How design trains attention – and what disappears as a result

This book examines how design shapes attention over time, influencing what users notice, ignore, or come to take for granted in everyday environments.

Drawing on cognitive psychology, perception research, and design practice, Sofie Beier shows how attention is gradually withdrawn from stable, familiar, or repeatedly irrelevant elements. Through mechanisms such as habituation, learned irrelevance, and predictive processing, design decisions can render absences, changes, and constraints effectively invisible, even when they are meaningful or consequential.

Combining experimental research with case studies from typography, interfaces, wayfinding, furniture, and everyday objects, the book demonstrates how design can unintentionally reinforce rigid habits and attentional blind spots, or alternatively support reorientation, learning, and adaptive interaction.