Ian Bogost: Game designer, Atlantic writer, and philosopher of the ordinary, on the small stuff that makes life delightful

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Ian Bogost – Game Designer & Philosopher of the Ordinary on the Small Stuff that Makes Life Delightful

Design Better Podcast
Host: The Curiosity Department (Eli Woolery & Aaron Walter)
Guest: Ian Bogost
Release Date: July 15, 2026

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Overview

This episode features Ian Bogost—game designer, Atlantic writer, and philosopher of the everyday—on the launch of his new book, The Small Stuff. The conversation explores how ordinary, mundane experiences offer "gratification," a distinctive pleasure separate from happiness or satisfaction, and how technological efficiency and dematerialization have quietly eroded our sensory connection to the world. Bogost invites designers (and everyone else) to rediscover the delight in the “small stuff,” from tactile objects to tiny, meaningful encounters with the physical world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining "Gratification" and the Loss of Sensory Texture

• Origin Story: The concept for The Small Stuff grew out of Bogost's viral Atlantic article on the demise of the stick shift due to electric vehicles. The response was less about nostalgia for car parts and more about the sensory experience of driving.
• Gratification vs. Happiness: Gratification is the immediate sensory delight from ordinary things—like the feel of a ridged coffee cup or the click of an elevator button.
• Dematerialization: Efficiency, automation, and software have distanced us from the tactile aspects of daily life (manual transmissions, paper menus, analog switches), creating an unnoticed but profound loss, not just “phone addiction” or digital distraction.
  • Quote:

    "It's about the deep and meaningful connectivity between you and your sensory life in just your ordinary life, your everyday encounter with objects and things and experiences."
    — Ian Bogost [04:31]

2. Mindfulness vs. Acceptance in Daily Experience

• Critique of Modern Mindfulness: Bogost critiques the commercialization of mindfulness, arguing that attention to the present is not about effortful awareness but simply “accepting” sensory gifts always arriving.
  • Quote:

    "You don't need any help to just experience the sensory encounters that are always happening to you... They are beings in the world that have a sense of hearing... that's enough."
    — Ian Bogost [06:39]

• Surplus, Not Scarcity: Sensory pleasures are plentiful and readily available if we allow ourselves to notice them instead of anxiously striving for “presence.”

3. Technology, Convenience, and the Trade-Offs of Dematerialization

• QR Code Menus & Automation: Common technological innovations, like QR menus or auto-faucets, offer efficiency but remove tactile, sensory experiences (browsing a menu, feeling a lever).
• Unconscious Trade-offs: Many losses happen without our choice; cultural and product shifts (e.g., Covid-19, smartphones) automated away parts of physical interaction we didn’t realize we’d miss.
  • Quote:

    "We make trade-offs maybe without consciousness or clarity of what is gained and what is lost. There's an idealism of what is gained... but then something's lost."
    — Aaron Walter [08:04]

  • Quote:

    "We're just starting to notice really that loss, and it's a loss that's weirder and more subtle than smartphones have taken over my life..."
    — Ian Bogost [09:23]

4. Friction, Creativity, and the Diversity of Sensory Life

• Friction Is Not the Enemy—Nor the Solution: The debate over “adding friction” to digital experiences misses the point; gratification comes not from difficulty, but from an ongoing, easy acceptance of sensory experiences.
• Medium Matters: The physical properties and affordances of our tools (printmaking blocks, software, or Ziploc bags) shape our creative and daily experiences. Diversity in encounters matters.
  • Quote:

    "Feeling gratified is easy. It's not hard at all. It's about accepting the gifts of the world as you encounter them in your senses..."
    — Ian Bogost [13:41]

5. The Mutation of User-Centered Design

• Drift to Outcome-Oriented Design: The goal of “user experience” has quietly become about organizational outcomes rather than genuine user needs.
  • Quote:

    "At some point between the mid-90s and now, that idea of user centricity got accidentally perverted into outcome orientation... what we really started to mean as designers was, well, I need to bring about an outcome..."
    — Ian Bogost [19:38]

• Tiny Moments Matter: Small, sensory delights in designed experiences (the zip of a bag, the feeling of a button) accumulate to make life more livable.
  • Quote:

    "Our lives are built out of those little moments, in large part. And the better those moments are, the better our lives are on the whole."
    — Ian Bogost [24:13]

6. Delight Isn’t Only About Feedback—It's the Texture of Action

• Beyond Artificial “Delight”: Design teams often add “delightful” feedback (Mailchimp’s high-five animation); Bogost argues the real magic is in the texture of direct action—the physical or digital feeling itself.
  • Quote:

    "The action itself is one of the things I'm really interested in—like what makes the stick shift, like feeling the gear drop into place. That feeling is connected to the action..."
    — Ian Bogost [25:32]

7. Game Design Lessons for Everyday Design

• Games & Pointless Pleasures: Games often exist just for the experience of manipulating systems and offer lessons in embracing the pointless pleasures found in daily interaction.
  • Quote:

    "Games are so weird because they don’t have a purpose, they don’t need to exist... just interfacing with an object in the world... like, that's kind of enough."
    — Ian Bogost [28:28]

8. Signal, Interpretation, and the Importance of Communication

• Loss of “Signal”: As technology becomes more intangible, we remove cues that help us interpret and meaningfully interact with our world—something Bogost frames as a design and social challenge.
• Software as Tactile as Possible: Designers should work to inject as much texture and “signal” as possible into digital environments.

9. Curiosity as the Root of Gratifying Design

• The Power of Noticing: Bogost’s central prescription is simple: be more curious, expand the range of phenomena you notice in daily life, and let that curiosity drive design decisions.
  • Quote:

    "If we could expand our curiosity... to ask questions that result in a reaction that's kind of like, huh... that's the tell. Something weird happening there."
    — Ian Bogost [40:20]

• Anecdote: The surprise of learning the difference in viscosity between ice cream flavors as part of a Cold Stone Creamery game project is an example of discovering overlooked but delightful phenomena worth building into design.

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• Importance of Sensory Encounters:
  “The sensory encounter of touching and turning a faucet, or of feeling a menu in your hand or flipping through its pages. It feels like it shouldn’t be important… But it is important.” — Ian Bogost [00:00]

• Dematerialization Defined:
  “My name for this process is dematerialization and it’s this process of having been decoupled or disconnected from the physical world.” — Ian Bogost [09:23]

• Do Not Mistake Friction for Meaning:
  “We’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that our lives have to be hard, that something has to be really difficult to overcome to be worthwhile… Friction, I don’t think is the answer exactly.” — Ian Bogost [13:41]

• User-Centered to Outcome-Oriented Shift:
  “At some point… user centricity got accidentally perverted into outcome orientation. Even though we continue to use the language of user experience…” — Ian Bogost [19:38]

• Celebrating the Texture of Action:
  “The feedback can also give that delight. But the action itself is one of the things I’m really interested in it’s like what makes the stick shift, like feeling the gear drop into place…” — Ian Bogost [25:32]

• The Magical Mundane:
  “I just think the world is riddled with stuff like that… you just have to be curious and open minded about it.” — Ian Bogost [43:30]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Defining Gratification & Dematerialization: [00:00] – [02:23], [04:17]
• Mindfulness vs. Acceptance: [06:22] – [08:04]
• QR Codes, Automation, Loss of Texture: [08:04] – [12:59]
• Friction, Sensory Experience, & Design: [12:59] – [17:10]
• Mutation of User-Centered Design: [19:38] – [25:04]
• Delight in Action vs. “Juiciness”: [25:04] – [28:04]
• What Games Teach Us About Living: [28:28] – [31:27]
• Signal & Design Implications in Software: [31:27] – [36:43]
• Curiosity as a Design Imperative: [40:20] – [44:29]
• Practicing the Small Stuff in Daily Life: [44:44] – [45:54]

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Practical Takeaways for Designers and Listeners

• Prioritize “texture” in designing products—digital or physical. Real delight is found in the ongoing, lived sensory connection, not just in outcome-driven or artificially “delightful” moments.
• Cultivate curiosity. Notice the small signals and seemingly insignificant physical pleasures; these are the foundation of deeply meaningful experiences.
• Don’t conflate friction with meaning. The pleasures of life are often effortless; notice them, make them possible, and build for them.
• Remember the user is not just a “problem-haver.” Design for their full, sensorial, lived reality—not just for your organization’s outcomes.

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Learn more about Ian Bogost & The Small Stuff:

• smallstuffbook.com | bogost.com

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This summary encapsulates the episode’s main themes, essential design philosophy takeaways, and the memorable, quotable moments that highlight Ian Bogost’s unique perspective on the joy and importance of the “small stuff” in both life and design.

Transcript

[Ian Bogost]

The sensory encounter of touching and turning a faucet, or of feeling a menu in your hand or flipping through its pages. It feels like it shouldn't be important, like, let's just order, let's just get on with it. What's the big deal? But it is important. We're just starting to notice that loss, and it's a loss that's weirder and more subtle than Smartphones have taken over my life and I'm addicted to scrolling Instagram. That's not what we're talking about. And it seems like it shouldn't be as important as it in fact really is.

[Aaron Walter]

A few years ago, Ian Bogos wrote a piece for the Atlantic that exploded in popularity. It was about electric vehicles and how it would finally kill manual transmissions. The reaction told him that people weren't mourning a car part. They were mourning the feeling of dropping a gear into place, a small moment of sensory connection that was disappearing without anyone choosing to give it up. The feeling is the subject of his new book called the Small Stuff. Ian calls it gratification. It's distinct from happiness or satisfaction. It's the immediate sensory delight of communing with ordinary things a ridged coffee cup, maybe the click of an elevator button, or the tink of ice in a water bottle. And he diagnoses what he calls dematerialization. That's the slow way efficiency, automation and software have severed us from the physical texture of daily life.

[Eli Woolery]

A game designer, longtime Atlantic contributor and

[Aaron Walter]

philosopher of the everyday at Washington University in St. Louis, Ian has spent his

[Eli Woolery]

career across books like Persuasive Games and Play Anything, arguing that the systems we build carry values whether we intend them to or not. Here he turns that lens on the ordinary objects most of us stopped noticing long ago. For designers, this is becoming more and more relevant. Ian argues that somewhere between the mid-90s and now, user centered design quietly mutated into outcome oriented design. We kept the language of user experience while the goals drifted toward the organization instead of the person.

[Aaron Walter]

But this isn't nostalgia or a plea for friction.

[Eli Woolery]

Gratification, he insists, is easy. It's already happening to you all the time. The designer's job isn't to add difficulty,

[Aaron Walter]

but to notice where the sensory life

[Eli Woolery]

has quietly drained out of the things we build. And the challenge he leaves us with is deceptively simple. Get curious. The small stuff is out now. You can find [e-mail] this is DesignBetter, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology.

[Aaron Walter]

I'm Eli Woolery, and I'm Aaron Walter at DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium [e-mail] subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

[Ian Bogost]

Hey, it's Christy from Lululemon and I'm here at the office checking out the Shake it out shorts. These have been my go tos and I kind of think of them as a middle ground between a true run short and a more playful athlete. Athletic, sporty, short. They have all the performance you want for running. So a comfy liner, our lightweight Swift fabric, even a pocket for your keys. But what I really like is the flowy fit and layered hem. It gives it a little bit of volume, a little bit of fun, so they feel as good on a run as they do just at coffee afterwards. You can find the Shake it out shorts in store now or [e-mail]

[Aaron Walter]

and now back to the show. Ian Bogos, welcome to Design Better.

[Ian Bogost]

I'm so glad to be here. Thank you.

[Aaron Walter]

You're here on the occasion of a brand new book and right before we hit record, you held up the physical object that has just recently arrived at your home. You're in St. Louis teaching at Wash U. Very cool school. Had friends who have gone there and loved it. So your new book, the Small Stuff, is full of philosophies and ideas that are going to resonate with our audience of designers. Let's start with the origin story of was there kind of a buildup of how you found this topic?

[Ian Bogost]

There's a simple answer and a more complicated answer. The simple answer is that it started with the stick shift automobile transmission. I did this, what I thought was like a little throwaway story for the Atlantic, where I'm a writer almost four years ago now, about how electric vehicles meant the the final and real end eventually of the manual transmission. And it was just explosive. Millions of people read the story and I got a bunch of emails and postal mail and it just really resonated with people. That's when I started thinking, okay, what did I find here? Because it wasn't just about the car or the mechanism. It's clear that there was something bigger. So that's the simple answer. And then the more complicated one is, as I thought about that more, I realized, oh no, I've been working on this idea of what I Eventually named gratification. Sort of idea of like the deep and meaningful connectivity between you and your sensory life in just your ordinary life, your everyday encounter with objects and things and experiences. I've been working on that for kind of my whole career. And I've always been interested in the design life of ordinary things. Toasters, slippers, kitchens, stuff that isn't remarkable or that we don't think of first as remarkable. And then, you know, as a game designer, which is one of the hats that I wear and have worn for a long time, we like, we make useless objects, things that don't have a purpose. Candy Crush doesn't have a purpose. Its purpose is to give you the experience of playing Candy Crush.

[Aaron Walter]

Very ephemeral.

[Ian Bogost]

Yeah.

[Aaron Walter]

Changing like it's there and then it disappears. Kind of like a sand mandala.

[Ian Bogost]

Right. It's not there to like, you know, get you to work. It's not a tool. And so thinking back on decades of doing that kind of work and trying to make sense of the meaning of interactive entertainment, I realized that was another piece of connectivity for me. The purposeless nature of just in the experience of interacting with a digital or physical system, a deck of cards or the system on your smartphone. And there's some other stuff in between, but those are some of the important pre histories of the book, I think. Fundamentally, though, it's about. I'm just very, very deeply interested in ordinary life and everyday life and mundane experiences and how much more meaningful those are than we give them credit for.

[Eli Woolery]

Is there a component there? I believe towards the end of the book, you pose a little bit of a critique of a current, you know, our attitudes or maybe commercialization of mindfulness. But is there a component of this where these experiences help us be more in the moment, help us be within our world rather than a part of it?

[Ian Bogost]

It's so interesting to start there because I do end the book kind of on that note. You know, I think we're stuck in our heads all the time. Generally, we're future oriented. We're like, what's happening next? I need to plan, I need to anticipate. And for that reason, it can be really difficult to think about living in your senses in the moment, but actually when you stop and think about it, you're doing it all the time. You don't need any help to just experience the sensory encounters that are always happening to you. So your listeners, right now, they're hearing my voice, and they don't need to work hard. They don't need to think about it. They don't need to get in a certain mindset to do it. All they need to do is to listen and to accept the fact that they are beings in the world that have a sense of hearing. And I'm speaking to them through this mechanism and that's enough. But that we've got to like tied ourselves in knots about that sort of thing. Thinking that we have to work ourselves into a state of mind in order to be able to do it. And I just think that's a mistake. So one of the things I try to do in the book is to reframe that idea. Call it mindfulness or attention or noticing some of the words that people use into something that's more acceptance. Like just accepting these sensory gifts that the world is always delivering to you. And that transforms them from something scarce into something excessive. There's just a surplus of them all the time that are available. If you miss one, it's no big deal. Another one will arrive right on its heels.

[Aaron Walter]

In the book you talk about a few things like QR code menus, which I hate. I know it's very convenient for restaurants to be able to have a menu that's digital and it's changing and we're out of stuff and we've got new menu items, but it's very fiddly. You've got to pull out a phone and kind of scan that. I noticed that my kids, it's not a big deal to them. I've been in software design for decades. I have been connected to the Internet and computers. This is the story of my life. It's my life's transition, the times that I was born in. And. And I think that that's kind of the thing that you're pointing at with your research and your writing is this transitionary time and what it means for us culturally, what it means for us as humans. We're making trade offs and we make trade offs maybe without consciousness or clarity of what is gained and what is lost. There's an idealism of what is gained. If we can bring this into a digital world. But then there's something's lost. Like you talked about a manual transmission. My kids will probably never know how to drive a manual transmission car. We've got autom faucets. Hate them because they don't always work. So when you look at the world in this transitory phase, it's like a liminal period. What do you see? We're trading off and what are we

[Ian Bogost]

losing My name for this process is dematerialization and it's this process of having been decoupled or disconnected from the physical world. And you've named a number of examples that I discuss in the book. And there's a lot more that people could think of that I don't talk about in the book. When you go into the airport restroom and you're trying to wave your hands under the faucet to get it turned on, there's a sensor and an integrated circuit there. But that's not a computer really. It's not like a smartphone problem. Whereas the QR code example very much is the sort of way that we've been digitized. The manual transmission is a different kind of example where certain kind of efficiencies that generally it's easier to drive an automatic transmission car. These are like choices that got made on our behalf over a long period of time that slowly and almost imperceptibly disconnected us, disconnected our senses from the control and outcome of the things that we do. And I think because it happened so slowly over so long a period in the name of efficiency, optimization, bureaucracy, all sorts of factors, social change, economic factors, macro micro, we didn't even notice it was happening. And those changes are not really your fault. That's another important factor. Like when you go to the restaurant and you feel like, I don't really. I can't really tell you why, but I don't want to deal with this QR code. You weren't given that choice. That wasn't something that happened because you downloaded an app or something like that. You didn't make a lifestyle choice. It was that combination of things. The availability of smartphones, the popularization of cameras on those phones, the COVID 19 pandemic, which is one of the accelerators of QR code adoption, especially in a context like that, because we didn't want to touch anything for a while. And some of the explanations that get put behind them, like, oh, it's more sanitary to have the automatic fixtures in a restroom, or it's more efficient for the restaurant to have QR code menus because they can change them. They're dubious at best. They don't necessarily deliver on the promise that they offer. But that dematerializing process happened nevertheless. And I think what you're really missing, it's weird. It's like the sensory encounter of touching and turning a faucet, or of feeling a menu in your hand, or of hiding behind it because it's large, or of flipping through its pages, of being disconnected from the previous life you were living before you entered the restaurant and having that attention reframed into the menu and the choice of what you're gonna have for lunch, of being able to point to something and show your friend, or, or you're a colleague who you're dining with, hey, what about this? Or what if we got these two things? All of that kind of stuff, it feels like it shouldn't be important. Let's just order, let's just get on with it. What's the big deal? But it is important. We're just starting to notice really that loss, and it's a loss that's weirder and more subtle than smartphones have taken over my life and I'm addicted to scrolling Instagram. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about something bigger or stranger. And that seems like it shouldn't be as important as it in fact really is. That's a phenomenon that I tried to name and diagnose and offer a way out of, but also I just tried to really take seriously. It wasn't just about whether or not our attention is being harvested in order that a few trillion dollar tech companies can abscond with it, or we're compelled to use our smartphones all the time. That story just isn't that interesting to me anymore. It's like a much more diverse, textured, smaller scale, weird, complicated set of changes that have resulted in this feeling of overall loss, this loss of this phenomenon that I call gratification. So we talked to a lot of

[Eli Woolery]

our guests about this idea of friction in the creative process and historically how important that is to creating things that are interesting and human. And we often frame it even within the digital confines of sort of the digital world where you might have started still on, let's say, Google Docs, to write something, and now you're just prompting it into existence. And, and I'm curious how you think about it in the real world. Like for me, for one example, I used to do a lot of printmaking and so I would have a block linoleum, and I'm carving into it. And inevitably what I have in my mind ends up very different from what is in the block, but often the block producing something more interesting than I would have, even just through the mistakes there. How do you think about that part of the process?

[Ian Bogost]

I think there's a couple things going on. One is that there's this idea that you can't have art without resistance in materials and that the constraints and properties of a medium are always pushing back against you, whether that's pigment, or whether that's the plate that you're printing, or even whether that's a software system that Google Docs can do certain things and can't do certain things compared to other kinds of word process. So everything whatsoever, whether it's digital or not, it has certain affordances and certain constraints, and that structures the kind of creative experience that you can have with it, or even just the kind of use experience you can have with it. That's an old story for folks in design. There's another part of it, though, which is that there's kind of like a diversity of those kinds of experiences in your life. It's sort of like having a balanced diet or something, or you're doing a lot of different kinds of physical activity, or having friends and colleagues from lots of backgrounds. You kind of want to have a diversity of physical encounters in the world. The delightful feeling of touching your smartphone and its smooth glass screen, that's one of the things that's most compelling about that designed object when it appeared. It's not that it does not offer a gratifying context, just that it offers one kind. And you kind of want to break from that sometimes why you want to pick up the menu or why you want to turn the handle of the faucet, even. And a faucet is not a creative implement. It's not something you use to express yourself. It's just something you engage with in the world. And so I think that's part of what we yearn for and have lost is the diversity of these systems of physical encounter, even if they're not facilitating creative output on our behalf. But you mentioned this word, friction, which I've been hearing a lot over the last year in particular, and I think it's a very different argument. I mean, I'm empathetic to it. And basically the argument about friction is like, everything became so easy. We need to introduce friction because it's so easy that it's not meaningful anymore. It's a very similar kind of idea to the one I'm expressing in this book and in this work, but I think it's actually quite a bit different than gratification. I expressly make the argument that feeling gratified is easy. It's not hard at all. It's about accepting the gifts of the world as you encounter them in your senses. And when you feel the smoothness of the stone block when you're doing printmaking may be hard to carve into, but just the sensation of doing so, doing it well is hard. Doing it at all is not. It's a little bit like the mindfulness stuff. We've tricked ourselves into thinking that our lives have to be hard, that something has to be really difficult to overcome to be worthwhile. This is one of the things about happiness, which I go after a little bit, that to have a happy life you should have to work at. It should be really difficult to do to achieve your professional or your personal, your family goals. And I'm empathetic to all that. But friction, I don't think is the answer exactly. We don't want our lives to be designed in a way that is harder. Rather, we want to feel and experience those lives more deliberately, more directly, more frequently. I think that's an important distinction that I would make in the current design conversation. We spent so many years thinking about user centered design and human factors engineering as a way of making sure that people in the design world were compatible. Those were right headed ideas because they were making it easier for us to do the things we wanted to do, but also connecting our physical bodies with the designed and built environment in which we lived. And it's kind of funny and ironic to me that now we're like, let's make it less compatible instead, and harder.

[Aaron Walter]

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[Ian Bogost]

I think what happened in the world of user centered design, user experience design, human computer interaction in the digital space, whatever you want to call it, human factors engineering, there's all sorts of these, there's this family of fields related to this problem. And I think what happened is that at some point between the mid-90s and now, I'm not exactly sure when that idea of user centricity got accidentally perverted into outcome orientation. It became really outcome oriented design. And even though we continue to use the language of user centricity and user experience, what we really started to mean as designers was, well, I need to bring about an outcome. And, and that outcome isn't necessarily even for the user, it's often for the organization facilitating the use. And this is one area where the massive rise of software has contributed. As a UX designer, you're no longer like, well, how do I help someone accomplish their goals? That's not necessarily the question you're asking. It's more like, how do we accomplish our goals by means of what we want the user to do? There's always a balancing act between an organization's goals, making an object or a designed experience, and the so called end user who was the one who was going to be making use of that device. But those goals were much more aligned in the past than they became today. Think about automobiles again. There was a time when, well, we want to make sure the pilot, the driver of this vehicle is safe and then they can adjust their climate control and the radio. And then at some point it was like, well, we'll just digitize that whole system. But also that led to very strange opportunities, like now we can upsell software services as a part of the future life of your Toyota or BMW, your Tesla vehicle, which has nothing to do with helping someone get from place to place, let alone to live in the environment that you've built for them. So it just became very confused. And I want to be careful not to blame anyone for this, even the designers. And it was complicated and it happened over a long time. And it happened because capital magnified and accrued in certain sectors. So rather than try to find the origins, it's more interesting to me to sort of say, if that did take place, if I'm right about how that took place, then we actually kind of stopped doing user centered design. We stopped caring about user experience and we started caring about the outcomes instead. The outcomes almost exclusively. And what fell out of the middle there was that really rich attention to the moment to moment experience of whatever it is that you're designing. Let me give you a couple examples from very different sectors. Every time I use a piece of software these days, like Microsoft Teams, which is something I wouldn't choose to use, but I use for work. Okay, Microsoft's GroupW, and this is a giant company, Microsoft is one of the biggest software companies on the planet. They've made this supposedly to facilitate me to talk to my colleagues. And I click in on one of the interfaces to chat to somebody. And 30 years ago, the software would have automatically focused my keyboard into the text box so that I could start typing. And now it doesn't do that anymore. I click on the window and I start typing. And it's like, no, I'm sorry, you're not typing in the text box yet. Please click on the text box in order to do that. This is such a very simple, obvious, used to be like bread and butter, HCI problem that, okay, when the window gets focused, let's anticipate what the user is going to want to do. And that was user centricity. That's just one example of how that's sort of fallen out. It doesn't matter anymore because Microsoft is selling a giant site license to my organization and I'm not really choosing to use the software anyway. So all you really got to do is push it out, right, in order that you can get the renewals on your Office365 subscriptions. I'm oversimplifying, but you get the picture. That's an example from software, but this stuff is everywhere. I've been thinking a lot about Ziploc closures these days. I Remember when I was a kid, like a sandwich bag or whatever would just fold over, and then at some point we got these Ziplocs and it was like a miracle. And there was like the yellow and blue make green version to let you know it would be sealed and they really worked. And eventually that mechanism got made cheaply enough that it could be built into packaging, not just into baggies. So you buy a bag of shredded cheese at the Trader Joe's or wherever you go, you tear it open, it has a little Ziploc, so it seals in freshness. Right. And lately I have a really hard time opening and resealing them again. And why is that? Did they just get made more cheaply? Well, probably. But something happened whereby this thing that was supposed to make my life better, that was supposed to help me and also help the organization that's selling cheese or whatever give me a better product that I would want to buy. We were supposed to be aligned there, and I was going to spend a little bit more to get that packaging, and then it was going to do the thing that it said, and now it sort of does, but sort of doesn't. And I've not only lost the ability to keep my cheese fresh, but also that delight, that incredible delight of feeling the zipper seat and close. And then as I put it back in the fridge, my life is marginally better than it was a moment before, because I've had that encounter. They maybe seem ridiculous, but they're not. Right. Our lives are built out of those little moments, in large part. And the better those moments are, the better our lives are on the whole. And conversely, the worse they become, then the worse our lives feel on the whole, but in this tiny little way that you kind of don't notice eroding until you start thinking about it.

[Eli Woolery]

You mentioned delight, and that brings up one of the questions that we had, which was around moments of delight and how that's been a goal of many design teams over the years. And Aaron's team at mailchimp has famously created this animation that when you sent your email campaign out, you know that you get high five by the monkey palm, you know, and there's some sweaty anticipation in advance of that. But what you're talking about more generally is kind of texture.

[Ian Bogost]

Well, it's like when you press the button to send the email, you know.

[Eli Woolery]

Yes, yes, exactly.

[Ian Bogost]

Yeah. So it's not feedback, but it's the action itself. The feedback can also give that delight. But the action itself is one of the things I'm really interested it's like what makes the stick shift, like feeling the gear drop into place. That feeling is connected to the action and you have a sense of control and purpose, but it also has a very particular sensory texture to it, which is not just an animation on the screen.

[Eli Woolery]

Right, that makes sense. Yeah. So it's not so much you're artificially creating something that doesn't even need to be there, it's by the instance of it being there, the way that you interact with it.

[Ian Bogost]

Yeah, we all meant really well in providing that kind of feedback. You know, in the game design world, we sometimes call it juiciness. It's like casino style design. You press a button and there's a bunch of visual and audio feedback. And that's supposed to make you feel like, oh yeah, I did the thing, but also like I'm delighted in feeling it. There's also this sense that that's extraneous in a way, or it's trying to make up for a design problem that wasn't solved. Instead, even in business system, an email marketing software tool, it's not an entertainment device. You're not eating it, you're not listening to it for relaxation or for entertainment. It feels like it's only purpose driven. But our work, our work lives, they better be gratifying moment to moment because we have to do them all the time. And you know, I talk about this a bit in the book. Like a lot of jobs, they're not gratifying moment to moment. You're in the same place in front of your computer doing the same thing over and over again. But at the very least, if the tools really help you accomplish goals in a way that you feel happening, not because the goals are being accomplished, but you feel the feeling of using them, then that would enrich your life much more than a little delightful animation that praises you for doing so. I'm constantly getting these emails about, like I buy something online and you get an email that's like, yippee, you bought something. And I don't need that. What I want is for the feeling of the purchase of meeting a need or just a want to be delightful. And when it gets like weirdly highlighted as you produced an outcome, it's this outcomes oriented thinking. And then I get another email for every action that the product takes as it makes its way through its fulfillment process. It's like it arrived at your door and then I get a text message and it's kind of evaporating my sense of delight and connection rather than amplifying it. It's like we're spamming our lives constantly with that kind of feedback system rather than concerning ourselves with making the experience of action really gratifying on its own, not just for the outcome it provides.

[Aaron Walter]

You've spent a lot of time doing game design and researching games and so forth. And there's just a ton of interface design and culture, understanding of humanity and how the mind works, psychology and so forth from game design. I'm curious, what do you bring forward from that discipline into this new book? And how does it inform your philosophies?

[Ian Bogost]

Games are so weird because they don't have a purpose, they don't need to exist. It's not like a car that's trying to get you somewhere. And yes, yes, you could say, well, they're for diversion, they're for entertainment. But that's almost a non answer. And if you think about what makes Candy Crush or Wordle or Super Mario or whatever you like to play, or a tabletop game, you know, a deck of cards or the chits in catan or whatever disease, what makes them compelling, the answer is very different than even other forms of human culture. Making the novel or the film or whatever that's trying to make you feel something or express an idea or a story. And over the many years I've been involved in game design, I really shifted my thinking. I mean, when I started out, I started out working in advertising. We were making games for advertising even on the early web. We did this golf game on Lexus.com and I was working on it in the 90s and I started this game studio around education and marketing and advertising and politics, using games for serious purposes. I was really into that for a long time and wrote a book about it. And I started to realize, well, for one thing, I think that other forms of storytelling are much better at that process than games are. The novel and the film and even the teleplay are much better storytelling mediums than games will ever be. This is a controversial opinion that gets me in a lot of trouble in the games world. And so then I started looking at play like the experience of just manipulating some kind of system for the sake of seeing what it can do, which is sort of what I think play is all about. That was productive to some extent, but it's still limited to toys or games or objects whose purpose is play, is diversion. And I think the big shift in my thinking from games from the play era of my career to the gratification era, this present moment, is realizing that the game part or the toy part isn't even really required that. Just interfacing with an object in the world or an experience in the world, like, that's kind of enough. I've picked up my water bottle a couple times while we've been talking, and there's some ice in it. It's almost melted. But when I pick it up, I hear and feel the tink of the ice against the metal wall of the vessel. And, you know, I'm not playing with it. I don't have a purpose in doing so. I can just drink out of the straw, which is very well designed, by the way. But that moment of just engagement with the object, that's enormously delightful. And it's not going to make my marriage better or my career more successful. But that's the kind of moment that I'm after, that I'm after capturing that I want people to appreciate and accept, but also that I want designers to understand is kind of like a first order principle of the designed object and the designed experience. And I think that used to be an uncontroversial opinion. That used to be something that people would not belong to. And now it's like. Well, that's kind of extraneous, actually. Like, what we really want to do is provide you with the thing that's going to help you hydrate the most effectively.

[Aaron Walter]

I feel like a lot of the examples that you are putting forth here, it kind of boils down to signal and the removal of signal as we move into an intangible world. And how much interpretation is required of human beings when we don't have those signals of, I picked up a water bottle and I can hear there's still ice in there. I moved a stick shift and I can hear that it just clicked into third gear. You're describing that as gratification 100%. There's a ton of those gratifying moments in our lives. Is this an accurate characterization of the philosophy? And then how do we put that signal into software? Because inherently it doesn't have that rich signal in so many ways.

[Ian Bogost]

The book is for ordinary people. I mean, designers can read it and appreciate it, I think. I think it has a lot to teach designers, but trying to help people understand how they can feel better and more content in their lives. And the window onto that is gratification. If you kind of flip that on its head, because most people don't have the ability to control these aspects of their lives. They can't design transmissions or software for that matter. They are at the whim of people like us who make these things for them. And it's not fair to say, well, you have to come all the way to water in order to feel something good about your moment to moment experiences and advocate for legislative change or make appeals to the organizations that design. That's a totally unreasonable thing to lay at the feet of ordinary people. But when you do have control because you run a business, even a small one, or because you have the ability to design and then distribute a physical object or a software system, then we do have the ability to change how they work. That's the first thing I would say in response to your observation. It's almost like looking at the flip side of gratification is this opportunity for internal interpreting gratified design, gratifying design as a way of introducing what you called signal back into the systems that we encounter. I really do truly believe that we used to do more of this in software design maybe than we even remember doing. We had more choices in the marketplace. People, when they used software systems, there wasn't this sort of switching cost associated with. I have to abandon this whole ecosystem of stuff. They could try different things. It was less a part of the constancy of their lives as well. We didn't have all these two sided markets regulating or negotiating between your needs and the flex workers that are being mustered. So some of this is big macroscopic socioeconomic kinds of issues. But nevertheless there's still a lot of control that we have. I find when I try to think about concrete examples, the best exercise I can muster is something that happened to me very recently because I'm seeing this all the time. So yesterday I placed a doordash order for something and there's some construction going on in my street and one of the entrances is closed and it's confusing to get there. And how do I communicate via this software service that is negotiating between my needs and goals and the person who is carrying out that task on my behalf. And technically the software has exposed a mechanism to do it. There's like a chat function or a call function and I can use that to supposedly communicate with the person who's doing the work on my behalf. But in practice that's not really the case. They don't get the message, they don't see them. They're not set up in an environment where they can spend enough time paying attention to those kinds of things. The preferences that I've put in my profile where I've updated the instructions for delivery don't get highlighted and foregrounded. So stuff that used to be Again, kind of bread and butter. User experience, design, sorts of problem solving, I think aren't happening. They appear to be happening. The trappings of them are there. All of the functions and services are there. Maybe even too many are there. But as a holistic experience, that kind of connectivity often falls away. It often doesn't take place, it doesn't fully mesh, the gears don't mesh. And it's not like anyone's fault exactly. But solving it would require not just greater attention to the design process or the implementation process. It would be like a shift in values around what it is we're trying to build, how we're doing it, who's advocating for whom, what kinds of feedback systems are in place, what kind of user research is actually taking place. We have all the tools to do this, though it almost feels like it should be just a trim tab adjustment to the design process. But nevertheless, it kind of doesn't happen, partly because everything's moving so fast. Scale is the all important factor in the success of a big software business. And all software businesses are assumed to be a big software business rather than a small one. So anything that a product manager or an executive or a designer or anyone involved in the chain can do to just kind of go, okay, you could ask, where's the gratification? You could ask, where's the system of communication between the sort of signaling, what's happening in the system? There's lots of ways that we could reframe that. And I'm hopeful that one of the things that, you know, who knows, you come up with ideas in the hopes of people who use them. And I hope that that's a conversation maybe that can be reinvigorated by the book and some of these ideas.

[Eli Woolery]

I played PC games mostly in my childhood. Things like Ultima, the Ultima series of games, if you remember those.

[Ian Bogost]

Oh, sure, yeah.

[Eli Woolery]

And they built these whole very extensive worlds where you could go in and you could just go bake bread, essentially you could go bake bread and sell bread to the villagers. And for some people that that got them really into it. And so there's that side of it, but there's also sort of this textural side, which is each series, the graphics progressively got better. You know, at one point it was like a VGA with a sort of isometric perspective. And for some reason that's sort of the sweet spot I felt, at least when I was a kid and interact with it, because as it got more sort of 3D and realistic, it felt it lost some of the magic, whereas these earlier versions and actually rebooted it on an emulator recently just to play around with it. That sort of like pixelated but textural, distancing you from the real world enough so that you can maybe fill in the gap with your imagination a bit more. And I see that now with my son, with games like Minecraft, where yes, you could render it more photorealistically, but purposefully, it's more blocky and pixelated to some degree. And that seems to be engaging for even kids of his generation.

[Ian Bogost]

I think there's a couple things going on. One of them is that sort of like crafting, like making bread in the video game or making stuff in Minecraft. We are fortunate to work in the creative industries, broadly speaking. I spent my whole work life trying to be creative and sometimes hopefully succeeding. And so I don't want that in my leisure time. I want kind of mindless television, actually. But I think for a lot of people who don't get the opportunity to express themselves creatively day to day, having these tools that make it really easy to do so without having to become a printmaker or something like that, that can be like really satisfying. The same way that people started making Sourdough during COVID Well, now I can go and construct this whole little virtual universe inside of Ultima or Animal Crossing. I think that's one thing that's going on. But I also think that just pressing a button is incredible. You remember the old Coin Op Arcade games of the 70s and 80s and you just go in, you'd feel the quarter drop into the slot and you'd feel it drop into the slot and the heft of it in your hand and then the gravity of it pulling in and the way the machine would gulp it down. And then to that sort of feedback issue that you were mentioning, it would give you some sort of audio feedback and tell you it was ready and then you press this delightful fat button that would release. I mean, why do you think people like elevators? I just want to press the button and they press it impatiently. But you feel as though you're connected to the world and that is almost enough. And as the games got more visually scintillating and supposedly like verisimilitudinous, they looked more like the world. That didn't make them more realistic, but they looked more like the world. There's also less to do or less that you felt that you could do. And that sense of picking up the controller and just mashing the buttons a bit, that's so incredible. It's really a first order outcome of the whole medium that, you know, when you think, what do I do as a game designer? I give people an excuse to press buttons. That's not the false, but that's not necessarily a popular way of thinking about it. It's not like a socially progressive way of thinking about what you're doing. Instead, it's like, well, this is the future of entertainment or the future of storytelling, or this is bigger than cinema. Yeah, maybe. But also, you're just giving people an excuse to mash buttons, because that's delightful.

[Aaron Walter]

So if you were thinking about the way that software is designed today and you had a magic wand and you could make one change and every software design team would think and work a little bit differently, that would result in better, more gratifying experiences for real human beings, what would that change be?

[Ian Bogost]

I think it would just be curiosity. If we could expand our curiosity, the scope of phenomena, of things, of encounters, of opportunities, of subjects, of backgrounds that are of potential interest to us and just be a little more accepting that there's something interesting and worthwhile about almost anything, I think that would be the thing that I would change. It's upstream from gratification, but I think to get there, you have to increase the surface area to ask questions that result in a kind of reaction that's kind of like, huh. And that's the sign to me, that's the tell. Huh? Something weird happening there, like the stick shift. I'm like, huh, what's going on there? Or you think about what's working and what's not. And it's not just delivering your KPIs or your net promoter score results for whatever you're surveying, looking. Right. But something about the experience kind of feeling like, you know, I think this is part of it, this thing that I didn't really used to think about. There's something there. And if you could treat that signal as an opportunity to ask the question, what if that were the whole center of the design experience? What if it were all about that and not about this thing that I thought I was doing? Not necessarily because it's going to be, but because that exercise will help you exercise that curiosity and it will lead to design opportunities and solutions that would produce more gratifying design. I just have the sense that in my experience, that's kind of how that process works. Many years ago at the game studio, we were doing this game for this ice cream store called Cold Stone Creamery. They're still around. Yeah. You know that place, it's delightful. So the thing that makes cold stone work is that they have this cold slab and they take the ice cream and they munge up all the mix ins that you want on the cold stone in front of you and then you get it in a big pot and it's like way more ice cream with way more junk in it than anybody needs. But it's delightful. And they had a number of interesting business problems, like all businesses. But the company also thought of themselves as a best first job kind of place where you're a 16 year old kid or something like that to get a job. So I went in and they did the training for the employee training. So we're going to make a video game about ice cream serving. To my delight and surprise, the different mixes, the different ice creams, they pulled totally differently. Pulled in the sense like you use these spades to get ice cream out and something like cake batter which was much more viscous because it had like literal cake in it and mint was super smooth and lithe. And so just the feeling, I'd seen them do this but I hadn't experienced it with my own hands and body. The feeling of moving those different ice creams around, it was just different. And that's something that that person in that situation working that minimum wage job, they're going to encounter that hundreds of times a day in their shifts. So knowing that that's a part of the experience, how do you account for it in the design? We built a viscosity model in the software to simulate doing so for serving size, portioning and so stuff we were supposedly training for. That's why I think it's an interesting example. Rather it's interesting because if you're there on the ground, that experience of knowing, gosh, how do I go about doing this? Well, I'm supposed to serve up 4 ounces or 6 ounces of this ice cream. How do I know I'm doing it right every time when it feels different in my hands? That was a major part of that little work experience. And I didn't know that it existed at all until I did. And then when I did, it was magical. It was like, I will never forget the difference in viscosity between ice creams at this commercial ice cream parlor. And I just think the world is riddled with stuff like that. And it's not even that you have to look for it, you just have to be curious and open minded about it. Sometimes it's accidental, like it was in this case just a consequence of the ingredients that are in different mixes. But then when you find it, you're like, oh, I really enjoy doing that. I don't know why. Well, why? Like, what is it about it? How do you characterize and talk about it with people? How do you make it seem less weird and more normal? Those are some of the exercises that I think will lead us to center gratification rather than to think of it as an accident. That is nice if we can get it, but not really that important.

[Eli Woolery]

Ian, as we wrap up here, we often ask our guests, what's inspiring you right now? But I've got a slight twist on it from our community. Joey Premiani asked a question. What's your core strategy to balance your busy life in ways that you can get outside and connect more with the physical world?

[Ian Bogost]

Since I've been living this small stuff, gratifying idea, what I've tried to do is just allow everything that I do to deliver a gift like that I enjoy. You know, you mentioned, like, going outside, and I think we're, like, mistaken in thinking that we need to get away from our. Even not from our computers, but our desks or our homes or our offices. I want to do that more. But what's really helped me do it more is in everything that I do to try to accept those gifts. Like the feeling of my mouse clicking or the seal of the refrigerator door gasket in the break room. When I let myself enjoy those experiences, when I depart the office and I feel the sun on my face or the twig crunching under my foot, I feel them more because I've been exercising this muscle of feeling them more often in other parts of my life and other parts of my day. So rather than, like, there's this part of my life that's ungratifying and then I need to seek out the part that is physical. It's rather. No. My whole life is lived in my body all the time, constantly. The more I can exercise the process of accepting those gifts, then the more gifts I will have to accept. That's sort of how I've gone about it.

[Aaron Walter]

That's great. Ian. Where can people learn more about you, your work, and your new book, the Small Stuff, which is out already, right?

[Ian Bogost]

It's out July 7th. Yeah. You can order the book now, smallstuffbook.com and then you can find me at bogos.com, b o g o s t dash fantastic.

[Aaron Walter]

Ian Bogos, thanks so much for being on Design Better.

[Ian Bogost]

Oh, thanks so much.

[Aaron Walter]

This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team Slack channel design better podcast.com it'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.