Designing Happiness: Irrational Technology
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Every digital product contains a behavioural argument. Scroll depths, notification cadences, default settings, onboarding flows — each one is a design decision that shapes what your users think, feel, and do. Most organisations inherit patterns from platforms built to maximisation and extraction, then wonder why their product feels off-brand or their users disengage.
How can we understand these patterns? Can we improve designs to care for the user? Can these patterns be designed to support happiness?
For the past two years, Lou Millar-MacHugh has run IRRATIONAL TECHNOLOGY operating as a public-facing research initiative, exploring the hidden logics of the digital world through a popular TikTok channel (10k+ followers, 106K likes) and in-depth essays on Substack.
Lou runs interface analysis for organisations that refuse to manipulate their users, auditing digital products for hidden persuasion patterns, dark UX, and behavioural manipulation — then helping teams redesign them to respect their users and still hit their goals for growth and profit.
Lou will be sharing this practice with us, and also sharing experience looking at Omniana and understanding a LifeOS platform designed to support happiness.
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Lou is an Interaction Designer, Graphic Designer, and Researcher focusing autonomy based approaches to user experience. Learn more about Lou's practice at:
Lou has been reviewing Omniana, exploring it's design for happiness. Omniana is a new kind of Life OS, helping you optimize your happiness.
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Masamichi Souzou (正道想像), meaning "Correct Path, Imagined/Created" in Japanese, is an organization that is working to build a world that is optimized for happiness, not just for profit or growth.
This is part of a series of talks where we explore various aspects of the design of our lives, and how various adjustments can be made to help optimize for happiness.
Talk + Discussion + New friends