Life as User Experience book cover
New Book from DigTek Press

Life as User Experience

Designing Your Days According to Software Principles

by André Berg-Stølen

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I build apps. Simple tools. Radical constraints. One task at a time. Along the way, I noticed something: the principles that make software worth using — intentional constraints, thoughtful defaults, removing friction — also make life worth living.

But this isn't another productivity book promising to optimize you into a better version of yourself.

This is about what happens when your carefully designed systems fail. When seasons change and what worked perfectly stops working at all. When you wake up one Tuesday feel disconnected and adrift. When you have to let go of identities, habits, and relationships that once served you but no longer do.

Drawing from Norwegian design philosophy — where "digg" means pleasantly good — this book explores life design as an ongoing practice, not a problem to solve.

It's honest about failure, recovery, maintenance, and the uncomfortable gap between who you want to be and who you actually are.

No 10-step systems. No perfect routines. No promise of transformation.

Just small, thoughtful adjustments. Responsive structure. Permission to be seasonal, to break sometimes, to design a life that's appropriate to who you actually are right now.

If you're looking for revolution, this isn't it. If you're looking for something digg — thoughtfully built, honestly lived, intentionally unfinished — then maybe this is for you.

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What you'll find inside

Software principles applied to life design — with honesty about what works and what fails

Constraint as liberation

How thoughtful limitations create freedom rather than restriction — in software and in living

Seasonal adjustment

Life design as ongoing practice. What works in summer fails in winter. That's not failure — that's being human.

Graceful degradation

How to design systems that fail well, recover quickly, and adapt to changing circumstances

Norwegian wisdom

Concepts like "digg" (pleasantly good) and "takk for nå" (thanks for now) as design principles

Intentional defaults

Designing your environment so the right choices become automatic, not effortful

Appropriately unfinished

Permission to never have it all figured out. Progress as practice, not destination.

About the author

André lives in Norway and builds apps that respect attention. Watching life systems fail — and gleaning parallels to software design — he has learned more from the failures than the successes. This is his first book about what he's learned — mostly about constraints, seasons, recovery, and the art of being appropriately unfinished.

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Publication Details

Title: Life as User Experience Subtitle: Designing Your Days According to Software Principles Author: André Berg-Stølen ISBN: 978-82-998988-1-2 Publisher: Self-published (Berg, André) Published: October 3, 2025 Format: eBook Pages: 179 Language: English

Available now

Life as User Experience is available as an eBook on Apple Books

Get on Apple Books

Also available in the Norwegian National Library, and listed in OpenLibrary.org and Goodreads