But gratification is weirder. It's, I call it the sensory
enchantment of everyday life. And it happens quickly.
It it isn't retrospective, it only takes place in the moment.
And if you let that moment go by, you sort of miss it forever.
It's around us constantly, all the time, but we often overlook
or don't notice it. And it provides these very small
scale little delights and pleasures that not only
sometimes are easy to overlook or to ignore, but we've even
been kind of culturally trained to push aside.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the AIGA Design
Podcast. My name is Li Shan Huang Co,
Executive Director of Learning and Programs here at AIGA, the
Professional association for Design.
Hello everyone, I'm Julia Donatello, Design Competitions
and Event Manager at AIGA. This season on the show we are
exploring the theme of eyes on design.
Looking at design through three eyes, the connecting eye, how
design connects with other fields and disciplines, the
critical eye, being self reflective about what design
does and how we practice it, and the future eye.
Looking at ways that design shapes the future.
And for today, we have the pleasure of receiving the guest,
Ian Bogost. He's a writer, designer and
scholar of media and technology. He's a contributing writer at
The Atlantic and the founding partner of Persuasive Games, a
game and design studio. He's also the author of 11
books. His games and artworks have been
played by millions of people, and they're held in permanent
collections around the world, including at the Smithsonian
American Art Museum. He's a professor at the
Washington University in Saint Louis, where he serves as Co
executive director of the Office of Public Scholarship.
His latest book, coming out now in July 2026, is called The
Small Stuff, How to lead a More Gratifying Life.
And that's the book is right here for the Yeah, we have our
copies and you can see. Watching us on YouTube, Yeah.
Yeah, for the ones watching us on YouTube.
And that's what we're here to talk to him about.
Ian, it's so great to have you on the show.
Oh, thank you so much. I'm really thrilled to be here
talking to you. So to go beyond the official
intro that Julia did so well, your career has spanned creating
video games to writing media criticism to now your latest
book where among other stories you share, you talk about the
importance of touching a velvet sofa and why that matters.
You write about the design world from both this insider and
outsider perspective, as somebody who designs games,
designs, experiences. And then also you have this
reflective distance as a critic, as an academic.
So, to give our listeners a little bit more context about
your work, could you describe how these very facets of your
practice connect together in your?
Head and you know, I've had this this amazing but very weird
career that's kind of hard to explain.
And when people ask me what what do you do?
My heart sort of falls out of my body in a in a way, But I think
that the through line is that I I've spent that whole career,
you know, studying and making experiences and and sometimes
those experiences are obviously design one software video games
are sometimes they're they're cultural systems.
I write books, for example, and articles for the Atlantic.
And then sometimes I'm looking at just ordinary, ordinary
objects and, and practices. He backpacks, lawn care,
haircuts, toasters. And I I really enjoy operating
at those various scales. The scale changes, but the
question doesn't. And the question is
fundamentally about how the things that people make shape
the way that they experience the world and then how the world
responds and, and, and pushes back on them.
And As for being a designer and a critic, both I, I don't
really, I don't really experience those roles as
separate activities. Sometimes you talk about like
the, the sort of theorist practitioner as a notion and as
if it's this sort of tidy balance where you're half one
and half the other or 75% one and 25% the other.
And it's, it's never that tidy, of course.
But you know, making something to me as a way of asking a
question and criticism is a way of answering one.
And then the, the, the reverse is, is also is also true.
So whether I'm making games or software or editing book series
or writing essays or books or making objects, they're all like
different methods for, for investigating and for pursuing
the same questions, for answering the same mysteries,
which is how do people make meaning from the world around
them? And sometimes I'd build an
object to see what happens to try to answer that question.
And sometimes I write about an object that I or someone else
has built. And I, I really see it as kind
of a dialectic, this cycle between practice and, and
criticism, like make stuff, step back, think about what was made
or what could be made and vice versa.
And I, I learned that lesson really early.
You mentioned my, my game in design studio, which is called
Persuasive Games. And, and then I wrote a book 2
decades ago now called Persuasive Games.
It's just like one example. If I was think, trying to think
about design philosophy abstractly.
And that's what the book is good for.
And then it's a well, OK, well, how do we put it into practice?
And how does putting it into practice lead to ways of
discussing it? Abstract and that that cycle has
just been perpetual for me. Like this little machine that
continually produces objects and then produces written or verbal
discourse about those objects. To follow up on that, is there a
difference for you between critique and reflection on games
because that is your core discipline as a designer versus
like other things like the the sofa or like a steering wheel or
yeah. It's a, you've asked a deeper
question than you may even realize, because I, I think the,
the design world and certainly the world of, of, of game
criticism or, and, and game design would see me in that way.
And I'm not sure if I see myself in, in that way any longer.
In a lot of ways, my relationship with games has been
fraught and has been a decades long process of trying to figure
out what it, what the lesson is to derive from, from games,
which are not a, a medium that the general public takes
seriously in the same way as, as, as the, as film or the novel
or even the designed object, you know, like the industrial
designed objects. And so I, I think it's fraught
for me. So one answer to your question
is my relationship with games has been a a long process of
asking what are the lessons that games can teach us about
ourselves, the world and our place in it.
And I keep moving further and further away from the game as an
object that has the where that lesson lives.
So it's less about like the entertainment value of the game
experience now and then it was like 10 years ago, it was about
play. I wrote a book on play.
I thought that's the that's the answer is the sort of ability to
have playful experience with anything was in that title of
the book, play anything, not just with a game experience.
And now with the new book, with the small stuff, it's like,
actually, maybe the play doesn't even matter.
It's just having, having a sensory encounter with the world
is it, is it is enough. So it's, it's kind of a, a, a,
a, a long way of saying I, I, I tried to, I've tried to keep an
open mind about the objects of interest and experience to me,
rather than maybe that's been a mistake.
Like it's much easier to drill down into a subject and become
better and better and more and more versed in it, you know,
whether that's architecture or industrial design or game design
or whatever your field is, you know, and I haven't done that.
I keep moving like further and further away to, to a more
distant orbit from the, the, the, the planetary body that,
that I'm supposedly moving around.
So like the it's, it's a, it's a kind of a weird identity crisis
for me all the time, but one that I don't that I feel very
comfortable in because it's really more about like, what's
the next question to ask and try to answer then, OK, this object
of study or of creation is like fixed and permanent for me.
And that's where I'm going to spend my time.
That's great, yen. I have to say that I've been
enjoying a lot your book. Great.
Thank you so much. And I think it, it provoked me
to very much connect with the physical world in a very like,
in a, in a very present way. So, you know, in the morning, I
opened the, the curtains at my house, make the bed, turn on the
coffee machine, hear the noise of the, the coffee machine.
So it's almost, it feels like because your, your book for me
was an invitation to really slow down and notice all this little
interactions with the physical world.
And I think that's a very much a very interesting place to be.
And I've been talking about this as, as if I'm experiencing your
book in in real life. So it's very, very cool.
And I wanted to hear more from you because I, I really
understand this provocative claim that your book offers.
And the thesis of your book is that the modern life has slowed
slowly robbed us from the small physical pleasures that I just
mentioned to you. Yeah, that we didn't even notice
that we were using right. So even.
Yeah, for me, I didn't even pay that much attention to all this.
So that I think that that's the, the, the, the, the strong
provocation there. And because as designers are
trained to to observe the world and shape how people experience
it. I wanted to hear from you if you
could elaborate on that. And, and what do you think is
the responsibility of designers, but also the opportunity for
them to change this journey in terms of the the experience with
physical, physical world? Right.
So I wrote the, I wrote the book for ordinary people to, to, to,
to use that phrase and, and you know, by which I mean folks who
don't necessarily work in the design professions like we do.
And I really didn't want to put the burden of solutions on them.
And, and you know, one of the things I argue in the book is
that it's not your fault. This feeling of what I call
dematerialization, of becoming disconnected from your your
sense of connection to the physical world that happened
through a set of systemic circumstances that you didn't
choose and that aren't your fault.
And, you know, you shouldn't internalize that blame.
And I I did that in part because most, most people don't have the
capacity as individuals to change the way the built
environment is designed, you know, or the way that big
organizations work to, to produce or culture that
environment. But if I were speaking to
designers or or to business leaders or lawmakers or urban
planners or what have you, I would say, yeah, like absolutely
you have a responsibility to preserve and advance the the
rich texture of everyday life. And I do worry that the design
community painting with A broad brush that the design community
has not arisen to that challenge, which isn't fatal.
It means we can still go back or or rich return to some of that
attention to the the small scale textured experience of sensory
life that is very much present in both the natural world and
the designs world. So I see it.
I see it in two ways. Even though there's not there's
not polemic in the book about like, oh, designers made our
world bad or something like that.
And that's not really what I believe.
It's complicated. But in the book I don't go into,
OK, well, here are the design world answers either.
And that's a really interesting, you know, future for this work
that I hope to be able to participate in with this
community is OK, what if you believe me that we lost this and
it's worth preserving or worth reclaiming, Then how do we do it
then how do we do it? And I, and I think that to me it
feels like just an enormous opportunity and a really
delightful up. Like I'm excited about it.
And when I put my design hat on to think about, OK, well, how
could we make some progress here?
Because I think it's, it can be really simple.
Like we we don't have to change the whole universe in order to
get like a slightly more gratified experiences from the
ones that we're already creating.
Reading through your book has given language to maybe some
latent feelings I've already had and some of the ways that I've
been trying to deal with what you call dematerialization.
So having been of remote work since basically the pandemic, I
remember, you know, at that time when the whole world shut down,
our dog was still alive at the time.
And I would just like notice how much he would relish going for
walks in the woods and just like stomping on the leaves and, and
the sound of that and how much he liked it.
Or nowadays I have a little garden and it's the height of
strawberry season. And so, you know, I spend all
day online in my computer, but just like the picking the
strawberries and tasting that is like literally like touching
grass, right? And, and feeling that, and so
coming, coming back to language, I wanted to get your help in
sussing this out. So the subtitle of your book is
How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.
And you differentiate between satisfaction as pride and
accomplishment and gratification in the sensory enchantment of
everyday life, which is where the the dog and the strawberry
examples come into plays come into play.
And so you also say that gratification is relatively
easy. So can you help us understand
these different words and how you distinguish between them?
Absolutely there, there's, there's three kinds of
contentment that I describe in in the book.
And the three are happiness, satisfaction and, and
gratification. This is not the only way of
slicing this pie, but it's the way that I did.
And happiness is the one that people think about all the time.
And there's like a whole industry of happiness and how to
be more happy in a whole like social psychology of what
happiness means. And I've always been somewhat
suspicious of it because what does what is happiness exactly,
actually? And one answer is it's just sort
of overall sense of general contentment with your plight in
your life. And it's usually focused on big
stuff, long term stuff, your family, your relationships, your
career, your home life, the place you live, the plight of
your children or your pets or what have you.
It's hard that we have a sense that it should be hard that that
that's what we're meaning. Lives and happiness is great and
I'm not against happiness, but it's different from satisfaction
notification, right? Yeah.
And, and satisfaction is, is, is also like big and it's, it's
like long term. And it also is somewhat
retrospective. So like you finish a big project
and you take pride in having accomplished it.
And that could be, oh, I, I completed this building that I,
that I was, that I designed and worked on.
Or it could mean like I mowed the lawn and I, you do kind of
put your hands in your hips and you look at what you've done and
you say, ah, I feel delight in, in seeing the, the whole thing
come together. And satisfaction's also, it's a
great feeling and we need it. And that pride and
accomplishment is really just so capable of delivering meaning
to, to humankind. But gratification is weirder.
It's it, I call it the sensory enchantment of everyday life.
And it happens quickly. It, it isn't retrospective.
It only takes place in the moment.
And if you let that moment go by, you sort of miss it forever.
It's around us constantly, all the time, but we often overlook
or don't notice it. And it provides these very small
scale little delights and pleasures that not only
sometimes are easy to overlook or to ignore, but we've even
been kind of culturally trained to push aside, you know, like
that gratification is bad because it's about indulgence
and sensory pleasure at the level of sin rather than the
level of meaning. And you know, like I have, I
have my, my water bottle here with me.
And you know, it's got, I don't know if you can hear it, but
it's got ice in it. And I can feel and hear the, the
ice tank against the metal interior of the, of the vessel.
And that's gratifying. So sometimes I just pick up my,
my water bottle and I, and I shake it and like, why do, why
do I do that? Like it doesn't have purpose.
It doesn't relate to the form of the object, but, but it, it
reminds me that I am connected to it, that there are, there are
these objects called ice cubes that will eventually melt.
And that I can, I can feel and hear them exist near me as like
friends, you know, and, and, and that, that's what, that's what,
that's what like what gratification is and feels like,
which has nothing to do with my health and why I might want to
hydrate, right? Or my sense of satisfaction and
having achieved a, an exercise or a personal goal that makes my
body, you know, more adept. So that's, that's sort of like
at A, at a general level, what those 3 terms mean to me.
And I, I love that you brought an example that you do it
yourself. And so it seems like the did you
feel that writing the book also was an invitation for you to
also pay attention to all these little interactions that you do
it you have? Yeah, this process has been,
it's been ongoing for me. You know, I've been working on
the book for four years or so. But when I think about it, this
is an obsession that I've had for much longer, and it does
connect to my interest in games to the to the point we discussed
earlier. Games are kind of like dumb
purposeless objects. They don't need to exist.
They don't really have utility, but they're intensely
compelling. Like what is it to make someone
want to play Candy Crush or Wordle everyday or, or, or why
do you like touching the joystick in the buttons of
Pac-Man or Defender in the arcade?
And like, there's not a great answer to it.
And that's, I think that's one of the places where this started
was my interest in the kind of the kind of purposelessness of,
of games or the relationship between games as designed
objects and as, as forms that have no, no structure or purpose
that's similar to to other kinds of of designed objects.
But I've also just been interested in ordinary objects
and ordinary life for a very long time.
And, you know, those are, those are certainly fall into the
purview of of design, but sometimes we don't take them as
seriously as we should. And when like the toast pops up
from the toaster, I think everyone knows that they like
that and and that they delight in it.
But but then we don't really, we don't stop to think about it.
We don't take it as seriously as even the form of that object, as
a piece of industrial design, which is which is also been been
notable to me. And I think some of this is like
like gratification is a little funny as a concept because it
lives in the experience itself. It's like the pleasure of using
the thing and inhabiting it rather than the outcome that it
produces. Like did the product solve a
problem? Did I accomplish my goal?
Did the intervention that it that it, it offered improve, you
know, my life or my community? And those are important
questions, but they're different from asking whether something is
gratifying. I would also say, you know, as
someone who's worked in, in and around software and high tech,
high tech, the high tech industries for a very long time.
So, so much of design got like filtered through computation,
through design in the human computer interaction or, or, or
or interaction designer experience, design sense of the
word as that got overtaken by the computing sector.
And I do think that that that kind of corner of the design
world kind of gradually stopped caring about experience and
mostly became interested in outcomes.
I realize that's a strange thing to say given that we have this
whole field subfield of design called experience design.
But isn't it really about accomplishing outcomes for the
designers or for the organizations that employ them
rather than for the, the so-called user, for the people
that are actually engaging with the design, with the designed
object, you know, and feeling the way the world works in a way
that designed objects allow. Like the, the, the ice in my
water bottle or the, or the, or the toast popping up from the
toaster or what have you. That just all became downplayed,
you know? But I've always been just just
so enamored of them, just obsessed almost with those kinds
of encounters. And I finally decided, OK, let
me take the obsession seriously. And we pretend like it makes
sense and try to make it make sense beyond my own weird brain.
Yeah, I love it. And I think another reference
that reminded me when I was reading your book was the movie
Amelie Poulan. Oh yeah, sure.
I love that movie. Yeah.
Yeah, it's a very much like an extension of what you what you
bring in your book. And I think well as you were
saying all about the ordinary life and objects.
I understand that in a way you revisit the normandor which for
the designers, many of the designers know about this
concept from from this book here.
Don't know. Yeah, I have it here.
So it's which is called the design of everyday things.
So very much aligned with the conversation we've been having,
but in a way you update it in a more provocative way just
because you're you're, you're bringing that the problem isn't
bad design anymore, as Don Norman brings.
It's the good intentions, the ADA compliance, the file codes,
the motorized automation of the physical world that have made
the doors, as we're using as the metaphor here, physically resist
us. So for you, I wanted to hear
from you a little bit more what, what's your take on that?
Is it is, is it a design problem?
Is it a policy problem? Or is it something that us as
designers will have to really deal with it and have to accept?
Right, right. I do have this whole chapter on
doors. Like why you can't open doors?
It was funny because I was like, didn't as I was writing, I was
like, Oh, I have to put the Don Norman stuff in.
And I was like, didn't, didn't Norman do all this already?
And I was like, I realize, no, there's still more to say.
But it was also interesting because as you say, I mean, the
the Norman door is such a familiar example to us in the
design community. Maybe it's even feels cliche,
but outside of our community, most people have never even
heard heard of that. They haven't read that book.
And, and even the idea that there is perceived affordances
and you don't know which hat, which, which side of the door to
push or pull on, that's, that's new to people, which is, which
is, which is interesting. I think in answer to your
question, only one of the pictures I try to paint there is
that it's, it's not just like the handle is hard to see or
hard to hard to understand how to use.
But but yeah, now there's like regulatory environments have
made it so that like you have to be able to open the door
automatically. And there's, and there's, you
know, accessibility concerns, there's fire codes that may have
to make it close, you know, with a motor, if there's a fire
inside and all this kind of stuff.
And I, I think the way I would, I would answer the question is
that most problems in the world today are complicated.
They're, there's what we sometimes call wicked problems.
They don't have simple solutions and they can't be solved by like
willpower or ingenuity or aesthetics alone.
And, and doors are a good example of this, even though
they seem really simple, like we've got ADA requirements and
fire codes and liability concerns and energy efficiency
standards and security and automatic all this stuff.
And like, those are all legitimate, reasonable concerns
that should be addressed. And that means that the modern
door isn't like the result of bad design, but the accumulation
of of all these good intentions. And then when all the good
intentions get brought together, something goes terribly awry.
So you might think of the the problem is 1 of competing
successes rather than obvious failures.
And I think from a design perspective, it's like, OK, that
is the condition of the design now.
That is sort of where we start from.
And just as everything in the world feels as though it's
become much more complicated today, and then it was one or
two or three generations ago, so it is with design.
We don't just like slap up a door any longer.
And there are consequences to that, to that fact.
Many good and many not exactly bad, but, you know, complicated.
So yeah, designers need to not just accept but embrace that
circumstance as one that is is no intrinsic to every design
problem, even seemingly simple ones like we need a an entry
point into this. Structure.
I wanted to go back to this theme that you brought up
earlier of like the byproduct versus the intention of design,
right? You're talking about user
experience design versus like outcomes design, getting people
to keep on scrolling in an app or to buy something in
e-commerce. I remember years ago I had the
chance to visit an Audi factory at a previous job and they
showed us or they're telling us about how there was a team
dedicated to just like the sound and the feel of the doors
opening and closing in this like Audi like way, right?
So that's like a very extreme example of like a luxury car and
how much intention goes into like these little things, not
even how the car drives, just how the door opens and closes.
But then as a counter example, in your book, you talk about
your friend Tom and his experience with this thick
masonry paint, and you have this great onomatopoeia.
I don't know if I'm saying this right up the Schwach loop.
Yeah. That's that's it, yeah.
Schwach loop of this, it's more of a secondary sensory output of
just the way that this paint goes on his walls, right?
And I don't think anybody designed the paint to do that
and to have that pleasurable sound and feel of that.
So, yeah, could you explore this somewhere?
I mean, there are those, there's the Audi example, and then
there's like the the paint where it just happens to be
pleasurable. Yeah, I know.
So I think it's a great, I think the Audi example is really
helpful because you know, we've been, we've been trained to
think of those, those, those, those experiences, those
connections that create gratification as like secondary
effects. You know, you're making a car
first and foremost and has to drive and be safe.
And then like the doors should work in a certain way.
If you have time and if it's a luxury vehicle, then you can
devote the attention to it. But when you think about it,
that stuff isn't secondary at all.
It's, it's the part we actually experience and that we
experience with as much regularity and maybe even more,
more frequency than the than the driving itself.
You, you, you turn over the ignition of the car and drive it
through the city, but you open and close the door every time
too. So to start from it's, it's
strange and intriguing to me that we would think of the sound
that the door makes as something to save for later if we have
time, as if it's not a fundamental first order part of
experiencing a vehicle we remember like the weight of the
handled or the resistance of the hinge or the sound of the latch.
And, and that experience isn't confined to the, the intended
function at all. Like we ought to be noticing it,
even if it's not the thing that we thought we were making.
Because then when you go to use and try it out, you see it now
you know, if you're making masonry sealer, then you're
principally concerned with getting an affordable product
out that works well. But it is a part of the product,
right? And it should be a part of, I
don't know what masonry sealer design processes are like.
I would love to learn more about that.
But because it's so viscous, that outcome has consequences
for using and applying it, which I know that painters talk about
because they have to actually, you know, do the work.
But my, my, my friend Tom and I use this stuff are, are, are
amateurs who don't know how to use it, use it properly.
So it's like, well, there's just an opportunity to think about a
design problem that we wouldn't normally construe as a design
problem. This is maybe in part because
design culture still tends to privilege what a thing does or
how it looks over how it feels like.
We ask whether the product works, whether the task can be
completed, you know, whether the user succeeded at accomplishing
the goal or whether they accomplished at helping us
achieve our goal. But those aren't the only
questions. And, and the sensory character
of the experiences we design. Like if those things don't
matter, I don't know what, I don't know what we're doing.
I don't know what we're doing, you know, So I, I wouldn't say
that like designers should start intentionally engineering every
sound or smell or texture like that could become rot and a
little precious. And I also think that the, the
turn to like you remember, like the turn to delight in UX and
user experience design. Oh, we're going to create these
delight. And I, I think maybe that was
risky and failed. It was like more of a way to
make designers feel good, especially as they started
designing experiences just to produce those outcomes we were
talking about, right? Yeah.
But maybe there doesn't need to be a purpose, you know?
Some of the examples I discussed in the book are powerful because
they're not designed and they're not instrumentalized.
And that's what makes them such interesting lessons like Tom
wasn't painting the wall to achieve the automata poetic
sensory delight of Shraksh looping, but that delight emerge
from the encounter. And when it did, it was real and
and it was important. And from there you kind of go,
oh, like from Tom's perspective, this is something that mattered
to me. I want to do it more.
And if we turn it over on its head and say, well, we're from a
design perspective, the lesson is that could be the first place
you start. That could be where the design,
that where the, where the design begins.
And so maybe as a way of of asking, well, how would we go
about that process as designers? It's like we've become so
focused on optimizing experience that we've forgotten how much
experience arises accidentally. They're not features, but kind
of consequences. And that's a pretty easy change
to me like, OK, well, if I'm going to be interested in
accidental or emergent properties of design, then I can
very easily commit to paying different attention to that
design opportunity in the, in the refinement, iteration,
testing, etcetera process, right.
But you know, there's, there's a, there's another, it's like a
flip side version of it that isn't about function, but it's
about form. That like designs obsession with
function has come alongside an equally obsessive interest in
form apart from use, which is like a a super kind of ironic
situation to find ourselves in. When Louis Sullivan coined the
the famous design axiom, form follows function, which is like
100 more than 125 years old now, right?
What he actually meant was that the shape or aesthetics of a
designed object, like a building in his case, that it should
arise from its purpose. But that's not even how we treat
that idea anymore. It's more like forms.
It's entirely outside of a function.
And I think that by separating those two ideas of form and
function and isolating them from one another over a century,
really, you know, from of 20th and 21st century design,
something fell out or a lot of things maybe fell out of the
middle. And one of the things that
dropped out is, is like gratifying design that that just
didn't become as important as having either the correct
function or the correct form, whether or not those two things
were connected, let alone how they felt to use.
Despite the fact that we spent decades talking about actually
designing how they felt to use without really doing so in a
committed way. Yeah, that's great.
So I think bridging on what you just saw just said about the
fact that we've been so much focused in optimizing the
experience. So designers are currently
briefed to to make experience as frictionless as possible.
And this has been a very strong principle in UX practice.
And and now there is a counter movement that says that
designers are talk are more talking about bringing back
meaningful friction. And I think your argument seems
to be different from both saying that gratification isn't about
making things harder, but it's it's about noticing what's
already there. And I wanted to hear your
thoughts in in in into that. Like are we asking the?
Right, yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up because I I have
been a little upset about the recent obsession with with
friction as a solution to a supposed problem we we face as
users and designers. And you're right.
I think it's wrong. I think it's entirely wrong
headed to hold that friction is what's missing from the designed
and the built environment. But I, I understand why that
idea came about. Like everything became so smooth
and so seemingly frictionless. And, you know, like the most
evident version of that is, is they're just glass screens
everywhere, which are literally frictionless or smooth.
And, and so like, oh, what's the opposite of that?
Well, friction, that would be, you know, the obvious answer.
But if you stop and think about the experiences you actually
have with designed objects, then friction is the, it's the wrong
solution. So I encounter this all the
time. There was one that I, I
experienced just just yesterday by happenstance, I was opening a
container of sesame seeds for a Gelato recipe that I was working
on. And, and it was a new bottle and
it had one of those like freshness or safety seals.
And, and it was the kind that has the sort of vertical folded
clear plastic tab and you're supposed to pull up on the tab
to release the seal. And like, it seems like a good
design because it's got a thing you pull on.
But I just, I just couldn't do it.
I couldn't gain a purchase on it.
And this happens to me all the time.
It feels like, you know, so I had to cut the thing out in the
end and, and then I got it open, but it was like the edge was,
was, was ratty now. And like, do I do I try to peel
that off with my fingertip or what do I do?
And like, that's friction. That's definitely friction, you
know, but that's not what I wanted.
What I wanted wasn't for it to be harder.
I wanted the gratifying delight of successfully releasing the
seal and then any like hearing it pop, you know, as it came
off, maybe. And then and then disposing of
the of the waste that it produced in a way that that
extended that gratification for a moment that let me linger in
the sensations that I'd had and then moving on with my life to
the next thing. And that's just not a, a
friction problem at all. Or, you know, at a higher level,
maybe in a in a way that feels more important that the recent
reactions against touchscreen interfaces like an automobiles
say, you know, not really a problem of friction either.
Like, like we clearly, clearly, clearly took things far too far
to make drivers use effectively an iPad to adjust their their
radio or climate while piloting this many ton vehicle at highway
speed. Like that was a bad idea.
But the return and it's it's only just starting the the
return to like neural knobs that turn into fine increments
instead. That's not really about
introducing friction. It's about restoring a better
sensory connection between the operator and the machine.
And then once you create that sensory connection, then the
gratification can arise again. I'm feeling the knob, you know,
in my, in my fingertips and I hear it click and I can, I can
determine that my action has had the intended consequence, but
just any consequence whatsoever. And that makes me feel
gratified. Yeah.
So I'm like super down on on friction as an answer.
It's the it's the wrong answer. It's understandable why we came
to the answer because it feels like the opposite of of
smoothness and lightness and ease and disappearance and
transparency. But it's definitely not the way
forward to me. Yeah, that's, that's a great,
yeah, great example. And I think I'm, I'm, I would
like to bring another example that you mentioned in the book
that you write about how drinking from a particular kind
of Tumblr changes how something tastes.
Yeah, like scientifically, right.
Right. Yeah, There's been studies
there. It's amazing.
Yeah. And you call it multi modal
perception. And I mean, I'm sure packaging
and product designers probably know this by experience by
intuitively, but they rarely get the chance to make that argument
in the part of the brief as they're as they're designing the
the product or the package, right?
I think in line with the idea of the in reference of the Audi,
Audi, Audi doors. So I wanted to hear from you,
what would you change if that if that was taken seriously from a
design principle point of view and not just like a side effect
or a byproduct of yeah, of its its process.
Yeah. I mean, I, I like to start, I
think I want to say that like the most heroic design to me is,
is the one that produces the most ordinary, the most ordinary
things in the most general use and, and packaging design, which
you mentioned. Like, it may be just one of the
most interesting fields of design.
It brings together so many disciplines so synthetically of
industrial design and business and economics and food safety,
advertising, ecology or environmental design.
And like at a high level, I think we're just having a really
diverse and multifaceted set of interests and, and challenges or
constraints. That's just like always a great
place to be in. But like more helpfully maybe I
think it gets back to the the form function problem I was
mentioning earlier. Because like the really
interesting stuff, the most interesting and most gratifying
things, they seem to arise from a really serious and committed
marriage between form and and function.
And if you design in a way that produces an object that seems
less noticeable as an object, or at least seems less noticeable
to designers as an object, then you're probably on the right
like moral path. You're, you're in the right
plane. You know, of, of effort.
You remember the Philippe Stark juicer, this famous like, you
know, alien arthropod looking juicer that like everybody was
obsessed with for years. And, and first it was just an
art object and then it was like an actual industrial design, you
know, good and, and it's gorgeous, but.
I don't know if you've ever tried to use one, but it's
terrible as a as a juicer, actually.
It's like, not the juicer you want, you know?
It just gets stuff everywhere, right?
It just gets stuff everywhere. And it's a mess to clean up.
And you know, but if you think about something like the Oxo
Good Grips line of kitchen products, right?
Like that is that does not have the cultural prestige of a
Philippe Stark object. But they've literally spent
decades like just trying to make ordinary tasks like peeling
fruit, not just more functional and beautiful, but but more
gratifying to remember what it was like to, to use like a can
opener before we had the, the, the, those kinds of tools.
And you were focused more on, on the, the pain in your hand and
on than on the sensation of the, of the, of the can of beans
giving underneath you. So I think like stepping back
from those examples, part of the problem starts from like what
the question of what designers value and, and what, where they
derive professional meaning and, and credibility, What makes them
jealous of one another, even. And, and the, the, the
particular kind of like, like Tumblr cups that I discussed in
the book, these Carlisle sand tumblers.
Like it's just not likely to produce envy, I think among
professional designers, which is too bad because it's, it's not
just an incredible victory of design, but it's an ordinary
object that millions of people has touched millions of people's
lives. And yeah, like an iPhone has
also touched millions of people's lives.
But why would we put that above the Tumblr cup?
Like that's, that's on us and the and the things that we value
and, and, and long for between ourselves and one another and
and not just on the opportunities for design that
exists because those opportunities are, are myriad.
So, Ian, I want to turn to the elephant that's in almost every
design conversation right now, which is AI.
And you do talk about AI in your book.
You compare AI writing and coding tools to automated
restroom faucets. And so you've already mentioned
in our conversation that it's not just about friction and or
frictionlessness. So can you tell us more about
what you mean about like, yeah, what do we lose or what's the
cost of AI or where we lose something that we didn't know we
even valued? Yeah, I mean, the, the AI
problem is complex because it's still so new and it's moving so
fast. And when, you know, I was
writing this book and I was like, OK, you know, I have to be
careful because anything I say will be out of date.
You know, the, the main example I discuss in the book is is
related to writing and language and, and the way the large
language models can produce it. And I talk about as a writer,
you know, that the feeling of writing, the feeling of, of like
the ideas moving from my head through my fingertips into the
keyboard. To me, that's a fundamental part
of the experience of writing. And that's something that I
don't get to do when the computer writes for me, which
doesn't exactly mean that I don't want to use the computer's
aid either. It's just that that that
gratifying experience of literally doing the mechanics of
writing is, is is lost. So I worry that AI offers like
an excuse to sideline that process, that the process, the,
the process of making things of any kind.
And because gratification lives in that process of making of
connection between yourself as a creator and the materials you'll
use, you're using that I do worry that we'll, we'll lose
even more of it. There will be even more
dematerializing effects that AI will produce.
But I'll, I'll say that I've also been kind of disappointed
and, and, and quite bored with the way that many creative
professionals have have rejected AI out of hand and said, well,
this is obviously evil and bad. There's nothing good that can
come of it because they're concerned either they're
concerned about job loss or they're concerned about
something like the, the loss of the texture of experience that
I've described. So I think it's complicated in
other words, and for me, like AI can, I mean it, it can
facilitate synthetic design in, in new ways that that we're
going to have, we're just going to have to figure out.
And I don't know, I don't think it's like fatalistic or or, or
or improper of me to say, well, this thing is here and it's
happening. We can't put our fingers in our
ears. And that's different from saying
just accept it like some of the technologists do.
I think there is a middle ground that most people want to occupy.
And you know, like I've been looking at AI assisted
programming for a long time now. And one thing I've noticed in my
own practice with it is the, the like these AI tools, they have
led me to places I would not have thought to go and allowed
me to ask and answer software design questions, not just
implementation questions in ways that feel much more like detail
oriented in the Audi door kind of way.
And, and therefore more user centric and more gratification
delivering Then I've had the experience myself of, of, of
being inspired to pursue, let alone that I've seen in the
commercial software sector for like a really, really long time.
So I think our attention to detail out of like a user
experience level to my points earlier, like that was already
on the wane. And it's possible that some of
these, these AI tools can actually help us recover some of
that. But we're going to have to
really, you know, figure out how to do it.
We, we have to be drivers and not just passengers in that
vehicle. And I worry that, I worry that
the design professions are not sufficiently in charge, which is
all sorts of reasons for it, right?
But we're getting we're going to need to right that ship before
we can sail it. Right.
Yeah, it's almost like a reminder to revisit that old
school computer science idea of garbage in, garbage out or in
design language, like having the right questions with the right
brief first. And I feel like sometimes with
the, I don't know, the, the seductive newness of AI, we
sometimes forget that. And it's like we jump into that
and it's like, oh, OK, it's crap.
It's slop or we it's the other way to go.
It's all. Great.
The the easy answer is worth getting out first because it's
easy. And then from there you must ask
another question that's harder. And we're not quite yet at that
point. We're still sort of circling
around the easy answer. It's slop, it's garbage, it's
evil. And you know, it can be that and
also be something else. And we have to be able to hold
competing ideas in our heads at once.
And I I think that a good designer already has to be good
at holding competing ideas in their head at once, so this
should come a little more naturally than to other people
from other walks of life. Yeah, you gave this example in a
different podcast where you talked about how AI helped you
fix an irrigation system, right, Right.
Sort of way to re engage with the physical world without
having to go through endless YouTube tutorials and stuff like
that. That was more targeted.
Could you tell us a little bit? More, I mean it's, it's like I,
I had I was trying to fix my irrigation backflow because it
was broken at the start of the season and I was doing all this
stuff and I was like, I don't know how to I don't know what
I'm doing. You know, AI is pretty good at
that actually. It'll help you understand
something at a basic level that you might not understand at all.
And as I, as I, it invited me to engage with that mechanism
attached to my house and I had to get out a wrench and I had
to, to open the bonnet of this brass fitting.
And you know, like, I injured myself against, like I scraped
my thumb against the, the, the, the, the stone side of the
structure into doing. I can still feel like the, the
scarring, you know, where, where I did that, which is like not
pleasant, but it's actually kind of gratifying that I was
connected to the world in that way.
And I, I learned what the parts were and I, I, I repaired it
sort of, but not fully. I had to get the professional
out in the end. And they also had to certify it
because that's how it works here.
And so I became like much more deeply engaged with a, an
element of the, of the physical world than I ever would have
been otherwise, in part because I'm, I'm fortunate to own my
house and have a commitment to, to upkeep it, which is something
I also talked about in the book. But also because I had this
channel through AI that it was like, hey, like, maybe you can
do it, Maybe you can do it. I thought, OK, you know, maybe I
can and I couldn't, but I, I also could to some extent.
And I have found myself just just thinking about those kinds
of questions, being open to those kinds of questions much
more than I would have been without this strange
interlocutor. And like, that doesn't solve all
the questions of, of, you know, who the data centers and the
energy usage and the water and all that other stuff that people
are concerned about with, with, with, you know, they're
justifiably concerned about. I'm not downplaying them, but
it's also doing these really interesting things and and
reconnecting me and others with the physical world in a way that
that that nothing else really has, including like YouTube
tutor. That's a great example.
So Ian, in in your book, there's a chapter named Get a Haircut
every day and you bring a reflection about the SMR
phenomenon that's been going on for for years now online.
And then basically it's millions of people are watching videos of
someone folding towels, tapping objects, making noise and all
that. So.
Yeah, yeah, very much connected very much as as the thesis of
your book, which is reconnecting with the physicality sensorial
experience, but essentially the the role-playing sensory
attention. It's also making folks just
increase their screen time. And I wonder if you can talk
more about it. It's not like an it's not
actually inviting folks to do it is they're just sitting there
watching other people do it. So, yeah.
Is that something that you worry about in a way that is it a
proposed solution for more for the fact that this is a
consequence of such phenomenon? Yeah, I think broadly speaking,
I think we're a little too obsessed with this screen time
problem in, in, in general. Like we like, let's say we were
reading books instead. And you know, if we like be
measuring the amount of time people are spending turning
pages of books and sort of saying, well, you're you're kind
of book time, your page time is too high or whatever.
No, we'd like, Oh my God, thank God that you're like engaging
with information and ideas. And so, you know, screens are
the instrument by, by which we, we create and consume ideas and
information now. So like, no wonder we're
spending so much time with these.
But, but I mean, I, I do think, and like, I think these, I,
first of all, I think these ASMR creators are like heroes and
heroines for, for drawing attention to what it looks like
when you treat ordinary objects with respect and in this deeply
serious way. And like when a pile of towels
or a garment or a cup or a piece of cellophane, it gets really
and earnestly and unironically treated like a friend or a
companion as an equal rather than as an instrument or a piece
of waste. That lesson is worth almost
anything to me, including the screen time it costs to do it.
Now, if that were the only thing you were ever doing was like
watching, you know, young women tap on the side of, of, of
shampoo bottles or something, then yes, I'd, I'd be, I'd be
worried. It can of course become a
perversion like anything else, but it's a starting point and
it, and I, I, I, I think and believe that if you watch these
videos, you, your relationship to your own, like laundry
changes. It's not just for relaxation or
something. It's also like when, when you
are engaged with those objects in the world now you think of
them in a different way. And that change of attitude is
what's needed. So you can think of it as a as
like vicarious gratification, which is one of the ways I talk
about it in the book, which isn't an end goal, but it is an
intermediary step. It's a way of kind of being
introduced to, OK, I've been dematerialized for so long.
What does it even mean to connect to the physical world?
And, you know, here's one idea. Here's one answer is, well,
like, what about those towels, though?
You know, what about the garment on your body right now and the
feeling of it? What if you just touched it for
a minute and it made a sound and it had a feeling underneath your
fingertips and, and then you can kind of move on from that and
live the rest of your life because those moments are so
constant and they're happening all the time.
So instead of this sort of cynical answer of like, well,
this is just a waste of time or it's going to lead us astray
into addiction. It's more of a like, how can we
use that as an example of curiosity?
I, I wish that all of us were more curious and more more
intrigued by the, by the design problems, the the depth and
breadth of the universe around us.
There's this famous 1972 Charles Eames interview that that I'm
obsessed with in which he's talking about about constraints,
but he's talking about the process of design.
They said, well, design is really a process of, of working
within constraints, which is a familiar idea to all of us in
the design world. Interviewers like, well, what
constraints? And he says the sum of all
constraints, anything, anything whatsoever kind of that needs to
count for you. You have to be have the
enthusiasm to work within any constraint whatsoever, time,
strength, cost, what have you. And, you know, like, I think any
designer, they like not along. Oh, yeah, like, that's totally
true. You know, of course he's right.
But have we embraced all of them like a thing that is not
remarkable, that is instead unremarkable, like a towel or
like a shampoo bottle? Like, is that a constraint
you're willing to embrace the problem itself, you know, and
the whole purpose of design in a way is to take those
unremarkable things and make them remarkable or to take
remarkable things and make them unremarkable again, to make
them. Do you know that that's where
the, where the idea of transparency came from?
And I, I just don't always see as much of that curiosity and
openness about the object of design or the domain of design
as I would like. So, yeah, it's weird a little
bit the ASMR thing. And like I, you know, I also
talked about like drain clearing videos on TikTok and you know,
there's, there's a lot of stuff online you see, and you're like,
is that that's not normal? But the purpose isn't it really
to say, well, that should be normal.
But rather This is why is this compelling?
Why is this interesting? What lesson can I learn from
that? And how can I bring that to the
next stage of of my own work? You know which for a designer is
is is making objects in the world.
Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I wanted to talk about
this concept of orthogonality, orthogonality that you bring up
in your book. You have a chapter called Live
Your Life Sideways. And so this is really about like
doing something outside, maybe framing this for designers in
our audience. It's like not just about looking
at other people's designs for inspiration on Pinterest, but
it's something else, whether it's looking at drain clearing
videos or ASMR like things that are just outside of our prime
professional fields. Can you tell us more about what
you mean by this? Yeah.
And you know, in the context of the book, the idea of
orthogonality is like, if you think about, you know, your,
your relationship with the physical world, your, your
sensory relationship with the physical world, then one way of
enriching it is diversifying is having like a, a more diverse
diet of sensory encounters. And so if you spend your time at
your desk at, at, at, at a job, then doing things that are
different from that, which could mean like knitting or tying
flies for fly fishing or gardening or whatever it is.
That makes sense as a way of introducing these, these sort of
orthogonal sensory experiences in your life, which can add
diversity and richness. But you're asking like a kind of
orthogonal question in a way to the question of orthogonality,
which is like, well, what can we learn from that at a, at a
professional level? And you know, similar to the
point I was making about product design, I think that as someone
who has been like someone who kind of operates like a sort of
coyote, you know, metaphorically like, like a someone who crosses
boundaries, kind of moves between various fields and
doesn't really belong in anyone. I've been so grateful for that
over my career. And I think the more that people
from any walk of life, but certainly from design fields,
the more they encounter different contexts and different
people and different problems. And like at a deep level, like
not just in passing. I'm like, let's hand this off to
the engineer. That's not really my job to deal
with. They will always become better
at what they at what they at what they do.
And you know, you don't want to be like just kind of scattershot
pursuing interests, but you, you often know, when you see it's
like, oh, I'm working on this, this problem and this other
thing comes up. It's like clearly really deep,
like that, that whole universe. I could spend my whole life
inside of that question. And so, you know, instead of
saying all that, that's like, I'll just hand that off to
somebody else or I'll or I'll lose myself down that road.
It's rather the pursuit of that kind of orthogonal interest
might lead you somewhere. You didn't, you didn't think to
think, you know, And so that kind of gets back to the idea of
curiosity and openness. And I realize we're all very
busy and we have a lot of, you know, challenges and we have
clients and, and, and budgets and everything kind of pressing
down on us. But even Despite that, the thing
that will make you successful and the thing that will make
the, the, the objects that you, that you build in the world
meaningful and lasting is that they are somehow both the same
and different from what has come before.
And one of the easiest ways to achieve that is to put together
2 domains that are obviously related, but that haven't
really, that haven't made it productively before.
Like, that's just like, that's just fertile ground always.
So that that that may be one way of like interpreting the the
lesson of orthogonality at A at a professional level rather than
just at a level of daily practice.
Thank you for sharing. That So as we move towards the
closing chapter, Ian I, since you're very reflective and
critical in the design regarding the design world, I wanted to
hear what if you could choose one thing to redesign that could
be a system, a product, a space, an institution or an experience.
What would it be? OK, this is an easy one.
I have, I have this running joke that we need to shut down
architecture schools until we can figure out airport restrooms
because like airport restrooms are just, they're just, they're
just terrible. And I, I used to think that it
was a, a problem of the, the, the changing nature of air
travel over the years and decades in old infrastructure.
But no, no, even in like brand new airport terminals, they
just, they just don't work. It's as if nobody thought about
the people in context to use them and how they do.
So getting in and out with your role aboard and where you're
coming from and going to and the kind of, you know, like that
experience to of like touching so many people in such an
intimate way under so much time and emotional pressure.
To me, that's like the ultimate high watermark in the in built
environmental design. It's not the form of the of the
structure or, or, or the public art that's been put inside of
it. If you can get the airport
bathroom right, then you can do anything.
I love that. I love that.
And what what have has been inspiring you lately?
That could be like a movie or book, an exhibition, an author.
I don't know anything that has been a source of inspiration for
you. I mean, one of the things I've
been super interested in in the design world over the last few
years is this practice called design fiction, which folks like
Julian Bleeker and Bruce Sterling and others have been
advocating, which is like all about, like, it's like science
fiction but with designed objects.
Like what if you designed counterfactual things?
As if they existed and that was your way of sort of asking and
answering questions about them. And I, I tried this with some of
my students in an AI class that we did.
And, and I guess the thing that was most inspiring to me about
that, that domain or that sort of approach for my own work is
not, not just like trying to imagine the future to help, you
know, Fortune 1000 companies design new products.
I find myself like looking like about you.
I was so glad you brought up product packaging.
I'm both inspired and disturbed by it.
Like, why, why does the why does the Heinz ketchup bottle so much
better than it once was? But yet still the valve like is
like you have to squeeze so much ketchup out at once.
And like, are they just trying to get me through all that
ketchup or right? So you buy more ketchup?
Yeah, so. I buy more ketchup or like,
what's the thinking beyond that? So I'm just try to be so
fascinated with anything. It's not a movie or a book or a
video game anymore for me. It's like what's the most
mundane ordinary object that I can become endlessly fascinated
by? And imagine discussing at the
level of fandom of an obsession that someone would talk about,
you know, Star Wars, the MCU about that's that's sort of a
compass bearing for me lately. And can you tell our viewers and
listeners where they can find more about you and your new
book, The Small Stuff? I'm at bogos.com that's my last
name. It's BOGO st.com and you can
pre-order the book which is out July 7th.
Small Stuff, book.com. Wonderful.
Ian Bogos, thank you for spending some time with us on
the Edge. Thank you so much, I really
enjoyed this. And thank you to our listeners
and viewers. You can find us on YouTube or
wherever you get podcasts. Please leave us a review or tell
a friend about us. I'm Li Shan Huang.
Until next time.