Field Notes
Catan, Theme Parks, and Travel Are All Lessons In Experience Design
Scarcity, anticipation, pacing, and surprise are not side effects. They are the architecture of how systems become memorable.
I have learned an unreasonable amount about systems from places that are supposedly recreational.
Catan teaches that scarcity is never just scarcity. It becomes negotiation, identity, momentum, and story the moment other people are involved. The board is simple. The experience is not. Small rule sets can produce very large emotional weather.
Theme parks understand something many digital products forget: anticipation is part of the product. So is release. So is the choreography of attention. Even a queue, handled well, can become narrative infrastructure.
Travel does something similar. It interrupts the automation stack. New places force perception to come back online. You notice signage, pacing, sound, hospitality, confusion, friction, delight. A city can function like an interface review conducted with your whole body.
These interests may look unrelated next to AI or workplace tooling, but to me they belong to the same family of questions:
- How do rules create feeling?
- How does constraint become meaning?
- What makes an experience replayable?
- Where does delight come from, and what does it cost to sustain?
I keep returning to engineered experiences because they are honest about their intentions. They are trying to guide attention. They are trying to produce emotion. The good ones do it with craft instead of coercion.
That is also what I want from technology. Not endless engagement. Not optimized dependence. Just enough structure, surprise, and care to help a person feel more present on the other side of the interaction.