Design Dialogues · Calm Design Lab Session
An intimate session on designing for attention and care
Calm Design is an approach to creating experiences that respect people’s attention, cognitive limits, and wellbeing. It’s design that favors clarity, depth, and intentionality over noise, speed, and endless engagement.
The Calm Design Lab Session is a small, in person session for designers and product thinkers who want to reflect more deeply about the impact of what they build. Together, we’ll explore what it really means to design for calm today, when most products compete for attention, speed, and constant engagement.
Part conversation, part structured practice, the session is intentionally slower and more reflective than a typical workshop or lecture. It combines tools and research methods drawn from UX, strategic design, semiotics, and Calm Design research. Together, we’ll use them to look at our own projects and questions, and to surface tensions, assumptions, and opportunities we don’t usually notice in day to day work.
We work primarily offline with printed materials. No laptops. No performance pressure. Just space to think, question assumptions, and experiment.
The goal is simple: To leave with more clarity, a few practical tools you can reuse, and a felt sense of how design can be more responsible, grounded, and caring.
What makes this Lab special
✦ Slow paced by design
✦ Offline first to reduce cognitive noise
✦ Focused on systemic and ethical implications, not only interface improvements
✦ Built for depth rather than inspiration
✦ Structured reflection combined with practical tools
This first edition is a pilot session and a shared learning space. Participant reflections will help refine the tools and shape future lab sessions.
What you will get
✦ Explore how digital systems shape human attention and behavior.
✦ Learn the foundations of the Calm Design approach.
✦ Experiment with reflective tools to analyze products and services.
✦ Develop a new lens to think about time, attention, and human experience in design.
✦ Leave with practical questions and frameworks they can apply to their own design practice.
RSVP
Places are limited to 12 participants
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Meet the expert: Audrey Lingstuyl
Audrey is a strategic designer and researcher with over 18 years of experience working across design, communication, and digital systems. She holds a PhD in Art and her work explores how design shapes human attention and experience. Audrey is the founder of Calm Design Lab, a research and educational initiative exploring how design shapes human attention. Through research, writing, workshops, and collaborative experiments, the lab develops frameworks and reflective tools that help designers create technologies that respect human rhythms, cognitive limits, and embodied experience.
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✦ Hosted in The Meeting Room at Montoya, a comfortable space designed for professional encounters
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What is Design Dialogues?
Design Dialogues is a trusted community for experienced designers where we can speak openly about those questions we keep to ourselves.
We keep the group intentionally small to allow deep and meaningful conversations to unfold naturally. Come ready to listen, gain fresh perspectives, and create real connections with the design community — free from corporate jargon or project showcases.