Week 5 Session: Make It Worse

The semester's first build — take a working interface and make it significantly worse, without breaking it

22 March 2027

Before the session#

Bring a normal, working interface — yours or a supplied starter — that you are prepared to make worse over the next two weeks.

In the session#

The Bad Design Studio: you’re handed a simple, working interface — a checkout, a booking system, a registration form, a settings page — and the brief is deceptively simple: make it significantly worse without breaking it. You cannot remove functionality; you can only introduce friction. The session works through the menu of options — more cognitive load, harder-to-find information, new ambiguity, extra unnecessary decisions, added waiting, error recovery that punishes mistakes — and you start applying them to your own interface.

Afterwards#

This is the semester’s first making exercise: from “I recognise bad design” to “I can deliberately produce it.” Keep building through week 6 — Assessment 2, the Worst Interface, is due at the end of that week.