Deskilling and de-thinking are not new phenomena, and they are not only AI related. A short history of deskilling goes back to the beginning of industrialisation when people started to rely on machines for goods, they were no longer producing. This went a step further with:

a. Bureaucracy, the organisational and logistical compartmentalisation of work, and

b. Disciplines, the disconnected from each other epistemic specialisations that came out of breaking down the production of knowledge.

As a result, I am expected not to know how my car, washing machine, computer or phone works. If they break, I can’t repair them. I can’t even open them without being liable1. What I do know though is this is rooted in an impromptu design psychology where a designed condition (technology) is making me lose my skills triggering the psychological side-effects of helplessness and dependency.

Treating technology as a black box exacerbates a blind faith in its capabilities, ethicalness and harmlessness despite evidence proving otherwise such in the case of social media coercion2, conflict minerals used in computers and phones, and data weaponisation. This did not happen overnight. Centuries of deskilling have led to normalising the comfort of something I have no idea what it’s made of, where it came from and who built it. Being willingly ignorant entails a reluctance to recognise the political and psychosocial implications of technology as well as the consequent loss of agency to hold it accountable.

The discomfort I experience with AI is an anomaly to the conditioning I have been exposed to since I am a by-product of bureaucracy and service economy. What I see around me is a dissociation between technology and its side-effects intentionally orchestrated by late capitalism. The speed by which feeling, thinking, memories and experiences get replaced by responses from AI leave no time to process the subsequent externalisation of all the above. In this light, all experience becomes mediated therefore not one’s own. What this removes from human experience is the impact a perception, thought, feeling or event makes on the brain when processed and intertwined with previous experiential imprints. Brain plasticity, which no matter the claims made by AI proponents, is still far from being fully decoded. While brain plasticity depends on the various encounters I face daily, if I don’t let it respond to them on its own, it will work less3. My over-reliance on AI/technology will also prohibit my resilience to grow by facing difficult emotions and problem solving on my own.

Not staying with the trouble4 is not as pleasant as at sounds. All the negative feelings that AI and technology-driven distractions help repress, come back as depression, insomnia and anxiety. As seen recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been associated with mental health conditions such as AI psychosis. Being in a mental state of esoteric dysfunction gets amply exploited by corporations like Amazon, Block and recently Atlassian who use AI as an excuse to restructure due to global economic pressures and their own pursue of endless growth. Furthermore, the Verizon CEO’s projections that 20-30% of the American working population will become unemployed presupposes that these people won’t have the agency to fight back due to being ‘unusable’, a term coined by my good friend and philosopher Anthony H Fry, for all the reasons presented here.

Yes, the challenges are known, at least to some of us, but how do I respond? How do I hold on to my agency, skills and problem-solving capacity? The first thing to acknowledge is that, either I like it or not, I am posthuman. Technological mediation is part of human life, from energy to pacemakers. What becomes urgent is being aware of how much agency I am/or not giving away and recognising how technology interferes with skills, critical thinking, cognitive growth, emotional resilience and connection with other humans and nature.

What I call intentional design psychology becomes an active effort to confront the impromptu design psychology of dissociation and its ramifications, as described above, by contesting the silos created by modernity between nature, society, and technology. This through reconfiguring ‘reality’ by mapping socio-technical, ideological, political and economic systems as the sources that keep dissociation alive and stepping outside the restrictions of imposed identities driven by late capitalism. Comprehending the mechanisms behind the obscureness of technology and the role it plays within a massively disturbed ecosystem will reveal the extent of human fragility and the ongoing separation of humans from each other, their material life and nature. By reclaiming knowledge and understanding of how technology affects everyday life, the designs that remove human agency and sustain dissociation can be contested. They can then be replaced by new designs generating psychologies of interdependence.

For this to happen, designers, psychologists and all theorists and practitioners contributing to this condition must be repaired, by accepting their minority superiority (objective, White, male), embodied individualism, techno-dependence, disconnection from past and locality, and lack of skills to cope with the threat of climate change, in which they are embedded. The call is to stop losing skills and start acting on what can be saved; species, livelihoods, friendships, resources, life. New designs of living won’t arise from AI but from transforming eco-fear and eco-anxiety into action that will enable adaptation to derive from lived experience, localities and collectives. Technology can facilitate this effort as the support act but not the leading lady.

Turning everything prematurely into waste, then making it vanish in thin air, only to turn around and buy more is a luxury on par with Global North’s urban environments. Despite the growing disparity these cities are currently experiencing, with social injustices multiplying due to cost of living, rising house prices and consequent homelessness, they are hopelessly trying to maintain a faux façade of prosperity so people can continue to consume. Malls and shopping centres are just a heartbeat away to replace with new, the ‘waste’ that the visible and invisible infrastructure removes. What is added to this very problematic choreography is the invisible infrastructural repair (if the city can afford it) either caused by wear and tear or natural disasters (floods, wildfires, hurricanes), which enhances the false perception of the city as stable and safe. The connection between the three (waste, natural disasters, damage) is usually ignored, so the dancers continue to follow the choreography’s steps.

Unfortunately, the dance will soon resume because:

a. climate change will make damage more imminent in Global North cities and the cost of fixing it harder

b. housing, which is already a major issue, will grow in price and will become uninsurable, if not already

c. a+b will disrupt buying power therefore the broken won’t be easily replaced anymore.

Going back to the ongoing discussion about accepting change and impermanence, visible impairment is confronting yet necessary1. It makes evident the impromptu design psychology of artificial stability as explained above.

I’d like to make clear that the impromptu design psychology described, affects the privileged ones living in the Global North, despite their number diminishing as you read this. In the Global South, the story is totally different. The majority is facing daily impermanence due to a lack of infrastructural maintenance or existence. Waste is everywhere as well as debris from disaster or dilapidation. People don’t have time to respond just react to whatever comes their way. But there are lessons to be learned there. The designs that have emerged from disaster-stricken residents of cities can generate blueprints for adaptation and their emotional resilience can be translated into strategies for preparation.

In short, the two sides of the same coin are the exponentially deteriorating smokescreen of permanence created by the Global North cities (for their privileged parts) and the reactive adaptation to impermanence showcased by the Global South’s urban centres. Both conditions require a level of recognition and care that is currently unavailable. While wars are happening and geopolitical games for control over resources are playing out, people remain numb and unsure of how to act. I am not using ‘we’ because the circumstances vary depending on where one is situated on the globe. Where I am living right now it is considered ‘safer’ (Australia) in relation to where I come from (Greece), where people are being terrorised by the media and holding their breath to see what unfolds next. In both cases, agency is being removed from individuals and collectives, either through false promises (Australia) or by turning populations into pawns in geopolitical chess (Greece). The link between waste, climate change, resources and war is palpable but does not really resonate due to the ongoing disorientation of public opinion and sensationalism.

The reality is that most of us live in cities that are threatened to become uninhabitable, in one way or another. Depending on where our location is situated, there is a disproportionate degree of impact2, evidencing the disparity between wealthy and poor nations but all of us are either unprepared or under-resourced (or both).

Preparation is fundamental on both design and psychological levels. To be able to collectively reconfigure what our lives are going to look like, if we still have the gift of time, we need to collectively redefine resilience and normality and approach them from a psycho-spatial point of view connected to survival rather than growth, individualism and development. In simple terms, resilience needs to be removed from the ‘bouncing back’ economic rhetoric and be defined within the premises of place-based, lived experience and resources available to the people affected. This could mean staying put and retrofitting what can be saved, getting rid of physical structures that unnecessarily consume resources and reclaiming space through regenerative practices. So many places around the world already practice urban gardening and food growth, passive heating and cooling, and co-operative housing. In other cases, relocating and breaking down cities into clusters of living with satellite services might be the way forward. The common denominator between these options is impermanence. There cannot be an illusion that things will remain unchanged therefore the model of emergence (live now, forget tomorrow) should be abandoned. Because of redefining resilience and rethinking our relationship with space and ownership, what constitutes normal will be organically redefined, leading to new psychologies (plural) grounded in different relationships with people, resources and place, than the present.

In action, intentional design psychology can play a crucial role as a framework to support the thinking and delivery of preparation plans, co-produced by practitioners and people on the ground who are going to live with them. In this respect, resilience becomes a way of living by maintaining resources and skills and effectively managing resources, practically and psychologically. What constitutes normal then will equal the recognition of adaptation as a never-ending process, with cities and urban locations following in step with impermanence instead of hiding it.

Given how precarious life in cities has become, if one looks carefully, change is an opportunity to get excited not depressed. This is happening, and if you’re lucky, you can choose a future that might be better than an overpriced, uninsured apartment in a city that is falling apart. Let’s claim that future by getting ready for it.

‘We’ exchange snapshots of our everyday survival mode, whatever that means, depending on our level of privilege.

Our individualism, dissociation and heightened self-importance are by design. Our neighbourhood is full of strangers; we don’t have a village to help with life and our co-workers are competitors. Why? A quick answer would be Modernity, a more elaborated one, would be the breakup of kinships and de-familisation of society by separating family from economy1. Both entail a blueprint of transitioning from living together, making collective decisions and relying on the commons2 to being alone, not talking to anyone due to heightened feelings of not-enoughness, competition paranoia and carrying the burden of everyday grind. These align with what Georg Simmel3 identified in the beginning of the 20^th century as structural loneliness, which comes out of urban life being designed to break down communal ties whilst simultaneously hyping individualism as independence.

In action, the by design part comes into play though examples such as the grand domestic revolution that never happened4 and the dismantling of unions with more recent examples being the American corporate union busting led by companies like Amazon Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s. That said, if we could reverse the latter design by collectivising workers’ rights, we could fight both the oligarchy of billionaires by activating “progressive taxation and mass unionization” and bring people together (killing two birds - wealth concentration and social isolation – with one stone).

Now that we established how individualism came into play by design and how it impacts our psychologies, let’s trace the design psychology of how our current ideological and economic mode (late capitalism) convinces us that individualism is a good thing and - drum roll plus dramatic pause - we can fix ourselves. Perhaps, it would have been a better professional pathway for me to become a life coach when I graduated with a psychology degree than going down the academic path because in the past two decades, personal well-being has exploded. Well-being sites, experts, services and retreats are all the rage if we want to be on top of our happiness, success and performance in all walks of life. They tell us how to rewire our brain, eat better, and break the pattern of self-destruction. Meditation is back and not just for the hippies. Despite the myriad beneficial aspects of being not doing, learning how to regulate our nervous system and sitting with our emotions, its teachings emphasise the I not We.

Bell hooks eloquently put it:

“I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.5”

Change begins from the self, for sure, but it does not escalate to the collective, if we don’t confront the systems that tear us apart. For example, Dan Harris promotes the idea of a ‘community’ through participation to events, Q & A, and online meditation but not sure if his or similar efforts have led to actual collectives, mutuality and interdependence. Metta (in Pali) or love and kindness practice is rightfully prescribed as an antidote to fear by Sharon Shalzberg but how much of it extends to building profound connections with other human beings?

The advice well-being sites provide for ‘social health’ is very similar to individual behavioural change. It’s my job to change how I connect with other people in an isolated world. It’s my responsibility to break the barriers of time poorness despite working to meet my financial obligations and the pressure to perform in an economy that can no longer grow. I need to put the effort to breathe like a monk, eat like a millionaire, exercise like an elite athlete, and afford therapy, silence retreats, holidays and access to nature. Blueprints for longevity are only applicable to people with money, time and private healthcare system access and notwithstanding their useful research and advocacy for preventative healthcare, they sit at the opposite end of de-fund public health systems. Who has the time and resources for all this? How much more exclusive and individualistic this experiment should get to realise that we, the lucky few, are self-indulging while our systems (political, economic, social, technical) are failing us. On top of this, we have stopped talking to real people and started talking to AI bolts, designed to never disappoint us, push back or tell us the truth.

The divide will deepen, if optimisation is on offer only for the individual and does not actively extend to building collectives. Pursuing self-betterment derives either from standards that are not ours to begin with, or from our need to fix the symptoms of a broken system. None of the well-being websites is truly contesting the context from where depression, bad diet and anhedonia derive, because they cannot repair what keeps us in isolation and are helpless to address the source of our problems (bad governance, ruthless economy, polarised societies, declining climate). The systems that keep us separate simply don’t get confronted.

We are trying to figure out how to live longer and better without acknowledging the elephant in the room – we are subjects of abandonment, in conditions we cannot control.

Please let me elaborate on the above statement. Yes, we want to live and feel better. And we potentially see mental and physical health results when we try to optimise our lives. But how can we sleep when our beds are burning6?

Climate change is present and real, environmental conditions are getting harder, species are dying and food production is greatly challenged. Despite the many little bubbles of activity, we do nothing. The enigma of climate inaction7, has been explored in so many ways – environmental psychological, economic, sociological and the list goes on. Theories provide bottom-up (degrowth), or top-down (the Green New Deal) fixes, rarely a combination (just Transitions) and commonly an approach related to the specialty of the expert/writer/researcher. Their suggestions hardly reach the affected, who struggle, deny or surrender to nihilism, depending on where they are on the spectrum of climate change impact.

So what works? (spoiler alert, collectives).

From what we’ve seen so far, predictive modelling does not work but community self-organisation and commoning, the practice of self-governance and collective decision making regarding the distribution of resources, does. As a response to individual behavioural change, community-led behavioural change is rooted in change led by place-based lived experience that identifies strengths and weaknesses on the ground and how resources can be maintained and distributed. Small pockets around the globe and especially in contexts of environmental and/or political crisis showcase how agency can be reclaimed and activated amongst people at risk. I step away from the concept of community8 due to its weaponisation for polarising purposes such as reinforcing nationalism, racism, sexism etc. and put forward the idea of constantly changing configurations of subjectivities.

We don’t have to join forces because we are the same but because we are in conditions we either want to protect ourselves from or make better. Migrants crossing the Mexican border to the United States come together because they have a better chance of first survival and then success; they’re not friends, but in the moment, they share what’s at stake. In this context they become one instead of distinct units lumped together9. The same urgency is required for climate change. How?

• Grow alternate psychologies: We all share the same psychological state (One psychology) that has not served as well. Why? Because it nurtures attachment to expectations from life that won’t be met (materialistic happiness and success, stability and permanence) and fosters blame as a response when they don’t. Accepting impermanence as a given (detachment), makes possible an agility in thinking and doing that right now, is not available. Understanding systems and how they operate to reinforce One psychology frees us, as individuals, from the heavy lifting and self-blame for everything that’s wrong, and enables accountability mapping, the practice of who/what/why is responsible for every aspect of our lives. Ideologically, spatially and practically removing what is harming our chances for extending our future (affirmative destruction) will allow for psychologies (plural) to emerge so we can accept and negotiate loss, opportunity and change.

• Find knowledge outside conventional knowledge: this entails accepting there are no solutions (permanent and fixed) and truth is a social construct grounded in epistemological colonisation (See Eurocentricm & Modernity). The way knowledge is currently addressed and pursued is within the confines of outdated models of understanding the world and failed economic theories (See privileged white old men’s theories and GDP as prosperity, respectively). These barriers need to break starting with opening knowledge to unaccounted traditional and indigenous knowledges; critically evaluating what/where knowledge is produced and what is taught at universities and schools.

• Become relationally accountable: going back to Modernity, individualism and knowledge, they all share the same attribute: thriving in and reinforcing silos. Making relationality part of how we operate brings back accountability into the big picture. Commoning, co-ops, indigenous custodianship become the paradigm of how relational accountability works and the impact it has on all living beings.

• Demand participatory governance: community-led behavioural change has showcased that when constantly changing configurations of subjectivities come together for a short or long stint to work on a shared cause, magic happens. Scottland’s citizen assemblies, decentralised renewable energy transitions in sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia’s village law are just a few of examples where, without being perfect, participatory governance takes place. In all these cases, collectives make decisions about their present and future together, directly addressing their food, habitation, transportation, access to facilities and how money is spent for their benefit. Despite the ongoing effort of governments to offload services to NGOs and citizen collectives, participatory governance is also about demanding services relevant to needs on the ground and planning irrelevant to political cost.

Implementing these ideas might bring to life not only a chance for a future but a profound connection with fellow human and animate beings, similar to how my youngest daughter calls all little people ‘friends’.

Now you know my friend and the clock is ticking. We better get started.

You most likely live somewhere in the world. This somewhere is designed to house, entertain, get you places and offer you an abundance of services. In this story, we, the lucky ones, live beautifully designed lives directing our moods, dictating our desires and prescribing our needs1. Given the sameness of what we wear, watch and drive, our moods, desires and needs are, more or less, the same (one psychology). We connect online, shop to be happy, upgrade to look successful. What makes us feel us, is by design.

Simply put, design psychology2 is how our environments shape us, and how we shape our environments. Design commands what we need and how to use it, and psychology defines how to be happy and successful by conforming to these designs. While this doesn’t really sound problematic, it becomes so the moment we realise how design and psychology have conditioned us to think, behave and feel.

Mind blowing as it is, it took me two decades to figure out design psychology by studying psychology and architecture, working as a design academic, writing, researching and experimenting with various projects. Refusing to accept the binary of ‘I am the product of my environment’ and ‘I am my own person’, I believe that our choices design the world that has also been designed for us. We redesign what we don’t like or opt out but accept (often uncritically) what makes us comfortable. Unfortunately, the latter is taking away our (and all living beings) future3.

If you think that’s a stretch, consider a global challenge (e.g. climate change) and how design has managed to convince us that:

a. climate change does not exist: Everything is looking fine on the outside, especially if you’re living in a building with electricity and running water in a big city.

b. we can design our way out of it: Think AI, geoengineering, floodwalls and anti-tsunami barriers. And,

c. we are so comfortable we don’t want to change a thing: The buying and upgrading I mentioned before.

Psychology is reinforcing all the above by reassuring us that:

a. climate change is our fault: See individual behaviour change4 and how it’s our personal responsibility to undo all the damage.

b. if we are stressed about climate change something is wrong with us: Suffering from ecoanxiety means we are mentally ill5. And,

c. if we have ecoanxiety we can’t be ‘normal’ therefore we need to be fixed: Translated into psychology treating symptoms and not causes of ecoanxiety6.

Exhibits a, b and c show that design and psychology have been improv-collaborating to reinforce each other’s arguments and reach the same goal:

Sustain an illusion of fictional permanence by bubble wrapping us in soothing denial7.

In contrast to what is available as design psychology right now, I envision an intentional effort to “initiate a new field of knowledge, spark a revolution, and build a community of practice8”. The hope is that you will engage and play with my ideas, bringing them to life through experimentation with intentional design psychology, so we can radically improve the way we do things.

This Substack is about how we think and feel as collectives with the same things at stake, how we can reframe change and redefine normal to explore new designs and psychologies, having in mind what is present instead of what we’d like it to be.

It is a call to arms to discover new strategies of moving forward and act on them, in conditions of impermanence, instability and unknowns, while acknowledging the existing designs that make us interdependent.

Through anecdotes, examples, provocations and cross-pollinating different initiatives, I’ll unfold different approaches of reframing change and impermanence, reactivating our skills and working together.

In contrast to the predominant stance of separating design and psychology, here, they are rethought as part of a continuum, along with other critical ideas and tools that can help us accept our true nature, unpredictability and interdependence.

This is an invitation for intense hanging out to rediscover capabilities, define goals and aspirations and figure out how to maintain and repair what is necessary for our collective adaptation and wellbeing.

As a human being, a mum, and lastly, a professional, I want to put all my effort into safeguarding what’s left of our future by preparing myself and others psychologically and practically about different scenarios that can play out, based on facts, research and experience versus wishful thinking. This is not a manifesto against all things ‘normal’ and how we’ve been trained. It is about embracing the discomfort and thrill of everyday life so we can work with what’s on the ground, collaboratively, with all we’ve got. Please, join me for the ride.