Part one of a series. Here’s part two: Somewhere People Wait.

Side note: This is a product design essay that keeps escaping its container. It also wants to be about architecture, cities, advertising, AI, organizations, anywhere felt experience gets designed out. I’m still figuring out the edges of it. Let’s call this a draft in public.

1. You’ve already felt it.

You’ve walked into a new hotel and known immediately something was wrong before you could say it’s the lobby layout or the quality of light. You’ve opened an app and felt the manipulation before you’d consciously registered the countdown timer. You’ve sat in a meeting and sensed the strategy was hollow before anyone said why.

This is you knowing. It’s not soft information. It’s fast. And it arrives before rational analysis, integrating more variables than any dashboard can report.

So when did we decide to stop treating it as signal?

2. Last night I watched a train crossing do something that nobody designed it to do.

I was walking the hidden pathways that line the train tracks in Saigon. Residential scene, bursts of motorbikes and people on foot, nothing remarkable except a sense of quiet compared to most streets. Then a young, uniformed crossing guard appeared. Barriers came down, red flashing lights, ding ding ding. Two scooter riders tried to sneak through and got scolded. They smiled. A tiny line of motorbikes queued, waiting. The train came, passed, and within moments it was just a quiet block again. Poof.

The crossing was designed for safety and traffic flow. Nobody designed the social choreography around it: the tiny rebellion, the scolding, the smile, the communal pause, the sudden dispersal. That emerged. And it felt more human than most things that are explicitly designed to feel that way.

3. You feel it the moment a Shopify store stops being a shop.

You land on what looks like an independent brand — ceramics, olive oil, that linen shirt you’re sure will launch a whole new you — and within seconds a popup, a countdown timer, a ‘you might also like’ before you’ve looked at anything. There’s a gunky, inhumane sleaziness you can’t quite name. What you’re detecting is Shopify’s conversion logic wearing the merchant’s clothes. That merchant is staring at a dashboard that says yep, it’s working. You, three stores into your session, have developed an allergic revulsion you couldn’t fully articulate.

And you won’t be back. Nobody connected these things because nobody stopped to ask: what should this feel like?

4. And then there’s the endpoint.

Scroll Amazon long enough and the mask comes off entirely. OMORC. VANKYO. BOMPOW. Brand names generated like crypto keys, attached to products identical to 36 others with similarly unspiritual names. It’s pure conversion logic so complete it doesn’t bother with the pretense of a personality. The Shopify ghost at least tries on someone’s costume. BOMPOW has stopped trying.

Of course you feel nothing about BOMPOW. That’s no accident. That’s the destination of a process in which nobody, at any point, was asked to give a damn. Shrug.

5. We never really measured feelings. But we held them.

There never was a golden age of sentiment dashboards that got replaced by worse ones. Feelings aren’t clear data. What existed and still exists, rarely, was an imperfect, informal, often unstated someone in the room with a clear sense of what the thing was supposed to feel like when it worked. You could identify them: they were the one who’d say ‘no, that’s not it yet’ before they could explain why.

The creative brief once held those intentions. Then performance marketing replaced the brief with a number. The PRD replaced a product vision with bullet points of requirements. And now vibe-coding has replaced the user’s experience with the builder’s breakneck enthusiasm, producing same-same interfaces at speed, with no reckoning for the person on the other end.

Each step locally reasonable. Cumulatively: felt intention got quietly evicted.

I have a secret: dashboards make me squirm. It’s not that they’re not useful, it’s just that most of them feel like bicycles for fish — instruments optimized for a kind of knowing that has almost nothing to do with whether the thing actually works for a human being over time.

Feelings couldn’t be shown in a meeting and spreadsheets could. So feelings lost. And then we kept the language. ‘Look and feel’ became standard vocabulary, except it almost always just means ‘the UI.’ Actual feel quietly left the building while we were busy discussing the button radius.

6. Advertising figured this out, then forgot it.

My friends who still care about advertising will tell you the work they’re proudest of made someone feel something real. Not “drove awareness.” Something. There’s a reason the VW Lemon and Apple’s 1984 still get taught. Then performance marketing arrived, and now we have influencer deals that move product today and mean nothing by Thursday.

BOMPOW.

Anu at Working Theorys calls it the difference between light mode and heavy mode. “We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing,” she says in Make Something Heavy. Light things move fast and fade just as fast. Heavy things are defining, meaningful, durable … and heavy, she’s careful to say, doesn’t mean big. It means density. It means someone gave a damn.

7. Füsun Aydın knows something urban planners don’t.

Iain Montgomery’s Challenger Cities puts it plainly: a city is never neutral. Every street, lobby, transit experience encodes permission, safety, hostility, or play — whether anyone intended those things or not. Montgomery spoke with Füsun Aydın, a sex worker who has lived in Amsterdam’s red light district for twelve years, to make exactly that point. The city has been considering moving the district to the outskirts. On paper, logical. In practice, she and her colleagues are woven into the neighborhood — the kids, the families, the merchants know who they are. That familiarity is the safety. In twelve years there, she knew one woman to be killed. In four years on the streets of Istanbul before that, she knew fifteen.

Nobody designed that safety. It accumulated through presence and familiarity over time. Move it to a purpose-built district and you can design the floor plan perfectly. But you cannot design what it replaced. You can evict felt experience without realizing it’s the thing holding everything up.

8. Marc Andreessen said the quiet part out loud.

In a recent interview, Andreessen, who has funded more digital products than perhaps anyone alive, mentioned he has zero introspection and considers the concept a fairly recent and unnecessary invention. He said it the way you’d mention you don’t care for black licorice.

The capacity to notice what something feels like — in yourself, in the room, in the person on the other end of whatever it is that you’re making — is precisely the capacity you’d need to hold felt experience as a design variable.

9. Erika Hall knows why we skip the question.

‘Organizations don’t stop to think about what they really need to know before rushing to what they’re going to do,’ Hall says in People Nerds. ‘We choose a technique before we’ve even narrowed in on what we need to ask.’

And on why the felt question gets dropped: organizations don’t say they’re afraid. They say they don’t have the time. The question of how something should feel to the person who will actually live with it is exactly the question that requires stopping and learning. In an environment structured around building faster, that pause smells like insecurity. Like not knowing. So we do that thing we humans do: we avoid it.

10. There is no soul by committee.

Every designed thing that has made someone feel something had, somewhere in its history, a person who cared what it felt like. And God love ’em, they held that line past the point where it was comfortable. Sometimes a founder. Sometimes a creative director fighting for the indefensible detail until everyone was exhausted. Sometimes just someone whose job description contained nothing about this, who did it anyway out of stubbornness about quality.

When that person leaves, the felt character doesn’t die immediately. It degrades. Slowly, then faster. The gunky conversion-logic ghost you feel in certain Shopify stores is what degradation looks like after the last person who cared enough left the room.

A healthy question: who right now is professionally responsible for how this experience feels? If the answer takes more than a few seconds, we have our answer.

11. Martha Nussbaum and the thing we keep calling soft.

In Upheavals of Thought (2001), Nussbaum says emotions aren’t irrational noise layered on top of clear thinking. They’re cognitive. They arrive before the analysis does, and they’re often more accurate.

‘Emotions are suffused with intelligence and discernment … we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.’

The feeling you get walking down a street that’s off, or using a product that works but leaves you cold … that’s not a subjective impression to set aside. It’s signal. And if that’s true, what exactly have we been optimizing for?

12. What would it mean to treat feeling as a constraint, rather than a nice-to-have?

Not a mood board. Not a brand adjective on a slide. An actual constraint — the kind that means the thing isn’t done until the felt experience works, the same way it isn’t done until the functionality works.

Which means the opportunity for nearly every design discipline is less about inventing a new methodology and more about recovering a question that used to live in the room: what should this feel like? Not to the brief. Not to the roadmap. To the person who will walk into it, open it, and live with it, maybe love it, or maybe never come back.

When we’ve optimized for everything except feeling, that question is available to anyone willing to ask it. That’s an opening.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​