to give up, especially when we’re not in the mood to do the thing. But it takes intentionality to stay the course and finish strong.

That’s why Janelle Smiley’s words in Training for the Uphill Athlete stood out to me:

“I decided to surrender myself to the circumstances—to these strangers in our group, to the mountains, to the variable conditions and harsh weather. I decided to like things that were otherwise uncomfortable or frustrating. Instead of turning my back to the wind, I faced into it, making me feel alive... I continually made the decision to find the good in each situation. I had to—it’s what carried me through.”

Janelle’s story highlights a subtle but powerful mindset: choosing to like the things we find uncomfortable.

Instead of letting her situation dictate her experience, Janelle used intention to shape it. Notice the words she repeats: “I decided… I developed… I chose… I continually made the decision…”

She didn’t let the storm, the cold, or even an abrasive teammate control her outcome. She chose to:

• make the best of her experience

• see the good in every situation

• reject negative thoughts

• embrace discomfort as fuel

This mindset shifts us from being rigid and reactive to being flexible and purposeful.

So the next time you face a challenge, don’t turn away.

Choose to lean into it.

Choose to embrace it.

Choose to find the good in it.

So you can become unstoppable.

🌱 Reflection Prompt:

What challenge are you facing right now that you could choose to lean into instead of resist?

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Low Fidelity explores the inner game of creativity through mindsets, mindfulness, and personal growth, drawing on honest stories and lessons from lived experience. Inspired by a Zen approach, it invites presence, patience, and simplicity into the creative process.

Founded and led by Rizwan Javaid, Low Fidelity offers reflections and insights to help readers navigate their own creative and personal journeys with clarity, intention, and a sense of calm focus.

Does small talk feel awkward and shallow to you?

If so, I'm right there with you. Making pleasantries and asking surface-level questions feels like a waste of time.

But why, you ask?

Because we want our conversations to have meaning and depth, to learn something new, and not just skip rocks on the surface. We want to learn something interesting. We want to make the best of our time together.

This is why I found Rob Walker's short talk, called Ask ‘Craft’ Questions on the Waking Up app interesting. The talk clicked with me because I know I appreciate moments where someone asks me deeper and thoughtful questions to make a real connection instead of making small talk, which I know won’t go anywhere.

Rob Walker is the author of the book and newsletter titled The Art of Noticing, in which he invites readers to pay close attention to everyday curiosities that most of us tend to overlook.

In his talk, Rob shares that bringing awareness and presence to the conversations we have with people can bring new possibilities instead of being lost in our own thoughts, even though we are physically nodding and acting as if we are listening.

Rob shares three approaches we can take when asking questions, which are:

1. Ask craft questions

The goal of these questions is to elicit surprising details as well as show the other person you are actually interested in what they share.

Instead of asking "How is your job going?" we can ask a researcher, for example, "What is it like to uncover hidden needs from talking to people?"

2. Ask deep questions

As Rob mentioned, "If you share something meaningful and important, you are likely to get something meaningful and important in return."

When we go directly to the deeper questions, such as "What are you passionate about?" we invite the other person to go directly to what is meaningful to them and can quickly make a connection.

3. Ask imaginative questions

These questions have the potential to surprise and engage us.

These questions give people room to be creative with their answers, such as this one that Rob mentioned his friend used as a writing prompt for a middle school class: "If you were a potato, how would you want to be prepared?" You can imagine the imaginative and colorful answers by the students.

The goal of all these types of questions is to make us want to ask more questions and be fully engaged with the people we meet, so we can make deeper connections with each other.

The key, however, is to be fully present and engaged in the conversation in that moment and to be genuinely interested in what the other person is sharing.

We can skip the small talk, but first we must do our part and be interested in what others share with us.

So the next time you find yourself slipping into small talk, try asking a craft, deep, or imaginative question.

You may be surprised by what you discover.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Low Fidelity explores the inner game of creativity through mindsets, mindfulness, and personal growth, drawing on honest stories and lessons from lived experience. Inspired by a Zen approach, it invites presence, patience, and simplicity into the creative process.

Founded and led by Rizwan Javaid, Low Fidelity offers reflections and insights to help readers navigate their own creative and personal journeys with clarity, intention, and a sense of calm focus.

In this new series, I explore designer, educator, and researcher Danah Abdulla’s prompts from her book "Designerly ways of knowing: a working inventory of things a designer should know." which challenge us to expand our knowledge and strengthen our commitment to making the world a better place through design.

#34. Design's Unintended Consequences

“Designing is fundamental to being human - we design, deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings - we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.”_

- Anne-Marie Willis, professor and editor of Design Philosophy Papers

Uber promised freedom of movement, but contributed to traffic congestion.

Instagram connected people creatively, but also enabled cyberbullying.

Facebook’s algorithms optimized for engagement, but fueled misinformation.

The designs we create are not innocent.

The designs we create have unintended consequences that can do real damage and even turn deadly in the case of cyberbullying.

Even the small design decisions we make, like using Western-only names or relying on stock imagery of stereotypical perfection, can unintentionally mislead, exclude, or harm.

It's not a question of skill or money, because companies like Uber, Instagram, and Facebook have the best designers and researchers in the industry and the largest budgets.

What could cause the unintended consequences in our designs?

We can think of this problem in three layers.

The first is systematic pressures within a growth-at-all-costs modus operandi. As journalist Om Malik puts it, “It’s hard to think about the human consequences of technology as a founder of a startup racing to prove itself or as a chief executive who is worried about achieving the incessant growth that keeps investors happy.”

The second is process flaws, where we design for the "happy path" and ignore the ways our designs break and cause issues because we didn't spend the time to explore the "not-so-happy paths".

The third layer is human psychology, which deals with our inherent cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are the mental shortcuts our minds take based on past experiences, which can distort our perception of the present moment, leading to inaccurate judgments and flawed decision-making. If we dig a bit deeper into the way we design, we see that our human psychology also plays a role in these scenarios.

Here are a few of the cognitive biases that affect how we design:

• Optimism bias - thinking our own risks are less risky than other people's.

• Confirmation bias - We selectively interpret data to show our designs have a positive impact, while ignoring the data that tells a different story.

• Groupthink - We don't want to be the person on the team who rocks the boat, so we fail to speak up and challenge questionable assumptions.

• Framing bias - How we frame a problem, either positively or negatively, influences our perceptions and decision-making

Here is a good explanation for unconscious biases:

What can designers do when even the best laid plans go awry?

By taking a holistic approach to our design, we can start with a wide lens and narrow down to the smaller details.

Here are a few recommendations:

Commit to ethics early

By establishing and committing to ethical principles early in the design process, you can set the stage for awareness of situations as they arise around fairness, transparency, inclusivity, privacy, and sustainability.

Tools to use:

• Prioritising Ethical design

• Unpack Ethical Design Toolkits

Think in systems, not artifacts

What happens when our designs are used over time, at scale, and in different, not-so-perfect contexts?

Tools to use:

• Scenario mapping

• Causal loop diagrams

• Journey/Impact maps

Widen your perspective

By working with team members, customers, and community members with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences, we can prevent working with blind spots.

Tools to use:

• Expand your worldview

• Unlearn old and unhelpful ideas and practices

• Challenge your assumptions

• Question established norms

• Collaborate with diverse teams and team members

Design for edge cases

Ask yourself how my design could be misused? Or are there any dark patterns within my design?

Tools to use:

• User story mapping

• Usability testing with primary and secondary customer groups to consider the wider impact

• Create Antipersonas - design with a user group that could misuse your product in a way you never intended.

• Continuously iterate, test, and refine, even after launching.

By bringing awareness, humility, and curiosity, we designers can help prevent the unintended negative consequences of our designs so the most good can be done for the most people possible.

Reflection Prompt

💬 What can you do to expand your knowledge of identities and life experiences that are different from your own?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

Mindful, by design.

The Mindful Designer is a space to pause, reflect, and explore the ideas that shape how we design and how design shapes us.

In this new series, I explore designer, educator, and researcher Danah Abdulla’s prompts from her book "Designerly ways of knowing: a working inventory of things a designer should know." which challenge us to expand our knowledge and strengthen our commitment to making the world a better place through design.

#47. The Politics Of Design

“Much, if not most, graphic design is about communicating messages, and many of these messages are intended to persuade. This places its practice clearly in the realm of politics.” - Michael Bierut

Design is political.

Design is a way to shape how humans live, behave, and communicate, for better or for worse, which makes design a political activity.

The political nature of design is evident in key parts of the design process itself. From who we include or exclude to be on our design teams, in our research and testing, and who we market our products to, all point to the political nature of design.

Why is design political?

• Carries a bias and an agenda towards achieving a goal

• Reflects specific ideological viewpoints

• Shapes social norms and influences how we behave and perceive things

• Guides how problems and solutions are presented

As Ruben Pater reminds us in The Politics of Design:

At the root of miscommunication lies the assumption that people will understand us because we use ‘universal’ or ‘objective’ communication. Assumptions of objectivity and universality in design are closely tied to the modernist design principles as they are taught in Western design education.”

Our Responsibilities as Designers

Knowing all this, what are the responsibilities for us as designers?

It means we must:

• Question and acknowledge our privilege

• Ask ourselves, “Who is being excluded from this conversation?” so we can understand the real impact of our designs

• We can create space for underrepresented and marginalized voices to be heard

• Challenge the status quo by bringing diversity into the names, images, and photos of real people we use in our design process

Design is never neutral. The question is what values, perspectives, and futures will our work stand for?

Reflection Prompt

💬 When you think about a recent project, what choices do you see now that reveal design is never neutral?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

Mindful, by design.

The Mindful Designer is a space to pause, reflect, and explore the ideas that shape how we design and how design shapes us.