We used to know how to do this.

For most of my career I asked one question: is this good for people? Then slowly, without noticing, I started asking a different one. This is about how that happens — and why it matters.

Apr 28th 26

For most of my career I asked one question: is this good for people? Then slowly, without noticing, I started asking a different one. This is about how that happens — and why it matters.

The infrastructure

We used to know how to do this.

There was a time when powerful tools came with something else: training. Intention. A period of supervised use before you were handed the keys. A culture of asking — is this good for people? — before asking whether it was good for business.

That infrastructure is gone. And nobody filled the gap.

We didn’t lose it all at once. It happened gradually, through a thousand small decisions that each made perfect sense at the time. A product shipped a little faster. A safety review got shortened. A training programme got cut. A regulation arrived a decade too late. And meanwhile the technology kept moving, shaping behaviour in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

Nobody was given a map. Nobody was taught to read the terrain. I know, because I was inside it.

Human Factors

It started with a question.

Human Factors engineering begins with a deceptively simple question: how do we make this better?

Not just faster, or cheaper, or more engaging. Better — for the humans who actually use it. How do we design tools that align with human capabilities and human limitations? How do we understand not just what a system does, but what it costs — in attention, in trust, in behaviour, in the slow accumulation of unintended consequences?

That question shaped the cockpit designs that reduced pilot error. The warning systems that kept drivers alive. The medical interfaces that prevented fatal dosing mistakes. Human Factors engineering was built on a foundational insight: when humans fail, it is usually the system that failed first.

Nothing is free. Every design decision has a cost.

Design

Design is not neutral. It never was.

Here is what most people don’t know: the same mechanisms that manipulate you can liberate you. The same lever pulls both ways.

Design that helps Organ donation opt-in : Switching the default from opt-out to opt-in dramatically increased donation rates — without removing anyone’s choice. Confirmation step : A single “are you sure?” pause before a purchase reduces impulsive spending. One second of friction changes behaviour. Social norm message : Telling people “most of your neighbours already voted” increases turnout. We are wired to follow what people around us do. Habit-based reminder : Linking a medication reminder to something already in someone’s daily routine improves adherence in populations nothing else reached.

Design that traps Unreadable terms and conditions : Make a legal document long and complex enough and almost nobody reads it — but everyone clicks agree. Marketing opt-in as default : Pre-ticking the box signs you up before you’ve decided anything. Most people don’t notice. That’s the point. Login that disappears on uninstall : Delete the app and lose access to your content. Reinstalling is easier than starting over. The friction works in reverse. Mid-session cutoff : A timer that cuts a child off mid-game doesn’t build understanding of limits. It builds a meltdown. The design creates the problem it was meant to solve.

Design can help you find your way. Or it can make sure you stay lost. The difference is whose interests it is serving. And that is always a choice.

The drift

I spent 25 years inside that choice.

I started studying how mobile phones changed behaviour behind the wheel — just as those phones were becoming ubiquitous. I went on to study collision warning systems: how people trusted automation, how they stopped trusting it, how the gap between trust and reality created danger. The goal was never maximum trust. It was calibrated trust — understanding enough about how a system worked to navigate it well.

That question followed me through Google X, YouTube, Google Maps, Agoda, Electrolux. Work I was proud of — built around the original question: is this good for people?

Then, slowly, it became a different question. How do we grow the business?

The drift was gradual. I didn’t notice it happening. That’s what makes it worth talking about.

The personal part

I also became that family.

When my kids were young, my husband and I watched a family at a restaurant — every one of them on their phones, completely disconnected from each other. We looked at each other and said: that will never be us.

It’s us.

Not because we’re bad parents. Not because we didn’t care. Because the systems we were using — some of which I helped build — were not designed with our intentions in mind. They were designed to capture attention. To extend sessions. To bring you back. And they are extraordinarily good at it.

Getting lost was never the problem. Not knowing how to find your way back is.

The bigger picture

This is not just about the kids.

That is the part of the conversation we keep missing.

The same mechanisms designed to capture a teenager’s attention at 11pm are working on you. The scroll that doesn’t end. The notification engineered to arrive at the moment you were about to put the phone down. The recommendation engine that knows, better than you do, what will keep you watching.

The question is not just: are our children becoming who we want them to be?

It is: are we becoming who we want to be?

Are we present for the people in front of us? Are we building the connections that make a life feel full? Are we living in colour — imagining things we haven’t seen yet, having the conversations that only happen when everyone is actually in the room?

We are losing those things. Not because technology is evil. Because we haven’t yet built the collective capability to find our way through it.

The way forward

The goal was never to opt out.

Banning YouTube doesn’t answer the question. A rule is not a compass — it tells you where not to go. It doesn’t teach you how to navigate.

What we need is graduated release — the slow, intentional building of wayfinding capability, so that young people and their parents develop an internal compass rather than an external constraint.

The map starts with three distinctions most people have never been offered: Digital Hygiene : Limits, device-free times, sleep boundaries. Necessary. But rules without understanding don’t hold. Digital Wellbeing : Agency, attention, the long-term relationship with technology. The goal beyond the rules. Digital Diet : Not how long, but what, when, and why. The shift from measuring quantity to understanding quality.

These are not the same thing. Conflating them is part of why so many programmes fail — and part of why so many families feel lost even when they’re trying hard.

Collective capability

Digital literacy is not an individual skill.

It won’t be solved by one determined parent with a document. Or one school with a new policy. It takes parents, schools, and kids finding their way from the same map — even when that map is still being drawn.

The next wave is already here: AI systems that learn, adapt, and shape behaviour in real time. The question of is this good for people? is more urgent now than it has ever been.

Urgency is not the same as alarm. The response to complexity is not restriction. It is the patient, honest work of learning to read the terrain.

Why I’m here

I’m not here because I got it right.

I’m here because I care enough to keep finding my way — in my own family, in my own life, and with the schools and families I work with.

None of us are perfect. None of us have arrived. The families who will benefit most from this work are not the ones who have it figured out — they’re the ones willing to be honest about where they actually are. That honesty is not a weakness. It is the only starting point that works.

I miss communities. I miss shared experience. I miss the stories we tell each other when everyone is present. I miss the drawings children make when they’re inventing something, not copying it. The texture of a life lived in full colour — failures included, mistakes named, hard things brought into the open so they can actually be worked through together.

The greatest failure is never trying at all. Everything else is just the process of finding your way.

Is this good for people? That’s still the question. It always was.