TOXIC UX
June 2 - 16, 2026
To resist toxic UX, we must first understand it. Why is it so hard to stop an infinite scroll? Why is your thumb already twitching when your phone buzzes in your pocket? In this course - led by an instructor with over a decade of experience building these systems at Meta, Amazon, and Google - we will go deep into the design principles of coercive attention capture. Drawing on the work of Jenny Odell, Neil Postman, and others, we will ask: How do these UX techniques operate on the body? How do they narrow consciousness? What possibilities of attention do they foreclose?
Once we understand, we will develop strategies for resistance and explore possibilities for non-toxic UX. If toxic systems collapse our attention into one thing (the reflexive, the reactive, the monetizable), what other shapes of attention are possible, and how might we design for those instead?
Each student will create, over the course of the seminar, a personal attention artifact: a designed object or practice built around your specific patterns, pressure points, and the conditions under which you are most alive to the world.
No background in UX or design is necessary. Liberation from Toxic UX is for everyone.
Led by product designer and writer Ashley Glover.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 2nd-16th
Photo credit: Maxim Hopman.
