A short primer on Action-Centered Design
Tools follow action, just like form follows function. Action-Centered Design is a versatile framework that enables designers to design for actions first.
“Eyeglasses are a good tool—you look at the world, not the eyeglasses” - “World is not a desktop”, Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC 1994
Case Study 1: Designing distraction-free computers for students to address the problem of smartphone addiction.
Designing a platform of ambient computers using Action Centered Design
The Thought Lamp is a Platform built for, and using Action-Centered Design
A versatile design framework
Action-Centered Design expands well-beyond a single platform. It's a versatile general design framework that can be used to design everything from apps to systems to interact art projects.
Further Reading
Designing Distraction Free Computers
Designing distraction free computers using an Action-Centric Design approach.
Vidit Bhargava
Beyond Sparkles and Chat
AI helps best when it stops taking the center-stage
Vidit Bhargava
Bringing Word of the Day by LookUp to Apple TV
How an action-centered-design framework and SwiftUI helped me build the Apple TV app for Word of the Day by LookUp in an afternoon’s worth of work.
Vidit Bhargava
Action Centered Design Framework
Full video of my Action Centered Design Framework talk at the ARCtic conference in Oulu; March 2025.
Vidit Bhargava
The way we interact with apps is changing, so should the way they are designed.
The current state of apps and the advent of Apple Intelligence makes it important to have an action centered design approach to designing apps. The phone is only a part of a much larger ecosystem.
Vidit Bhargava
Mark Weiser's The World is not a Desktop essay that forms the ideological basis of the design framework: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/174800.174801