Designing Things People Hate

Course at a glance

What this course is

A twelve-week course built on one thesis: design is the deliberate arrangement of choices, and whoever controls the choices controls the behaviour. You don't memorise a list of dark patterns — you build them, deliberately, so you learn to recognise the same moves in the wild. Everything before week 12 is practice for the Redemption Project, where you turn that practice on something real.

What you submit

Four assessments, each closing one of the semester's blocks: the Hate Catalogue (15%, week 3), The Worst Interface (25%, week 6), the Hostile Design Experiment (20%, week 9), and the Redemption Project (40%, week 12). Assessment has the full criteria for each.

Where to start

Open Sessions and read week 1, The Hate Wall. Bring three ordinary things you already hate using, each specific enough that a stranger could recognise it — those three go straight into the class's shared Hate Catalogue on day one. Start there.

What you will do

Every week you take something people already hate — a form, a checkout, a queue, a subscription flow — and work out why it works on them. Then you build your own version, deliberately: a catalogue of hateable design, an interface engineered to frustrate, an experiment that tests whether your hostility actually lands. By week 12 you take one you built or found and redeem it, with the receipts to say what changed and why.

Who it is for

Third-year students with some HCI or interaction-design grounding who want to understand manipulation by building it, not just naming it. You should already be comfortable prototyping an interface end to end; this course spends its time on why the interface behaves the way it does, not on how to wire one up.

How the semester holds together

Where to go next