Already thinking of my next zine

I woke up early this morning and an idea for a second zine just popped fully-formed into my head. It's weird how the subconscious works.

After a little bit of back-and-forth with my Little Robot Friend, I'm thinking of framing it as a "field guide for designing around the mind we actually have". That's in contrast to the ultra-rational one that we'll never achieve, nor would we actually want anyway.

This second zine could potentially forming part of a trilogy around "textures of attention". It's about human-computer interaction, but in ways that don't necessarily feel computer-ish.

If I use a similar structure as Field Notes on Productive Friction then it could look like:

1. The Groove – habits of thought you slide into automatically (status quo bias, sunk cost)
2. The Echo Chamber – belief reinforcement loops, confirmation bias, social proof
3. The Spotlight – availability heuristic and salience; what feels vivid overrides what’s true.
4. The Tilt – loss aversion, negativity bias; the mind’s weighting towards threat and loss
5. The Mirror – self-serving bias, projection bias; how we narrate our own role
6. The Shortcut – heuristics that are useful until they silently mislead (anchoring, representativeness)
7. The Fog – overconfidence, Dunning–Kruger, illusion of explanatory depth
8. The Grid – structural mental models like map vs territory, feedback loops, base rates, and checklists.
9. Mind Contours Self-Check – a mini protocol for noticing which contour you’re currently sliding into in a given situation.

The visuals would be fun to play with using the contours metaphor.

In terms of content, I could mix several page types:

• Incidents: anecdotes of where a contour shows up in everyday life (e.g. meetings, email threads, social media)
• Cross-sections: small diagrams treating a thought process like a cut-away of geology or anatomy (e.g. layers of evidence, pressures, shortcuts)
• Practices: tiny practical interventions to help get out of an unproductive groove
• Warnings: short notes in a box explaining how how platforms/institutions deliberately exploit specific contours