Digital archive of micro-disobedience among cognitive workers.
About
Unguilty Pleasures is a critical design project exploring the emotional and political dimensions of contemporary work culture. Developed during my Master’s in Design Innovation & Citizenship at The Glasgow School of Art, the project investigates how ideas of productivity, autonomy and workplace happiness shape everyday experience—especially within digitally mediated forms of labour.
The project began during the first year of the pandemic, when remote work became a widespread reality and systems of workplace monitoring and performance tracking accelerated. While initially focused on employee surveillance technologies, the research gradually shifted toward a broader question: how do people preserve agency inside environments increasingly structured around optimisation, self-management and the expectation to remain constantly engaged? Rather than treating design as a tool for producing solutions, I approached the project as a way of opening up critical conversation around systems that often feel invisible or inevitable. Unguilty Pleasures became both a research project and a public invitation to rethink our relationship with work.
Research context
The project was informed by research across post-work studies, labour theory, workplace surveillance and psychopolitics. I was particularly interested in the tension between the language of autonomy promoted by contemporary workplaces and the increasingly intensive forms of measurement and performance that accompany it. Ideas of flexibility, authenticity and wellbeing are often presented as signs of progress, yet they frequently coexist with subtle forms of control and with pressure to remain visibly productive, enthusiastic and emotionally available.
The theoretical research drew on authors including David Graeber, Byung-Chul Han, William Davies and Eva Illouz, whose work helped frame the relationship between labour and the aesthetics of positivity. Alongside this, I conducted a series of conversations with researchers and practitioners working across political economy, management studies and technology ethics. These interviews expanded the project beyond workplace trends and grounded it within broader questions of labour, culture and contemporary capitalism.
Engaging the Publics
The central part of the project involved working directly with people employed in corporate and technology environments. I invited participants into a two-stage conversation process, creating space for both open dialogue and more reflective follow-up. These conversations focused less on gathering measurable data and more on understanding lived experience: workplace rituals, emotional expectations, tensions around performance and everyday negotiations around autonomy.
To extend these interviews, I designed a series of physical reflective artifacts inspired by cultural probes. Participants received a package by post containing playful prompts, writing exercises and a diary to complete over several weeks. The tasks encouraged them to reflect on workplace habits, emotional performance and small personal behaviours that often go unspoken. At a time when almost all communication had moved online, the tactile and physical nature of these materials created a slower and more personal form of engagement. The returned responses became one of the richest parts of the project, revealing both frustration and humour, but also the subtle strategies people develop to protect their time, boundaries and sense of control.
Insight: micro-emancipations
As the research developed, one theme consistently resurfaced: small everyday acts through which people quietly preserve autonomy at work. I described these as micro-emancipations—minor gestures that resist the logic of optimisation without necessarily appearing political from the outside.
These acts could be simple: taking a longer break than necessary, stepping away from a task, refusing performative enthusiasm, ignoring workplace rituals or allowing space for boredom. What made them meaningful was not scale but intent. They revealed a desire to reclaim time and agency within systems built around constant activity and self-management.
This insight became the conceptual foundation of the project. Rather than framing these moments as laziness, guilt or lack of ambition, Unguilty Pleasures reframed them as everyday expressions of autonomy—small but meaningful forms of resistance embedded in ordinary working life.
Design and digital experience
The final outcome took the form of a public website designed as an open archive for collecting and sharing workplace confessions and small acts of resistance. I wanted the experience to feel direct, playful and slightly confrontational.
Visually, the project draws from internet brutalism and early web aesthetics, combining pixelated typography with references to confession, guilt and digital labour. The graphic language intentionally contrasts corporate visual culture with something more raw and expressive. The interface invites visitors to anonymously submit their own stories and browse others. Alongside written contributions, the platform includes a simple drawing tool that allows visitors to sketch directly with a mouse or trackpad. This interaction was intentionally low-fidelity and playful—closer to doodling during work than completing a formal survey.
The platform was designed not as a finished statement but as a living structure capable of growing over time. It functions simultaneously as a digital publication, participatory archive and design intervention.
Navigation
Outcome and reflection
Unguilty Pleasures launched as a functional website and continues to exist as both an archive and an open-ended research platform. More than a single output, the project became a way of testing how design can create space for collective reflection around work and everyday systems of control.
For me, it marked an important shift in practice. It deepened my interest in combining critical theory with participatory methods and strengthened an approach to design centred on research, experimentation and public dialogue. Rather than reducing complexity into neat solutions, the project embraces ambiguity and creates space for tension, humour and contradiction.
That perspective continues to shape my work today across design research, teaching and critical practice.