At this year’s FOO Conference, co‑facilitators Matt Webb and the author ran a hands‑on workshop titled “Designing for and Against the Manufactured Normalcy Field.” The session unpacked Venkatesh Rao’s theory that users accept new tech by shrinking mental adjustments, using familiar metaphors and design tricks that hide strangeness. Participants applied the model to a range of emerging and everyday products.

The whiteboard split into three zones: “Things That Feel Weird,” “Things That Feel Normal,” and “Things We Use To Feel About Things.” Weird entries listed cutting‑edge ideas such as smile‑detecting chips, Mechanical Turk, self‑driving cars, smart prosthetics, Google Glass and brain‑reading tech. Normal items spanned mundane staples—from pet‑keeping and refrigerators to centralized banking and Chinese manufacturing—highlighting where design can either normalize or defamiliarize.

The final column surfaced cultural tactics—personification, routine, gamification, domestication, and even medical framing—that help push concepts toward or away from the field. Rao argues that successful UX deliberately manufactures just enough normalcy for radical tech to slip in, a principle echoed in Apple’s iPad ads that present the tablet as a “glass magazine.” The workshop proved the framework’s practical value for product strategy.