No, I don’t know why the phone is like that either mate. But you get the point. Too many podcasts.
Or, why skipping an episode feels like abandoning a friend.
There’s a particular guilt that comes from skipping ahead in a podcast series. Not the comedian-chats-to-comedian ones, or Desert Island Discs, those you can binge or bin at will. I’m talking about the recurring ones. The talky ones. The ones hosted by people you like, or worse, people you know. Miss a week and you don’t just lose the thread, you lose the right to laugh. The callbacks make no sense. The in-jokes have moved on. You’re no longer in on it.
I’m aware this sounds neurotic. But I’ve stopped listening to several podcasts not because they got worse, but because I missed two episodes and couldn’t face the trauma of catching up. I know I could jump in. I know no one cares. But somehow, I do. It’s the same part of me that keeps unread issues of The Spectator in a stack, muttering, “I’ll start again from the first issue.” That all came about when Jeremy Clarke got ill and I couldn’t bear reading his brilliant column out of sequence, inevitably posthumously.
The problem therefore, I think, is narrative continuity without narrative urgency. Podcasts, like newsletters or Jeremy’s Low Life column, have become serialised companionships. Their UX rewards loyalty, but punishes lapsed affection. It’s a structure built for the always-on, and it assumes you never really leave.
And the volume. The sheer, relentless sprawl of it. Everyone has a podcast now. Kind, intelligent friends. Former colleagues. Distant people I admire. I say this with genuine affection and no small dose of complicity, I write a blog read by literally tens, so I’m not throwing stones from the hilltop. But podcasting’s democratisation has created a landscape where the bar to entry is nil and the bar to quality is… unacknowledged.
This isn’t a snobby defence of old gatekeepers. The best podcasts out there are often the weirder, niche ones. The ones that would never make it past a commissioner’s desk. But that doesn’t mean the friction was all bad. A copywriter at my former agency once said, “Don’t waste the reader’s time.” With podcasts, the time-wasting is part of the premise.
There’s also the question of emotional design. If podcasts are a medium of intimacy, why are the interfaces and audio frequently so transactional? There’s no gentle onboarding for returners. No “here’s what you missed.” No warm “start here.” Just a reverse-chronological list and an assumption that you’ve kept up.
Imagine if books worked like that. Chapter 17 opens with “As we were saying…” and you’re left frantically flipping back (actually, come to think of it, that’s the exact reason why I really started to hate Thursday Murder Club). Or if Netflix removed season recaps because you should’ve been paying attention. It’s not hostile, exactly. Just… indifferent.
So what would better design look like? Perhaps:
A podcast player UI that lets hosts flag standalone episodes for returners.
A soft re-entry note at the top of an episode: “You don’t need the last three. This one’s its own thing.”
A brief recap audio snippet or even a written primer for regulars who’ve been away.
Small things. But they matter. Because as much as podcasts masquerade as friends chatting in your ears, they’re still products. And products that ignore re-entry, or punish time away, eventually lose people, not to rage, but to fatigue.
I don’t think we need fewer podcasts. That would be like saying we need fewer books. But we do need better affordances for how people actually consume them: messily, sporadically, guiltily.
We don’t stop listening because we’re bored. We stop because the emotional lift of rejoining feels heavier than just starting something new.
And if you’re wondering whether I’ll catch up on that podcast you recommended last month, the answer is no. I fell behind. And now I can’t remember when his dog died.
AI: This piece was written by me, I did use ChatGPT to sub-edit, help shape the structure, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.
This morning I watched Richard E. Grant talk about his late wife Joan. Four years gone, he said, but what his mind serves up now isn’t the frailty of her last months, but her in good health.
“The wonderful trick of memory means that we now remember her in full health rather than the last 8 months of her Life.”
And he’s right, it is a trick, but not sleight-of-hand. Psychologists have know of this bias for decades. Negative emotions tied to autobiographical memories fade quicker than positive ones. It’s called the fading affect bias. Your mind isn’t erasing facts, it’s acting like a producer in the studio, quietly turning down the volume on the anguish while letting the warmth keep playing at full volume.
Other processes chime in. Every time we recall a memory it’s rewritten, not replayed. That’s reconsolidation, and it means memories get smudged and softened, sometimes in our favour. Trauma therapists use this to their advantage, nudging one’s recall toward less damaging associations. In grief, the brain seems to do it on its own, substituting the image of the person in decline for the person as they really were. Not denial. Not repression. A form of mercy.
I’ve had a rough few years myself, different terrain, not bereavement. But I’ve clung to the old adage that time heals. It turns out that isn’t just Pollyanna sentimentality: it’s neurology. The sting dulls, the good bits endure. The mind edits.
Yet (Grant aside) scroll through the socials or (even the trad press) and you’d think the brain is a broken appliance needing constant external servicing. Talking therapies, sound baths, mindfulness apps (with subscriptions, natch). So. Much. Talking. All while PTSD headlines insist almost the opposite, that memory is a cement block dragging lives under.
Of course, trauma can lock memory in its raw, searing form. That’s the clinical exception. But for the rest of us, maybe the task isn’t endless intervention? Maybe it’s a lighter hand. Trusting that our brains are, on balance, fairly decent editors. That focussing on the good, replaying and re-storifying it, gives it more weight in the archive. I’m taking a leap here but perhaps Richard E. Grant didn’t “work through” those final months. He simply outlived their dominance.
There’s something oddly hopeful in that. Not a quick fix, not an app notification or a breathlessly titled self-help paperback, but a reminder that forgetting is not failure, it’s function. Memory is a museum curator, and sometimes the exhibition changes.
AI disclaimer: This piece was written by me, but I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, check and surface study references, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.
Freya India’s “A Time We Never Knew” is, on the face of it, a lament. But not for something tangible, not for a policy or platform or even a particular childhood. It’s a mourning for an idea of childhood. One shaped by distance, longing, and a deep sense that something quietly essential has been lost.
She writes from within the generation often described as digital natives, the ones we, as parents, designers, and the more pretentious cultural observers, keep diagnosing. But what she offers isn’t data. It’s affect. Grief. And reading it, you realise: this isn’t nostalgia. It’s anemoia (a term for the ache we feel for something we never really had). This is a pre-digital adolescence glimpsed only through fiction, photo albums, or the vague warmth of a life not filtered through lenses and likes.
Freya’s piece is moving because it’s not arguing a case. It’s inhabiting one. She shows you what it feels like to have grown up inside a version of it that always felt slightly off.
“We never knew friendship before it became keeping up a Snapstreak or using each other like props to look popular on Instagram.”
You can’t optimise your way out of that. No digital literacy workshop or screen-time-tracking feature will undo the sense of being used by your own image, or complicit in someone else’s performance of belonging. That’s not a UX flaw, it’s existential distortion.
I’ve argued (and still believe) that design can play its part and restore rhythm, attention, and emotional fidelity. But Freya’s piece sharpened that for me. It’s not enough to critique what’s broken as so many do with no alternative, we need to take seriously the kind of childhood that’s been lost, and ask: What now?
Not conceptually. Practically. What now?
Here are five places to start; if not to fix things, then to stop making them worse:
1. Start with the household, not the handset
Stop asking what the app is doing to your kid. Ask what your own habits are modelling. Shared mealtimes won’t solve everything, but they set a tempo. Phone baskets, landlines, analogue clocks, not as statements, but as defaults. Ordinary, visible, repeatable.
2. Make physical things accessible, not aspirational
Stationery shops now look like gift boutiques. That’s a design failure. Kids shouldn’t need £38 Moleskines and Bullet journals to feel entitled to write something down. Re-normalise pen and paper without a need for it to looked designed and perfect. Put it on the table. Make it disposable. Used, not treasured.
3. Build spaces for lingering, not passing through
If you’re designing environments, cafes, libraries, waiting rooms, even apps, make them boredom-compatible. Low-stimulus, soft-lit, acoustically calm. Places you can sit without being prompted, pitched to, or processed. Most teens have never known that feeling. In apps this means zero notifications, tapered onboarding, low information density. No autoplay, restful animation.
4. Reclaim awkwardness
Digital fluency has obliterated the slow burn of uncertainty. But life happens in those gaps. If you’re a teacher, don’t fill every silence. If you’re a parent, let the car journey be wordless, let them be bored. Awkwardness isn’t failure it’s part of growing up.
I’ve had enough with breathwork apps and dopamine dashboards. If your platform wants to support mental health, stop inventing new notifications. Introduce blank states. Dead-ends. Hard stops. Have a very high bar for introducing infinite scroll. If the user’s done, say so. Let them leave with #NOFOMO.
In the piece I wrote last month, I framed our dilemma as a kind of middle-class dread, knowing something’s wrong but unsure how to respond without sounding puritanical or panicked. Haidt warns us of the cost of inaction. Burnett warns us not to lose our heads. Freya reminds us what it feels like. And somewhere between their caution, grief, and scepticism, we need to act, not with slogans or screen-time charts, but with work that answers in the way I have above, modelling better rhythms, removing false urgency.
We don’t all need to log-off, we just need to show up offline too, be awkward and occasionally uninteresting.
AI disclaimer: This piece was written by me, but I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, surface research, help shape the structure, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.
Here’s a sentence that shouldn’t exist: our two-year-old has a savings pot inside her eleven-year-old brother’s bank account.
Not because we’re trying to confuse HMRC or because we’ve discovered some fintech hack that’s too good to share. Simply because no UK bank will give her an account until she turns six, and when she does, it will still be hamstrung by limits that assume every child’s money arrives in neat, predictable chunks from a parent’s allowance.
The set-up is simple. We sell her old clothes and toys on Vinted. It’s honest, traceable money, every transaction recorded by a platform that has its own anti–money laundering checks baked in. The items avoid landfill. The proceeds go to her future self. It’s the kind of wholesome circular economy PR departments love to posture about. And yet the only way to park that money somewhere with her name on it (sort of) is to create a ‘pot’ inside her brother’s Rooster account.
This is not a problem the Financial Conduct Authority asked the banks to solve. There is no specific regulation that says under-sixes cannot have a bank account. This is a product design decision, dressed up in safeguarding logic. NatWest’s own Rooster service told me:
“We’ve had to introduce limits, with these limits created and set at what we believe is a generous amount for a child’s pocket money app… We recommend that you make fewer larger top-ups in the month, and then boost the money over as often as you like.” Katie, 15.AUG.25
The logic, if you squint, is that transaction caps stop laundering. But laundering what, exactly? In our case: a baby’s outgrown sleepsuits. The “10 loads a month” cap on Rooster is not cumulative-value–driven (the actual pound-limit is much higher). It’s a blunt instrument, applied as though fewer transactions automatically means less risk.
In reality, this isn’t about AML at all. It’s about the convenience of enforcing one simple rule across the board rather than designing for the messy reality of modern family finances:
Parents with irregular incomes.
Blended households with multiple contributors.
Ad-hoc earnings from resale platforms.
Grandparents who send £5 here and there for birthdays or because they saw a cute jumper in M&S.
Under the current design, the system doesn’t distinguish between proceeds from a second-hand pushchair and proceeds from illicit activity. The compliance blanket is thrown equally over both.
The result: we’ve built a workaround. Her ‘earnings’ from Vinted go into his account, into her pot, under our management. One day, in about four years, we’ll withdraw the lot and hand it to her. Which is absurd, not least because we’ll have to move it in fewer than ten transactions to avoid tripping the same rules all over again.
If we were serious about aligning banking with real life, we’d have:
A from-birth, save-only account – visible in the parent’s banking app, locked against spending, able to receive small, traceable contributions from approved sources.
Transaction rules shaped by value and source, not arbitrary counts.
A seamless graduation path at age six to a junior current account with a card and spending controls.
The point is not to hand toddlers contactless cards. It’s to start building the habits, and the visibility, early. Money in, money saved, money safe. The actual ‘banking’ part should be the least absurd bit of that equation.
This piece was written and fact checked by me and then sub-edited with the assistance of AI. The image was rendered by Gemini and excerpt, ALT tag were AI generated.
Or, What a Ryanair journey map taught me about real UX.
There’s a type of interface that shows up on Dribbble every few months: flight check-ins, boarding passes, baggage-tracking dashboards. Always slick. Always serene. The UI equivalent of cucumber water.
Most of them start at Choose your seat and end at Enjoy your flight. Which is tidy. But also nonsense.
A few years ago, I worked on a project for Ryanair. I drew out a journey map (with pens, natch), not the polished, stakeholder-pleasing kind, but something closer to the real emotional terrain of travel. One that began well before the confirmation screen. One that started, in fact, with the cat.
Because booking a flight isn’t a clean beginning. By the time anyone taps “Book now,” they’ve already trawled five sites, tried to align half-term dates with the one cousin who replies to group chats, checked weather reports, and googled “Do I need a visa for Croatia?” even though they’re flying to Naples.
Life admin, not travel ambition, is what usually kicks things off. That’s where the journey begins.
The diagram traced everything from that fraught pre-booking stretch through to the post-trip hangover, highlighting the emotional and logistical clutter that most airline UX avoids. Not because it isn’t there, but because it’s messy. And mess doesn’t fit neatly into a product roadmap.
There’s the bit after you book, when nothing much happens, except everything might. The vague unease when no one’s confirmed your seats. The passive-aggressive alert that “something has changed” in your itinerary, but you’re left to figure out what. The nervous rechecking of emails. The slow panic over cabin bag dimensions.
Then comes the day itself. A spike in interaction. The printer runs out of ink. You’re stood at Departures at 6:30am trying to download Peppa Pig episodes with 4% battery and no signal. Your toddler’s hungry. Your partner’s tense. And you’re still wondering if you packed the Calpol.
And yet… this is the brand moment. Not the glossy UI, not the neat API integration. Just this: the knot in your stomach, the uncharged phone, the boarding pass you can’t pull up without a connection.
The map tried to capture that. Not to romanticise it, but to acknowledge it.
Even on the return leg, the friction isn’t over. Passport queues. Lost luggage. The existential despair of a train replacement service. You get home, open a week’s worth of mail, find a parking fine, trip over a stray shoe from the hasty departure packing, and realise you didn’t leave anything for the cat-sitter.
Most journey maps stop at wheels-up. Ours didn’t. Because experience doesn’t follow a clean arc. It loops, it stutters, it sags in the middle. Thoughtful UX understands that.
Of course, Ryanair won’t build an app that books your pet-sitter or packs plug adapters. But this kind of messy map reveals where the brand can quietly show up—not with a feature, but with timing, tone, and the rare dignity of being understood.
Maybe that’s a 6-sheet in the departure lounge that says “Still cheaper than therapy.” Maybe it’s an email that clears, not clouds. Maybe it’s an in-seat comm that drops the marketing voice for once and just says: “Made it. Welcome back.”
Even for Ryanair, in fact especially for Ryanair, those moments can build memory, trust, and repeat business. Because no one remembers the boarding pass. They remember how they felt when the wheels touched down, the keys were missing, and the cat looked at them with contempt.
You’re not designing for delight. You’re designing for 4% battery, no signal, and a queue that won’t move. That’s where memory lives. And maybe loyalty too.
AI disclosure: This piece was written with the assistance of AI, used strictly as an editorial and thinking partner. All ideas, edits, and final phrasing are mine. ALT text and tagging were also generated with AI support.
When I was around 15, I’d get into trouble for calling a girl I was ‘seeing’ after 9pm on the house phone. I remember the jeopardy when her dad answered. It wasn’t just awkward, it felt catastrophic in that very teenage sense. There was no texting, no soft-launching your feelings via Reels. If you wanted to reach someone, you reached their entire household. Privacy was negotiated in real time, and a cordless phone allowing you to slink off to a private corner was borderline futuristic.
I mention this not to romanticise a pre-digital age but to mark a boundary: I don’t truly understand what it’s like to grow up now. Not really.
We’ve been told, often with good reason, that today’s teenagers are in trouble. Jonathan Haidt calls them the “anxious generation”, a cohort rewired by phones and social media. Since around 2012, adolescent mental health (especially among girls) has deteriorated alarmingly. Haidt blames the smartphone: a device that didn’t just enter childhood but, frankly, annexed it. The evidence is worrying, declines in sleep, attention, face-to-face connection. An uptick in self-harm, anxiety, emotional exhaustion. The argument isn’t hysterical. It lands.
But Dean Burnett suggests we’ve misdiagnosed the patient. The panic, he argues, isn’t just in the teens, it’s in us. The parents, the teachers, the adults nervously refreshing headlines while peeking at their own screen time stats. According to Burnett, much of this alarm stems from a mix of generational disorientation (a kind of collective unease that what we grew up with is no longer relevant), recurring moral panic, and good old-fashioned ignorance. We didn’t grow up with these tools, so we assume they’re harmful. We project. We catastrophise. We fear what we don’t fluently use.
The result is a pervasive sense of being at a loss. Some parents clamp down, banning apps, enforcing rigid rules on screen-time that feel increasingly arbitrary. Others detach, paralysed by the sheer bloody complexity of it all. But the most common response that I pick up from parents around me is probably the most human: low-level dread wrapped in middle-class guilt. We don’t really understand what our kids are doing, but we feel complicit anyway.
And then, just as we start to piece together a measured response, “Right! phone-free supper time!”, delayed access, schools running digital literacy workshops, the next threat pops up. Welcome to Whack-a-Mole Parenting. Just as the cultural tide begins to turn on one device, another rises, this time more subtle, more embedded, more seductive.
Take me, for example. I ask ChatGPT more (personal) questions, now than I ever asked Google. Some are practical: how to structure an email, what to cook with these leftovers, when should I plant out these seeds. But others are… not. I’ve caught myself consulting it about health worries, internal dilemmas, parenting doubts, things I wouldn’t bring up at dinner, or even necessarily with my family, my friends. Because it remembers. Because it adapts. Because it flatters you by bending to your will.
And this is me: a reasonably grounded adult with (I hope) a steady compass and a mild allergy to digital hysteria. Yet even I find it maddeningly addictive. Not the technology itself, but the relation. The illusion of being known, helped, mirrored. I can only imagine how powerful this is for a 14-year-old who isn’t just seeking answers but identity.
So the question isn’t whether smartphones are making kids anxious. They are, in some ways. But the deeper story is that we’re all overwhelmed by the sheer pace of paradigm shifts. We can’t metabolise one tech wave before the next hits us in the face.
What Would Good Design Do?
This is where design comes in. Not as damage limitation, but hopefully as orientation. The best design doesn’t just solve problems. It asks better questions. Like: what rhythms support attention? What thresholds help people feel held, not hijacked? How can digital relationships exist without replacing the real ones?
The design problem is not abstract. It’s visible everywhere. Think of Snapstreaks – a design mechanism that rewards compulsive interaction with digital trophies. Or TikTok’s For You page – a personalised feed of videos that TikTok’s algorithm thinks you’ll be interested in, which notoriously appears to learn vulnerability faster than it learns taste. These aren’t neutral tools. They’re attention economies wired for compulsion, not care. If you’re a parent watching this unfold, it’s not just confusing, it’s existential.
A brief aside here: Earlier this year, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LoveFrom’s Jony Ive announced a collaboration to create a physical device for the “AI age.” They talked about daily rhythms, calm interfaces, emotional connection. And while their vision sounds noble, it also confirms the underlying anxiety: that our tools are no longer just functional, they’re emotional infrastructure. If anything, their announcement makes this conversation more urgent. Because the question isn’t whether the tech will be beautifully built. It’s whether it will reflect what matters.
That means not just critiquing the addictiveness of AI companions, but imagining something better. Less extractive. More human. Here’s what that might look like (after an hour of making notes this morning):
Design for pause, not push. Platforms should default to stillness, not stimulation. Kill the endless scroll. e.g. “You’ve seen it all, for now” or opening to a prompt rather than a firehose of dopamine content, or making ‘like’ less of a tap and more of a hold, restricted to just a few per day. Default to a quiet mode after 20 mins. Ask a user “why are you sharing this?”
Design for self-awareness. Don’t just track engagement. Track how users feel when they leave. Make reflection part of the loop. e.g. “How did that make you feel?”, reporting this along with screen time weekly reports. An in-app emotion metric that algorithmically analyses your interaction cadence, scroll patterns, message tone.
Design for companionship, not substitution. If AI is going to listen, let it redirect. Let it nudge us toward real conversations, not just simulated ones. e.g. “This sounds important. Have you considered talk to [name]?” or helping the user plan social activities, remember dates or conversation starters.
The tools aren’t going away. But the way we design them can still reflect care, pace, and conscience. That’s not a nostalgic idea, it’s a classic UX problem and one worth solving.
Coda
When I was a teenager, the phone was something you had to ask permission to use. Now, it’s something we all struggle to put down. Maybe the answer isn’t more rules or fewer apps. Maybe it’s knowing what to do with ourselves in the quiet space that’s left when the screen goes dark.
That’s where design still has a role to play, instead of locking us out, it guides us home.
AI disclaimer: This piece was written by me, but I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, surface research, help shape the structure, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.
London’s decline into low-level disorder hasn’t happened overnight, and it hasn’t happened through some grand cultural collapse. It’s been a slow demagnetising of civic expectation, one graffitied carriage, one dumped rental bike, one unchallenged fare-dodger at a time.
And for all the commentary, the plans, the posters, the social media pleas from Sadiq Khan gently asking us to be kind to TfL staff, the system continues to fray. Because it’s not just about policy. It’s about psychology. A city, like a child, becomes what you quietly tolerate.
Take a stroll through Camden. Or Putney. Or Vauxhall, or Shepherds Bush. It’s not just the spike in phone thefts or fare evasion. It’s the collective flinch away from even acknowledging it. Authority is outsourced, first to security guards who are contractually told not to intervene, then to CCTV operators watching with all the urgency of a screensaver. The presence of order exists only in post-event paperwork.
This isn’t a new problem. Every generation thinks it invented disorder. But what marks this moment is the collapse of presence. The people who once embodied low-stakes authority – ticket inspectors, bus conductors, even the occasional stern-faced commuter, have all retreated. And without those micro-moments of correction, the boundary dissolves.
Because there was a time, not utopia, not Victoriana, just the mid-2000s, when the Tube was cleaner, antisocial behaviour meant something, and fare dodgers looked over their shoulders. And crucially, someone would have said something if you left your bike in the middle of the pavement.
Now? Saying something feels like an act of madness.
Even a relatively fit man in his forties (ahem, let’s say one with the outline of muscle memory from rowing and once-upon a time lifting in the gym) thinks twice. Not because he’s afraid of being shouted at. Because he might get stabbed. Not metaphorically. Actually stabbed. By a 14-year-old with a 9-inch blade and nothing to lose.
So we look away. We (not I, reader) film instead of act. We turn up the headphones and pretend not to see. Because the calculus has changed. What used to be a moment of friction – “Oi, pack it in” – has become an existential risk assessment. Is this worth dying over?
Yes, austerity hollowed out visible staffing. But not every act of disrespect can be blamed on poverty. You can’t say the teenager in £100 sliders and a Balenciaga hoodie is evading the fare because the system failed him. Nor that the grad in Clapham dumping a Lime bike across the pavement is a victim of systemic neglect.
This isn’t all about deprivation. It’s about detachment. From consequence. From collective norms. From the sense that shared space has shared rules.
So what do we do? Because the answer isn’t doubling police numbers or shaming people on social media. Culture doesn’t change through crackdowns. And civic behaviour isn’t restored by a stronger PR campaign.
You don’t police culture. You design for it.
London’s problem isn’t just one of law or design, it’s one of contrast. As other towns and smaller cities have quietly levelled up, the capital has coasted on past prestige. Behavioural standards lag not because Londoners are worse, but because London is no longer best. The Tube is better, but the civic fabric? Worn thin. What once justified the stress (the vibrancy, the culture, the sheer aliveness) now feels out of balance. You dodge fare evaders and dumped e-bikes, but for what? A Pret subscription and an off-peak West End ticket? Meanwhile, Sheffield has sourdough, Manchester has swagger, and Kent has all the ex-London chefs who could no longer justify paying £3,500 a month to fry mushrooms near a bin store.
That’s where behavioural science (and, yes, some gentle psyops) comes in.
Behaviour is context-dependent. What people do in public space is shaped by cues, affordances, and social norms more than personal ethics. If the system is designed to look away, people will act accordingly. So design it to notice. Design it to remind. Design it to suggest.
What we need to rebuild is civic equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
Start small. Use nudges that aren’t insulting. Place messages where norms are breached, not in corporate safe zones. A sign at the Tube barrier isn’t for the person tapping in, it’s for the kid about to hop it. Use tone accordingly.
Bring back the sense of being noticed. Not punished. Not tracked. Just observed.
We could do worse than call in Rory Sutherland and a few behavioural strategists with teeth. The work they’ve done on transport psychology (understanding how we navigate space, status, and visibility) is ripe for civic deployment.
Imagine a pilot scheme on the Bakerloo Line that doesn’t install more barriers, but changes the posture of the space. Mirrors. Eye-level signage. Floor friction that makes hopping awkward. Subtle lighting changes that simulate visibility. Staff trained not to chase, but to notice.
We could run this for twenty years. Quietly. Iteratively. Without press releases.
The point isn’t to eliminate every act of disorder. It’s to rebuild a culture that expects better.
Because somewhere along the line, shame became taboo. Correction became aggression. We outsourced authority to laminated posters and video cameras and hoped it would be enough. It wasn’t.
Civilisation is not a vibe. It’s a ritual.
And it’s time we noticed what we’re no longer willing to defend.
AI disclosure: AI used to sub-edit the copy and perform factual research which was cross-referenced manually. AI generated the image (obviously), excerpt and tag list to enhance exposure.
Some couples go to B&Q. Others recalibrate their marriage on a B-road in June.
I recently got back from a couple of days away in Norfolk with a close friend who also loves his driving. We set out on a fantastic loop from Aylsham through Fakenham, Wells, and Cley – brilliant roads, good sightlines, measured effort, and our own playlists accompanying the sweat on the wheel and the red-hot calipers. It’s been seven years since we did something similar in Scotland on the North Coast 500, and while I’ve found a few roads round me in Surrey where I’ve had flashes of the same joy, doing it in perfect weather with a good friend is different. It’s memorable, visceral, and deeply satisfying.
That trip reminded me what modern driving risks forgetting: rhythm, concentration, the way a great road stretches you just enough to feel vividly, physically present. A truth utterly ignored by the automotive press, which seems fixated on a frictionless future. Autonomy. Electrification. Over-the-air updates. The car, once a machine, is now a platform. A node on a smart grid. Another screen to poke and personalise. And if the future is to be believed, it’ll be a contactless glide from A to B – your vehicle knowing where you’re going, what mood you’re in, and curating the ambient playlist accordingly. Comforting, perhaps. But is that the future we really want?
Because here’s what happens when you flatten a journey into data points and strip the human out. You lose the sweat, the skill, the subtle joy of being in tune. What the current automotive vision tends to forget is this: flow beats frictionless. Every time.
Driving at its best is not about arrival. It’s about engagement. If you’ve ever taken the long way home just because the road was dry, the light was low and the playlist was perfect, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Let’s be fair: 95% of driving is perfunctory. School runs. Trips to the tip. Visiting family. Airport drop-offs. Just get me there, and do it efficiently. That’s what satnavs are for, and they’re brilliant at it.
But just as we crave a real meal after a week of cobbled-together dinners, we also need room for the drives that feel like something. That remind us we’re not just being carried – we’re in it. That’s what this is about: reserving space for the exceptional.
Because flow isn’t just a productivity state. It’s the embodied feeling of rightness. An experience that draws on physical skill, real-time interpretation, being attuned to your environment. Strip that away, and something vanishes.
You can bolt as many sensors to the bumper as you like – flow isn’t something a car detects. It’s something a driver feels. But here’s the thing: technology doesn’t have to kill flow. It can co-create it.
The current HMI (Human-Machine Interface) paradigm presents a false binary. Either the driver is in control, or the system is. But there’s a third, more human path: co-piloting. Not Microsoft Clippy with a steering wheel, but a system attuned to how you want to feel on this drive. A route with rhythm. Camber. Flow. Roads that reward precision and tempo. Effort that meets intent.
When ease becomes the only design goal, something essential gets lost. And we’ve already seen what that looks like: In one eerily prescient experiment, researchers gave households a free chauffeur for 60 hours a week1 – as if driverless tech had already arrived. Public transport use plummeted. Total miles driven rose by 60%. Among retirees, it more than doubled. Why? Because friction disappeared. People sent cars to pick up friends, ran errands just because they could, and stopped weighing up whether a trip was worth it.
When mobility becomes passive, we don’t do less. We just do less meaningfully. Journeys blur. Movement becomes background noise. The vehicle ceases to be a site of agency or expression – it’s just another box we sit in while life happens elsewhere.
And that’s before we reckon with de-skilling. Driving draws on real-time judgement and physical awareness most of us rarely use elsewhere. Spatial reasoning. Risk calibration. Micro-adjustment. Automate that, and we don’t just lose control. We lose fluency.
Despite this, the appetite for engaged driving hasn’t gone – it’s just become more selective. The very existence of niche markets for classic cars, track days, and driving experiences proves it. That’s why designing for joy matters even more.
But this sits awkwardly alongside a cultural drift towards a one-size-fits-all mobility model – where driving is seen as a problem to solve, not a pleasure to preserve. It’s become unfashionable in some circles to even admit you enjoy it. As if to love driving is to reveal something suspect. But not all movement is equal. The same road can be a chore or a joy. It depends who’s driving, and why.
This shift in perception also affects how we measure success. The metrics used to justify infrastructure (usually based on time saved) miss the point. The real value lies in access gained, experiences unlocked, the long way round.
As behavioural economists have shown, effort often creates meaning. In a world of ‘frictionless’ experiences, friction can signal intention, depth, care.
Technology and craft, when designed with that richer journey in mind, can support and amplify, rather than replace. Like a great chef or a sound designer, it should highlight what matters and let the rest recede.
Context-aware routes that change with the light, and the sky.
This emphasis on the physical and the intentional becomes even more crucial because the more we strip away, the more we’ll crave moments that remind us we still exist – bodily, skilfully, viscerally.
Especially in a world where younger generations increasingly see driving as a chore, or opt out altogether, the ones who do drive will be those who want to. That makes the case for joy-built design even stronger.
Because let’s be honest: the real enemy of joy on the road isn’t speed limits or EV ranges or even other drivers. It’s waste. Wasted road. Wasted time. Wasted potential for a moment of synchronicity between human, machine, and landscape.
If the future of automotive is to feel like anything at all – if it’s to be more than a Netflix-enabled transportation pod – we need to stop designing for the eradication of friction, and start designing for the restoration of rhythm.
Not just arrival. But aliveness.
AI Disclosure: This piece was written with the assistance of AI, used as an editorial and thinking partner. All ideas, edits, and final phrasing are mine. Image creation was by AI, natch – ALT text included. Excerpt and tag lists were also optimised for best practice
The study has its limitations of course. It took place in the US where driving is end-to-end whereas Europeans focus is on automation for the last-mile and the public transport is sufficiently better to expect more inertia in behaviour↩︎
We’ve just established that perfection is a bit of a con. That smoothness and polish can feel synthetic, that flaws, handled well, make things real. That was true of design. It’s true of parenting. And it’s true of conversation.
So let’s apply the same logic to how we talk to each other. Especially when we disagree.
Because somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten how to argue.
Not the red-faced, festive episode of EastEnders kind. Not the long, finger-pointy online threads ending in a half-hearted “do better.” I mean real disagreement. The sort where two people actually try to figure something out, not just dig trenches and hold the line.
Everyone talks about “civil discourse” now, as if etiquette is the issue. But most of that still sounds performative. What I miss are arguments with friction and humility. Ones where both sides know they might walk away changed. Where doubt isn’t seen as a weakness but a sign you’re still listening.
We’re a long way from that now.
Many years ago, I was in the school debating society, travelling around Kent in numerous competitions, even appearing at Westminster School and later representing the University of York up at Durham, where, amusingly, my debating partner was supposed to be Jonathan Isaby, a well-known Conservative voice. However, he mysteriously never showed up until the competition was over. But the principle was simple: listen, engage, persuade. Not demolish. Not deflect. Just make your case, and be ready to refine it when someone made a better one.
Somewhere along the way, we swapped that for something else.
Now, we reward the ‘gotcha’ moment. Certainty is treated like strength. Doubt is weakness. If you admit you’re unsure (or worse, that you’ve changed your mind) it’s seen as a loss of face. We’re so busy performing our identities that we’ve lost the ability to revise our thinking. It’s tiring. And it’s stagnating us.
You see it in culture, in politics, in everyday conversations. People don’t talk to win understanding anymore, they talk to stay on brand.
I’ve done it too. I argued hard for Brexit. Believed in it. Spoke up for it. Framed it as independence, as a chance to reimagine things, to step away from bloated bureaucracy and do things differently. I meant it. I still think the instincts weren’t all wrong.
But the outcome? Messy. Fragmented. Slower than promised. And ultimately, let’s be honest, not the reset we sold ourselves. The deals didn’t arrive. The country didn’t come together. The optimism curdled into something else. That was hard to admit. Still is. But it’s true.
And what’s the alternative? Digging in forever? Pretending clarity is betrayal?
I’m not interested in performative U-turns. But I am interested in being the sort of person who can say, “I’ve reconsidered”. And hearing someone else say it, without pouncing.
You can blame social media for this shift if you want. The outrage economy. And yes, that’s part of it. But it goes deeper. We’ve built entire identities around never backing down but it’s not brave, it’s brittle.
Changing your mind is not a flaw. It’s a feature. Same as in design. Same as in writing. Same as in life. You revise because you care. You argue because you want to know more, not because you just want to be right.
We don’t need more hot takes. We need cooler heads. Conversations that can hold heat without boiling over.
So next time you’re mid-argument (online, in a pub, at home) ask yourself: Am I here to win? Or am I here to learn something?
Because only one of those has a destination and frankly, I’d like to get somewhere.
I used AI to assist with this post. Specifically to help generate the excerpt, tags, image prompt, and to refine the structure and rhythm of the piece in my own tone of voice.
This is the third in an accidental series of essays about design, constraint, and real life. The first explored ownership and editing, the second mapped those principles onto systems thinking. This one’s about the myth of the uninterrupted workspace, and what raising small humans has taught me about creative process, product integrity, and emotional design.
Last week I was catching up on some unplayed podcasts and heard Marina and Richard mention the Cyril Connolly line: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” It’s a tidy little number but, like a lot of pithy mid-century takes, it doesn’t hold up brilliantly under daylight. So, as I continue to navigate our Thule buggy at the foot of the stairs, I thought I’d take a 2025 view.
It’s not just the casual misogyny (though yes, there’s that). It’s the deeper implication: that creativity requires retreat. That meaningful work, especially in design, happens at hushed desks; free of crumbs, notifications, or anyone yelling “Shoooooesies.”
This idea still carries weight in design and UX culture. You see it in reverent desk photos on Instagram and podcast guests earnestly waffling on about ‘flow state’, as though uninterrupted focus were the only path to quality. But what if that’s backwards? What if the mess of real life (parenting, caregiving, the emotional admin of being human) doesn’t dilute our creativity, but sharpens it?
Parenting compresses time like nothing else. Afternoons vanish. Tasks bleed into one another. The illusion of ‘ideal working conditions’ gets quietly shelved between snack prep and bedtime logistics. And yet, in those gaps, between drop-offs and Teams pings, on walks to see the cows, while fishing blueberries out of cardigans, some of the sharpest thinking gets done. Not in spite of distraction, but because of it.
In UX, we talk a lot about constraint as a catalyst. Creativity thrives on boundaries. But we rarely apply that logic to ourselves. Parenthood doesn’t just add constraints, it shifts your perspective. You’re no longer thinking about the user. You’re living with one. Or two. One tantrumming in the hallway, the other arguing about their Prep.
Design culture still clings to the myth of the monastic workspace: noise-cancelling headphones, immaculate desk setups, flow-state rituals. As though life must be suspended for work to begin. But most of the things we design are for people whose lives don’t pause. Parents in mid-tantrum. Carers juggling logistics. People buying insurance, ordering groceries, trying to rebook a dentist while coaxing a child (back) into trousers.
We design for frictionless experience, yet fetishise workflows that rely on silence. On having both hands free and the truth is: proximity to real life doesn’t dilute our design work. It deepens it.
You stop wasting time on polish and start noticing what actually matters. You develop an emotional radar: spotting friction, pre-empting dead ends, sensing what might quietly delight (or indeed quietly break) someone. And as I wrote recently, perfection has become a tell. In a world of generative smoothness, what we trust is the textured, the slightly improvised, the things made while someone was also making lunch.
Most importantly, you stop designing for personas. You start designing for real humans, chaotic, distracted, interrupted. The same kind of people we talked about when designing for enough. The kind who don’t need more features. They need clarity. Mercy. A digital space that behaves well under pressure.
Creativity and caregiving aren’t in conflict. In fact, it’s often caregiving that teaches us how to notice. To prioritise. To mean it.
This piece was edited with the help of AI, to shape rhythm, reference tone, and trim the fat. The excerpt, tagging and image were the result of carefully considered AI prompts. The words and arguments are mine. The tempo is deliberate. The polish is, therefore, human.
John Gibbard 
Too Many Podcasts?
Or, why skipping an episode feels like abandoning a friend.
There’s a particular guilt that comes from skipping ahead in a podcast series. Not the comedian-chats-to-comedian ones, or Desert Island Discs, those you can binge or bin at will. I’m talking about the recurring ones. The talky ones. The ones hosted by people you like, or worse, people you know. Miss a week and you don’t just lose the thread, you lose the right to laugh. The callbacks make no sense. The in-jokes have moved on. You’re no longer in on it.
I’m aware this sounds neurotic. But I’ve stopped listening to several podcasts not because they got worse, but because I missed two episodes and couldn’t face the trauma of catching up. I know I could jump in. I know no one cares. But somehow, I do. It’s the same part of me that keeps unread issues of The Spectator in a stack, muttering, “I’ll start again from the first issue.” That all came about when Jeremy Clarke got ill and I couldn’t bear reading his brilliant column out of sequence, inevitably posthumously.
The problem therefore, I think, is narrative continuity without narrative urgency. Podcasts, like newsletters or Jeremy’s Low Life column, have become serialised companionships. Their UX rewards loyalty, but punishes lapsed affection. It’s a structure built for the always-on, and it assumes you never really leave.
And the volume. The sheer, relentless sprawl of it. Everyone has a podcast now. Kind, intelligent friends. Former colleagues. Distant people I admire. I say this with genuine affection and no small dose of complicity, I write a blog read by literally tens, so I’m not throwing stones from the hilltop. But podcasting’s democratisation has created a landscape where the bar to entry is nil and the bar to quality is… unacknowledged.
This isn’t a snobby defence of old gatekeepers. The best podcasts out there are often the weirder, niche ones. The ones that would never make it past a commissioner’s desk. But that doesn’t mean the friction was all bad. A copywriter at my former agency once said, “Don’t waste the reader’s time.” With podcasts, the time-wasting is part of the premise.
There’s also the question of emotional design. If podcasts are a medium of intimacy, why are the interfaces and audio frequently so transactional? There’s no gentle onboarding for returners. No “here’s what you missed.” No warm “start here.” Just a reverse-chronological list and an assumption that you’ve kept up.
Imagine if books worked like that. Chapter 17 opens with “As we were saying…” and you’re left frantically flipping back (actually, come to think of it, that’s the exact reason why I really started to hate Thursday Murder Club). Or if Netflix removed season recaps because you should’ve been paying attention. It’s not hostile, exactly. Just… indifferent.
So what would better design look like? Perhaps:
Small things. But they matter. Because as much as podcasts masquerade as friends chatting in your ears, they’re still products. And products that ignore re-entry, or punish time away, eventually lose people, not to rage, but to fatigue.
I don’t think we need fewer podcasts. That would be like saying we need fewer books. But we do need better affordances for how people actually consume them: messily, sporadically, guiltily.
We don’t stop listening because we’re bored. We stop because the emotional lift of rejoining feels heavier than just starting something new.
And if you’re wondering whether I’ll catch up on that podcast you recommended last month, the answer is no. I fell behind. And now I can’t remember when his dog died.
AI: This piece was written by me, I did use ChatGPT to sub-edit, help shape the structure, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.