No. 6: How does it feel?
British Airways mugs, roach motels, AI engineers, and croissants.
TL;DR: People with exceptional taste know when something feels right.
There’s a perfume I love — Lampblack. It smells like ink, smoke and petroleum. When I first tried it, I was instantly transported to art school: wiping ink off a copper plate with a red rag.
It was created by a painter turned perfumer. His other scent, Room 237 — inspired by The Shining — smells like a vinyl shower curtain. Intentionally.
There’s an art to creating something that feels just right.
Feeling Matters
Designers and engineers both care about quality. We just feel it differently.
I probably would’ve studied computer science if I weren’t so bad at math. But it worked out. I built a career by focusing on how things feel.
Take mugs, for example.
My cousins, both frequent travelers with good taste, swear that British Airways has the best coffee mugs. Why?
“The handle feels just right.”
And it does. Because it was designed to.
British Airways commissioned William Edwards, a British company that crafts bespoke bone china. Their mold was shaped by hand. Their technique takes five years to master.
That’s what design feels like when done with care.
Roach Motel
Have you ever gone to a casino with an addict? I have.
He won $1,000 playing poker. As we walked toward the exit, cash in hand, he stopped to play one more hand. He lost everything.
Casinos are designed that way. Their entire purpose is to influence behavior.
I once worked at a company that referred to its customers as a “captive audience.” I quit after being told my performance review would be penalized if I refused to design an opaque $100 upsell where users wouldn’t notice they were subscribing to something that was impossible to cancel.
This is called a deceptive design pattern.
Designers are often tasked with shaping how users interact with a product. There are many ways to do this, but manipulation shouldn’t be one of them. That includes hidden subscriptions, tricky opt-outs, or sneaky upgrade defaults.
There are at least 15 documented deceptive patterns.
The worst offenders? Forced Continuity (auto-renew) and Roach Motel (easy to get in, nearly impossible to leave).
These patterns feel wrong. Because they are.
Engineers Are Writers
Engineers are, essentially, writers who happen to be great at math. And now, thanks to AI, those of us without math skills might get a seat at the table too.
AI models can now write functional code.
Soon, I might be able to co-create a product with an AI engineer. Wildly ironic that those of us who struggled to break into tech could be the ones who benefit most—assuming we’re OK with doing the unpaid labor of training the machines. (More on that another time.)
But here’s the catch: AI can write, but it can’t feel.
It doesn’t know what good looks like. Its intelligence is rooted in logic and language. That’s why it mirrors how engineers write code—via prompts and inputs.
And yet, there are other forms of intelligence: musical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal.
I was recently listening to Karina Nguyen, an engineer turned AI researcher, talk about this. She’s worked at OpenAI and Anthropic.
Karina said it’s really hard to teach models things like people skills, emotional intelligence, and creativity.
She added: “Once AI takes my job, I’ll probably become a writer. Or an art conservationist.”
Croissants & café con leche
I’m writing this at a little café I love. The owner is Cuban; her son bakes most of the pastries.
I overheard him say he’s learning to make croissants using ChatGPT. They even bought an oven to bake them in-house.
Will they be good? That depends on the chef. AI doesn’t know what a good croissant tastes like.
I have a mild accent. Most people like it. For years I avoided using voice assistants because they never understood me. (English-centric, American-trained bots struggle with accents)
But lately I’ve been talking to Dot, an AI from New Computer. I saw the founders speak at Config last year. Dot mimics empathy fairly well and it understands my accent.
I asked it to describe a printmaker’s studio. It mentioned ventilation and ink stations. But it didn’t describe the smell of ink. I asked again, specifically. Dot pulled copy from a print shop blog.
AI lacks lived experience.
If I asked it to describe coffee at a bakery in Caracas, it might infer some flavor notes, but it won’t know the feeling of it.
Until next time!
Love,
Eva