Hidden By Design is a podcast about design for everyone, hosted by Thorbjørn Lynggaard Sørensen and Martin Whiskin. Every episode digs into the design decisions you don't notice, because the best design is the kind that works without you seeing it. We're back. After a break, Thorbjørn and Martin relaunch Hidden By Design in two tracks: Talks, opinion-driven conversations like this one, and Learn, deep dives into specific design mechanics and theory. This first Talks episode covers bad design, deceptive design, and what AI is doing to the design trade. The question "Do you think there's such a thing as objectively bad design or is it always contextual?" This one comes from Thorbjørn and Martin's own list of talking points rather than a listener submission. No source platform (Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) is named in this episode. If you want your own question answered on a future episode, see "Got a question of your own?" below. What we talk about Thorbjørn's answer is yes to both: design is contextual, but there's still a floor under it. If a design doesn't solve the user's problem, or does something other than what the user expected (a button labeled "start" that doesn't start), that's objectively bad, whoever's judging. Two examples: No Man's Sky, which technically delivered the open-ended procedural worlds it promised, but with so little to actually do in them that players felt cheated, and other promised features missing on top of that. And the 1990s BBC soap Eldorado, badly made on every level, canceled fast, and later loved precisely for how bad it was. Then design that works exactly as intended, just not for the user. Thorbjørn calls it "good design with a bad experience": airline booking flows that nickel-and-dime you step by step, mobile game ads showing mechanics the game doesn't have, "frustration" marketing baiting clicks by showing someone playing badly, freemium puzzle games that stall you right before a win. Thorbjørn shares a story from his own company, Keepit, targeted by a scam using its name and branding to sell fake storage devices. Martin connects it to AI-cloned podcasts lifting a show's notes, art, and titles while swapping in generated audio. From there, the episode's central prediction: AI won't take your job, but someone using AI will, unless you keep the craft AI can't fake. Thorbjørn's parallel is Warcraft III's map editor, powerful and easy enough that it flooded the game with amateur maps; the real problem wasn't letting people create, it was surfacing the good stuff. He expects the same with AI-generated design and voice work: once speed stops being the differentiator, craftsmanship and knowing what actually works becomes the job. Mentioned in this episode No Man's Sky — delivered the promised procedural worlds, but with too little to do in them; other promises went unmet too.Eldorado (TV series, BBC, 1992) — Martin's "so bad it's good" example.Candy Crush Saga — referenced for its near-win-then-pay mechanic.Warcraft III World Editor — referenced for flooding the game with user-made maps and the challenge of surfacing the good ones.Emotional Design (Don Norman) — source of the visceral/behavioral/reflective framework applied to the chair examples.S2E9 – Design and AI — the earlier episode where "AI won't take your job, but people who use AI will" was first discussed.S2E20 – UI is not design — referenced directly ("we touched upon that earlier in the episode about UI").S2E3 – Hicks Law — named as an example of the mechanic-level deep dives Learn will cover.Fitts's Law — not covered yet, named as a topic for a future Learn episode.Cognitive Load — not covered yet, named as a topic for a future Learn episode. Got a design question or dilemma you're stuck on? Send it to Thorbjørn and Martin through the contact form at hiddenbydesign.net and it might become a future episode.
