What is Illusive Design?

Illusive design is a collection of distorted reminders designed to deplete our motivation through dopamine overstimulation, manipulate our emotions through social status play, exploit cognitive biases and elevate distortions leading to anxiety, stress and depression, preventing us from sustaining balance to be the best version of ourselves.

The Problem

Design heuristics try to explain best practices using principles backed by empirical research. Dark patterns try to catch common tricks but only accounts for 20% of unethical patterns. These strategies however are not enough to stop the attention economy and do not work in the age of AI. Anxiety and depression are on the rise through everyday interactions including outrageous feeds, unregulated user generated content, highlight reels and comparative beauty filters.

Interactions between people and products should be playing the same iterative game yet bad usability plays with different rules allowing illusive design to seep into the product exploiting our biases and causing distorted thinking patterns. It's not us that have to change and adapt to technology, it's technology that needs to adapt to us as the fundamental principles of interaction are permanent.

The Solution

By adopting the new ethical Altruheuristic Evaluation along with the existing principles, we can migitate the proliferation of illusive design with the addition of biology, cognitive science and CBT. Together we can eradicate everyday illusions to design a more meaningful, inclusive and humane world free of suffering, toxicity and algorithmic bias.