By Mara Ellison · 2026-06-15 · 7 min read
The Discipline of Noticing
Every interface is designed to take your attention. The craft worth practising is what you do with the attention that's left.
Every interface you touch was designed by someone who wanted your attention, and most of them got it. The more interesting question is what you do with the attention that is left over — the slim margin the feed did not manage to claim.
I have come to think of noticing as a craft rather than a mood. It improves with deliberate repetition, and, like any craft, it mostly consists of removing the things that get in the way.
A concrete façade, mid-afternoon — the kind of surface you only see if you stop.
The first thing to remove is the assumption that attention is scarce by nature. It isn't scarce — it's captured. There is a difference, and the difference is where all the leverage lives.
Attention as a design material
Designers talk about colour and type and motion as materials. Attention is a material too — arguably the primary one — and we have spent fifteen years learning to mine it and almost none learning to return it.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Light through trees — a thing the feed will never schedule for you.
The good news is that the same tools that take attention can give it back. An interface can be built to end. A product can be designed to be finished with.
That is the whole argument, really. Not less technology — better-aimed technology. Tools that respect the thing they are spending.