Design with Human Nature in Mind

A council adds an anonymous online form so residents can report fly-tipping. Within a month most of the reports are about neighbours — the wrong bin put out, a car parked on the verge, a garden that has been left to go over. The form works exactly as specified. Nobody designed it for what a person will do when handed an anonymous channel and a grievance.

Design that assumes good faith is not neutral. It hands the advantage to whoever is prepared to act in bad faith, and the cost falls on people who were never part of the design conversation. Every system is a set of incentives before it is anything else, and people respond to incentives far more reliably than they respond to intentions. Fear, status and scarcity shape behaviour inside a product the same way they shape it in a workplace or a queue. Building as though they won't is itself a decision, taken quietly, with consequences somebody else absorbs later.

The card runs ten practices in two columns — five for leaders and designers, from anticipating misuse to building deliberate friction into high-impact systems and rewarding integrity rather than throughput; five for individuals and communities, on recognising what a new tool is amplifying in you and holding to account the people who claim a technology was inevitable. It's for anyone who has watched a feature get used for something nobody wrote down.

It comes from The Next Evolution, where the fuller argument about psychological truth in design gets made at length. The card doesn't need the book to make sense — it stands on its own.

Print it, or send it to whoever is about to sign off a launch date.

Anticipating misuse costs time that nobody has budgeted for. What would have to go wrong in your organisation before that time got found?