Bringing positive psychology to design
Mindful design is my ongoing project/brand/thingthat I’ve been building since 2018. It’s a product studio, a duo of books, a 50-hour video course, and an ever-growing open source toolkit of good design practices.
I’m the sole thing-doer at Mindful Design. I authored both books, design and develop all products and the website, scripted, recorded and edited the course, and produce workshops and other artefacts for the toolkit.
The seminal book on responsible product design
Mindful Design started as a book. Written in 2018, and published through Apress, it was a well-received and welcome antidote to habit-forming, coercive product design practices.
A heavily-refreshed and much-improved second edition was published in 2024.
Building a brand
After launching the second edition, I pursued turning Mindful Design into more of a thing. In the past it was essentially just ‘Scott’s books’—but I always felt like it could (and should) be more than that.
The Mindful Design brand is chill, playful and as stripped back as I could possibly make it. I wanted to combine the visual simplicity and nostalgia of a Fisher Price record player with the purposefully minimal/transparent design of—and be prepared for a deep cut if you’re not from the UK or didn’t grow up working class—Kwik Save’s No-Frills essentials.
Launching a course
As part of the evolution from book to brand, I worked with the gorgeous folks at Piccalilli to produce a Mindful Design video course. What resulted was an in-depth design course, covering everything from underlying theories of cognitive science through to the minutiae of UI design decisions.
An open source toolkit
Soon after the course launched, I open sourced pretty much my entire design toolkit. An addendum to the Mindful Design site, it’s a succinctly-documented collection of workshops, design files, and other artefacts that have stood the test of time throughout my career.
An open source product studio
The final phase of ‘make Mindful Design a thing’ plan was the one I was most adamant about, and most excited for. Mindful Design Products is a product studio under the MD umbrella, building opinionated, local-only, zero-AI products as a counterpoint to the shitshow of modern technology.
The first product launched was Lorist—the writing app that gets out of your way, and as of now there are two other products in various stages of development.
I think Lorist (and the other products when they launch) probably represent the sweet-spot of the work that I do: lovely products, designed in the browser to do just enough, then go away until you need them again.
An interminable quest to make design better
Mindful Design will continue evolving, and through writing, educating, and simply building good shit I hope to continue to show the power of good design coupled with giving a fuck about real humans.