Where Positive Flow Can Thrive: A Critical Approach to User Experience and Control in the Digital Workspace

Building on critical theory approaches to experiential digital labour, this article examines the expanding discursive influence of user experience (UX) within workplace computational cultures. Aligned with experiential industries, Silicon Valley ideologies, and an emotional turn in human-computer interaction (HCI), UX has also featured in HR change management and technology implementation strategies. Yet, despite contributions from critical library studies, the managerial use of UX in shaping digital labour remains under-scrutinised. The article contends that UX operates behind a discursive veil of value-neutrality. This is a discourse of user centrality which masks epistemological gaps in UX research, ignoring the reduction of complexity to consumable moments of interaction and excluding broader social and cultural dimensions of experience in the workplace. This article further interrogates the convergence of UX principles with positive psychology and wellbeing discourses—what it terms Positive UX. Drawing on salutogenic models, Positive UX promotes workplace resilience through emotional optimisation rather than addressing structural harms. The article traces this framework from Don Norman’s emotional design to contemporary affective workplace technologies, arguing that measurable positive states not only defer workplace pathologies but also conceal control mechanisms. Finally, the article reframes Positive UX through a trajectory between Foucauldian surveillance and a Deleuzean-inspired affect theory. By doing so, the author proposes that UX transforms workers into pre-emptive temporal prototypes or probes—subject to continual modulation, engagement, and role expansion—within disruptive market environments.