Author Archives: John Gibbard

Nov 06 2025
socio-cultural, work

Ghosts in the Picture Book

The other day, I was reading a children’s book with our daughter when I saw it: a corded telephone. Black, wall-mounted, with a dangling spiral wire. The sort of phone that last rang in anger sometime around the Blair years.

Roger Hargreaves's; Little Miss Neat picks up vintage style corded black telephone.
The Telephone rang. Little Miss Neat picked it up.

A few mornings later, it happened again, Baby Club on the BBC, all primary colours and soft clapping, and there, on the play mat , was a car. Not one she’d ever recognise. A boxy saloon. Straight-edged. Round headlights. The kind of thing you’d find idling outside a golf club in 1987.

What’s odd isn’t that these images exist, they’re charming, even lovingly drawn. It’s that they still feel like the default. Most phones today are glass bricks. Most cars look like they’ve been inflated rather than put together in a factory.

But when we illustrate for children, we reach back, not to what they know, but to what we remember. This isn’t a developmental crisis. Children don’t need realism to read meaning.

Jean Mandler’s research (thank you ‘Ai research team’) showed they use schematic categories, “car,” “dog,” “phone”, not photoreal recall.

Furthermore, Ellen Winner proved they can grasp symbolism early on (i.e. hey don’t need realism to understand things). So, no one’s confused. That’s not the point. The point is that these images persist, long after their referents have disappeared. The floppy disk still means save. A film reel still means video. A telephone still curls like a question mark.

We say it’s just design shorthand, but it isn’t. It’s something stickier.

These are the ghosts of our interfaces, icons of touchpoints no child will ever touch.

Gunther Kress‘ observations describe how meaning doesn’t update on command. It drags history behind it and changing the meaning of symbols requires overcoming an awful lot of cultural inertia. And children’s media, shaped entirely by adults, ends up as a kind of curated hauntology: a world that looks nothing like theirs, but everything like ours did, right around the time we were their age.

They swipe past rotary phones, expect Santa to come down a chimney no longer connected to a fireplace, draw little square cars with four doors and no raised suspension. It’s sentimental and not remotely sinister but it does mean they grow up consuming artefacts of use they’ll never need.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s like castles in fairy tales. But it’s hard not to feel the ache of it, that their books are filled with our objects, our past, our cultural residue.

Perhaps more concerningly, they’re not learning to navigate the world as it is. They’re learning to decode the leftovers of how we once did.

So I find myself wondering now what a picture book drawn from today would look like. Would the car even be recognisable? Would anyone bother sketching a glass rectangle phone? Or would the page just show a toddler, alone, swiping at the air, waiting for something to respond.

AI: This piece used AI to help me research the psychology references and summarise their observations. I used it for the tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were all mine.

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Nov 04 2025
socio-cultural, work

The Week Away That Never Quite Happens

Every few weeks at this time of year, my thumb betrays me. It hovers over a post of a cabin somewhere on the edge of a loch or moor, all shō sugi ban cladding, light oak, mid-century desks and ‘vintage’ lightbulbs, and presses like. The algorithm now thinks I’m the sort of man who wears wool socks and writes preposterously neatly in propelling pencil beside a woodburner. It’s not entirely wrong.

There’s something magnetic about those images: the design-led minimalism that’s somehow still warm; the promise of solitude that doesn’t look lonely. I imagine a week in one of them — laptop off, phone on airplane, words finally unspooling in peace. I can practically smell the Danish oil.

A lone Scandinavian-looking cabin from 57 Nord contemplates its life choices above a Scottish loch, surrounded by smugly photogenic hills pretending it’s always this sunny.
The luxury of slow living at 57 Nord: 57nord.co.uk .. a cabin I adore, can’t afford and will never book

This time of year encourages such delusions. There’s just enough light in the mornings to feel alive, but enough dusk to make retreat seem reasonable. You could slip away for a week and no one would really notice. The trees are almost bare, the pubs half-empty, and the countryside looks half-finished, as if waiting for someone to turn up with a notebook.

In my head, I’m dictating into my phone while trudging through leaf-sodden lanes or across a windswept upland. Evenings mean simple food, one-pot stews, bread, the sort of red wine you can chew, and perhaps the odd night at a pub, purely for proof of humanity. I’d come back leaner, calmer, possibly holding the first chapter of The Book*.

Except I never go. Yes, a little because of fear or money (and the logistics of family life) but mostly because the fantasy works too well.. The idea of the week away does its job before it begins: it restores a sense of possible order. Just imagining the solitude feels productive, which is as close to it as most of us ever get.

What makes us crave it? Age, maybe – the mid-life suspicion that our attention’s been pawned off to apps and admin. Or perhaps it’s just winter and that soft command to draw inwards, to tidy one’s psyche before spring. Either way, the idea of leaving it all behind has become one more thing to scroll through, admire … and postpone.

I like to think it’s not laziness but calibration by which I mean a quiet audit of what would actually change if I went. Would I write more? Probably not. Would I look less at my phone? For a day, perhaps two. Mostly, I’d just be somewhere else doing the same gentle dance of distraction, albeit with better lighting and a view.

Still, the fantasy has its use. It reminds me there’s another tempo available, one I could, in theory, choose. And maybe that’s enough for now. Some people meditate. I browse cabins I’ll never book. We each find our way back to silence, even if it’s only through the screen.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine and were composed in Surrey, not Scotland.

* this is my first public announcement that I do have a (non fiction) book in mind. It may also be the only time I ever mention it.

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Nov 02 2025
work

Time Returned, Time Resold

Rain-blurred motorway at dusk viewed through a windscreen; dashboard lights glow amber in an empty driver’s seat — a quiet image of autonomy and time unclaimed.
Autonomy promised freedom. Instead, it gave us metrics.

Every few years a new invention turns up promising to give us time back. The dishwasher did it, then the calendar app, now the self-driving car. Efficiency, they say, is liberation. But the minutes never come home. They’re quietly re-employed: answering messages that weren’t urgent until we saw them, scrolling through news we already half-read. We don’t get more time. It just comes back wearing a different outfit.

Design now speaks the intoxicating language of generosity. We’ll save you clicks. We’ll make it seamless. Lovely words, but they come with a tempo you didn’t choose. The system nudges, reminds, congratulates you on your streak. Even the oven chirps when it’s done pre-heating. Helpful, yes – in the way a personal trainer is helpful when all you wanted was a walk.

Efficiency was meant to hush the world, not make it chatter. Parcels update you mid-journey, cars suggest faster routes, TV apps interrupt the credits to make sure you don’t go off to bed just yet. You start to feel managed by your own apps and appliances. Is it me, or do they all sound slightly pleased with themselves?

Still, there is a deeper promise in all this autonomy. Because the best thing about a self-driving car isn’t speed, it’s permission. The choice to drive when you want to: for rhythm, for presence, for drivers like me who relish the satisfaction of line and camber, and to switch off when you don’t. The long crawl north to the Lakes. The dawn blast to the airport. The late-night, rain-spray-soaked slog home when you’d gladly hand over the wheel and let the motorway unspool while you exhale, watch the window-light flicker, maybe half-doze through an episode of something forgettable. Control should be optional, not constant.

That’s what the technology could be about: selective surrender or a quieter freedom. But for some unfathomable reason, the marketing and product design departments have decided autonomy is best packaged as constant optimisation. That means another dashboard app full of metrics and prompts and juanty reminders. We built cars clever enough to drive themselves, then gave them personalities that never stop talking.

Real luxury now isn’t speed but discretion: the right to decide how long something should take. To drive when you feel like driving. To look out of the window when you don’t. Technology can make both possible.

Convenience promised to return our hours, but mostly it’s taught us to account for them. Every minute feels spoken for. Perhaps the odd thing is how willingly we’ve agreed to it and the peculiar pleasure we take in shaving seconds off tasks we didn’t enjoy anyway.

Maybe the best thing a self-driving car could do is forget the ETA and let us forget, too.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine.

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Oct 23 2025
socio-cultural

The cult of the worthy garden

In The Times yesterday, as we descend into a storm-filled few days of autumn, there was a little glimpse of Spring ’26: the line-up for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May. Britain’s annual proof that we can still grow things even if we can’t quite govern them. Every year the press release reads a little more like a mindfulness pamphlet, hope, resilience, healing through nature. May’s line-up is depressingly familiar: Parkinson’s, asthma, gynaecological cancer – each of course exquisitely planted, each designed to make one feel faintly guilty for not being ill yourself (or worse, triggering the health anxiety you fight almost daily).

This is far from a dig (!) at the designers. They’re extraordinary – and the reason I return year after year. Some of the most inventive visual thinkers and horticultural artisans in the country. You could hand them a brief about midlife ennui and they’d produce something quietly transcendental. But notwithstanding this world-class craft, the culture that surrounds them (the commissioners, sponsors and curators, the gushing BBC scripts for reverent narrators describing the “healing”) rather wrings the joy out of horticulture. And, I might argue, severs the connection from our own plots where we aren’t putting in corten steels laser-etched with messages from sympathy cards sent to Grandma when Grandad died.

For the last decade, Chelsea has sounded less like a flower show and more like a group therapy retreat funded by Coutts and serving South African rosé. Every garden, sine qua non, must mean something. Every sponsor must emote through the plant list and recycled-paper design statement. The law firms are at it too, Corporate Britain has discovered mortality and it must keep workshopping it.

Aerial view of the Campaign to Protect Rural England – On the Edge show garden designed by Sarah Eberle for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The design features a circular, sunken seating area bordered by curved dry-stone walls, a reflective black water bowl at its centre, and densely planted perimeters of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers in green and white tones. The layout creates a naturalistic, enclosed sanctuary with winding paths and layered planting that evoke the edge of a woodland or coastal landscape.
Particularly looking forward to Sarah Eberle’s return to Main Avenue — one of the few 2026 show gardens with a brief that feels refreshingly light of touch.

Of course, a sombre brief needn’t make a sombre garden. Most of these designers still find moments of light and sometimes even laughter amid the gravity, that’s their genius, natch. But the problem is saturation. When every garden carries a diagnosis, the cumulative effect is numbing at best and quietly oppressive at worst. You can admire the craft, the planting, the colour, and still feel the weight of mortality pressing against the rope fence. One or two gardens about illness are moving; a dozen and it starts to feel like palliative care with mottled sunlight. The tragedy therefore isn’t in the planting, it’s in the packaging. Even when a designer finds joy, the institution rushes in to label it therapy.

Ten years ago (and perhaps I misremember) you might have had one or two charity gardens, their presence was powerful precisely because of that juxtaposition. Now almost every plot is tied to a medical condition, social cause or climate anxiety. The messaging has become so homogeneous it borders on satire: “healing,” “hope,” “resilience,” the RHS bingo card of benevolence. The poignancy cancels itself out among a cacophony of good intentions, white noise amid the frothy borders and swept pavers.

Of course these causes matter; it’s simply that the monoculture of worthiness leaves little room for unfettered joy. The very people (RHS members and the paying public) say it outright in the comments: “God forbid we could just have lovely, liveable gardens.” Others confess they no longer bother going, the crowds, cost and piety becoming too much of a hurdle to clear just to enjoy the flora. It makes one wonder whether the charities have done a cost-benefit analysis on being yet another earnest voice in a field of them.

A while back I wrote about human-centred garden design, the idea that landscapes should serve the people who live in them, not the narratives imposed upon them. I still believe that. But the pendulum has swung from self-expression to self-help. Designers stopped building for themselves, only to start building for someone’s trauma instead. The irony is that true human-centred design, the kind practised by Zetterman, Pearson, Wilkinson or Nordfjell, already is healing, precisely because it doesn’t insist on it. Their shared language of calm geometry, natural materiality and measured restraint gives people space to feel, rather than instructing them what to feel, elegant evidence that joy and contemplation can coexist without a press release or a prime-time TV walkthrough to explain it. A well-made garden gives you peace without telling you you’re broken.

Every so often, something still slips through, a garden like 2025’s Monty’s Radio 2 Dog Garden plot, joyous, affectionate, full of warmth, and you remember how good Chelsea can be when it drops the self-consciousness and simply revels in life.

If I were a bank or a law firm with money to spend, I’d commission rebellion: a garden about the thrill of travel, the dynamism of the next generation, the sheer optimism of growth. Not a metaphor. Not a manifesto. Just a riot of clever planting that exists because it can.

Because all beautiful gardens are healing. They always have been. They don’t need to say they’re healing; they just are. And that’s the point the RHS seems to have forgotten – that beauty itself is the therapy. If the great British flower show can’t find joy in flowers any more, if every petal must carry a moral story, then perhaps it’s not resilience we need, but relief.

Come on, RHS. Lighten up.

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Oct 09 2025
work

Predictive Luxury: When the Algorithm Decides You’re Worth It

The paradox of modern luxury is that the more precisely it knows us, the less we seem to want it.
AI-driven personalisation flatters our taste so efficiently that desire itself begins to flatten. You open an app and there it is – the jacket you’d half-imagined, or the playlist that mirrors your mood before you’ve named it. The system anticipates, arranges, and completes. It feels frictionless, even generous.

But when everything fits this neatly, what’s left to reach for? Desire once depended on a perceptible gap, the space between wanting and getting. Now that gap has been optimised away. We no longer aspire; we’re simply anticipated.

Behind that easy charm sits a machinery, an industry, of prediction. Every scroll, hover, and hesitation becomes a confession. From these micro-gestures, the algorithm builds a probabilistic portrait: accurate enough to sell to, not to know.

This is predictive luxury – the luxury of convenience. It packages aspiration for the mass-affluent, translating status into data. The product is still expensive, but the experience is engineered for scale: “exclusive” taste delivered by statistical consensus. What once required discernment now arrives pre-approved.

To be clear, this isn’t curation. It’s correlation. Your discernment becomes the weighted average of everyone who clicked before you. Luxury houses once guarded their ateliers; now they guard their datasets. What was once stitched by hand is now inferred by pattern.

The shift sounds harmless until you notice what it removes.
Aspiration (the slow, self-defining kind) relies on uncertainty. We learned our taste through trial, boredom, and even embarrassment. Those edges are gone. There’s no risk in going to the restaurant where the algorithm has all but booked you the table. The algorithm keeps our preferences in a holding pattern, replaying what we’ve already confirmed, always within one standard deviation of safety.

The Predictive Plateau: a system that sells us the most probable choice, not the most interesting one. Left unchecked, it narrows the collective palate. As I argued in Luxury UX: Beyond Veneer, lasting equity comes from structure and restraint, not surface gloss. The real risk for luxury brands isn’t technological obsolescence but aesthetic homogeneity, a market trained to prefer the median.

Prediction is never neutral. Behind every act of personalisation sits a hierarchy of visibility, whom the machine believes is worth showing first. The more data you surrender, the clearer your silhouette in its model; those who resist become statistical ghosts.

There’s a quiet economics to this. By automating inequality, the algorithm devalues any form of wealth it cannot quantify or identify. The ultimate luxury, then, is to disappear from the data entirely, to operate through introductions, word of mouth, and private networks. The truly exclusive product is the one the algorithm cannot find, let alone recommend.

And yet there’s still one lever left: intentionality. The deliberate pause before purchase. The refusal to click “similar items”. The act of finding something the algorithm couldn’t possibly have foreseen. In a world of predictive luxury, this is not passive rebellion but an active aesthetic stance, a luxury of choice by will.

The smartest brands will design for this intentionality, not against it. They’ll reintroduce or retain friction as a feature: the waitlist, the mandatory consultation, the garment that demands to be felt. These are not inefficiencies but signals of depth, proof that the experience values attention over automation.

For all its precision, predictive luxury leaves a vacuum at the top. Once algorithms have colonised the middle (the mass-affluent market chasing “smart” recommendations), genuine exclusivity must move elsewhere. Increasingly, it drifts back to what machines can’t do: interpretation, eccentricity, the unrepeatable judgement of people who know.

That’s where true luxury now lives, in human-centred unpredictability. The ultra-wealthy and the culturally literate aren’t rejecting technology; they’re augmenting it. Data may light the runway, but the finale still belongs to the artisan, the editor, the quietly idiosyncratic expert who can surprise you in ways no model can.

Close-up of a tailor’s worktable lit by soft natural light, showing thread spools, scissors, and a half-finished jacket with a visible imperfect seam — an image symbolising human craftsmanship and intentional imperfection in contrast to algorithmic precision.

British luxury has long understood this. Our best exports – Savile Row, Bentley Mulliner, McQueen, Hockney, Grayson Perry – thrive on that narrow line between discipline and disobedience. Their genius isn’t efficiency but editing: knowing when to break symmetry, when to leave the imperfect seam that proves a hand was there. The imperfect seam is a brand’s deliberate investment in unscalable production – the final, physical proof of value when all scalable processes have been commoditised. Curation, as I’ve argued before, isn’t collection. It’s the art of choosing what not to automate.

The challenge for brands now is to build value not through correlation but through judgement. To shift from efficiency to experience, from prediction to anti-prediction. Their next digital frontier isn’t better personalisation; it’s deliberate unpredictability, the algorithm that refuses to close the loop. Designing such friction isn’t romantic contrarianism; it’s the only sustainable strategy for generating new forms of scarcity, and with them, price elasticity.

Because in an economy obsessed with knowing what comes next, the rarest thing a brand can offer is the pleasure of not knowing, of being surprised, seen, and momentarily off-script. That’s the new exclusivity. That’s predictive luxury, undone.

Acknowledgements: This piece was partly inspired by Antonia Hock’s recent post on invisibility and the next era of ultra-luxury.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine. You can still see my hand.

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Oct 07 2025
1 Comment
socio-cultural

Making a Dent

The word itself is plain enough. A dent is what you notice on your car after some clumsy berk has parked too closely and biffed their door into yours. It’s a mark, a bruise, a reminder that force was applied – and something yielded. In English it comes from the same (ahem) root as tooth*. A bite-mark on the surface of things.

Somewhere along the way though it was promoted. No longer just damage, it became ambition. “Make a dent in the universe,” said Steve Jobs, and since then entrepreneurs have repeated the phrase as if the only worthwhile mark is a cosmic one. The dent as disruption, scale, transformation. Anything less is failure.

But the smaller dents are the ones that stay with you. It might have been the teacher who insisted (as one of mine did) that you should all learn the famous Hamlet soliloquy. Or it’s the neighbour who always walked their dog and said hello at the same time every. single. day. The colleague who set out all the chairs just-so before an important client pitch. None of these altered the universe, yet all left their trace. They changed the shape of memory.

I wrote recently on Facebook about how I think of my own father. He was never one for speeches or grand lessons, but I recall often the steady choreography of ordinary competence and reliability: how he chained the door and set the house alarm each night, how he did the family sums on the dining table, how his handwriting looked like copperplate. To a child, these things mattered. They were evidence of his authority, of order. They left their mark, quietly but permanently.

A close-up of a butter knife spreading butter on half a bagel, placed on a plain ceramic plate on a wooden table with a linen cloth. A child’s small hand rests nearby, watching quietly.
The smallest rituals are noticed. Even a bagel, even the buttering.

Years later, on a beach holiday, I read The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Its premise stuck: you pass through life leaving marks on people you barely notice, and they on you. The scale of influence is hidden, but no less profound for it.

My sister knows this now. She works in a primary school and (again, recently) received a thank-you so personal it landed hard, parents saying she was unforgettable in their child’s life. I shot back: “You’ve made a dent.” The phrase had lodged in my head decades earlier from a boss ** in the early 2000s (he must have picked it up from Jobs). Back then it sounded like a corporate battle cry. In her case it was entirely different: personal and resonant at a human scale.

The same pattern plays out in reverse: not just what we do to others, but how they take it in and echo it. You see younger eyes taking in far more than you intended, in my case, with my son. The joke repeated, the mannerism borrowed, the odd seriousness with which a child observes how a bagel is buttered. It is flattering and unnerving in equal measure. You realise you are denting the surface whether you mean to or not.

This is why the Jobsian version rings hollow. It’s not the universe waiting to be dented. People are. And the dents that matter are not the ones scaled up for shareholders or history books, but the grooves worn into habit and recollection. They accumulate into something like folklore.

A dent, after all, is both damage and record. It tells you that contact occurred, that someone was here, that effort was made. The question is not whether we leave dents, we all do, but whether they are the sort of impressions others are glad to carry.

Perhaps that is enough. To dent memory. To be felt after the fact, in the small rituals and rhythms that survive us. Jobs aimed for galaxies. Most of us work closer to home, and the marks we make are no less real for it.

* hat tip to Leigh Thomas who always loved to expand on the etymology of words in her speeches to our agency. That is her dent on me.

** hat tip too to Darren Cornish who influenced me heavily on what customer experience really should and could be.

AI: This piece was written by me, and this time I used ChatGPT lightly as a sub-editor to smooth out some repetition and find the odd ragged grammar. The experiences, perspectives and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpt and, obv. the image that accompanies it.

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Oct 02 2025
work

The Loyalty Programme That Forgot How Parenthood Works

A parent stands by the open rear door of a family car on a rainy day, checking their phone which shows a zero loyalty points balance, while two Cybex child car seats are visible in the back on with a sleeping toddler in it.
Ten years, three seats, still loyal. The app says otherwise.

I’ve been through the Cybex catalogue more than once. Our son (2014) graduated seat by seat. Our daughter (2023) reset the cycle. That’s two children, multiple seats, a base, plus the odd accessory. All dutifully registered with Cybex’s Club, a loyalty scheme that promises free shipping, birthday treats, “exclusive offers” , y’know, the usual garnish.

This isn’t a flex. Cybex is high-end stuff, and we bought it because I lost a friend and his son in a dreadful car accident years ago and I became obsessed with buying the very best. That said …

Here’s how loyalty actually played out:

  • Jul-Sep 2023 — I registered three products: Cloud T (baby seat), Base T (for same), Sol Z-fix (Child’s booster). About 136 points earned.
  • Nov 2023 — a 100-point “bonus” dropped.
  • Summer–Autumn 2024 — the slow bleed: –45, –86, –5, –100. By the end of the year, the balance was gone. I saw the expiry warnings, but they were irrelevant – I didn’t need new products at that point.
  • Sep 2025 — I came back for our daughter’s next seat, the Sirona. Logged in before checkout: 0 points. Of course, after paying the account lit up with +150 “bonus”.

So the scheme doesn’t reward loyalty at all (beyond ‘free postage’). It rewards the purchase you’ve just made. A pat on the back after you’ve handed over your card.

I think you see where I’m going though, the deeper flaw is structural. Car seats don’t follow marketing calendars; they follow biology. Parents buy in long arcs: infant to toddler, toddler to child, every two to four years. A one-year expiry is a guaranteed wipeout. The cadence of childhood doesn’t match the cadence of a CRM dashboard.

What would a loyalty scheme look like if it took parenthood seriously?

  • Milestones – reward the upgrade points: newborn → toddler → child → booster.
  • Moments – top-ups on birthdays or product anniversaries, nudges to check fittings and sizes/weights, effectively MOT-style safety checks.
  • Upgrade triggers – automatic credits seeded ahead of the next seat, not after it.
  • Accessories and cover — redeemable on spare covers, pads, travel bags. Or fold them into warranty extensions — the things parents actually use between major purchases.
  • Recycling – the chronic gap. Car seats can’t be resold, gifting feels reckless, and regulations block obvious reuse. A scheme could collect and recycle them responsibly, with credits back for doing the right thing.
  • Family pooling — roll credits across siblings so value doesn’t die with one child’s cycle.

None of that is radical. It just respects the rhythm of a family’s life.

Instead, the experience feels like bait and switch: promises on the front page, expiry in the small print. Which is clever if the goal is data capture, catastrophic if the goal is trust.

Of course, I still bought the Sirona. Safety and product quality trump irritation. But the goodwill is thinner now. The wider lesson is simple: if your model ignores the customer’s real timeline, you’re not building loyalty. You’re designing disappointment.

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Sep 25 2025
work

Luxury UX beyond veneer: structure as brand equity

Split illustration in muted tones: on the left, a sleek SUV fades into static on a computer configurator screen; on the right, a calm hotel lobby with warm wood panelling, guests moving easily, and luggage arriving without fuss. The contrast shows polish versus structure, with luxury defined by order and rhythm rather than surface gloss.
Luxury isn’t in the chrome or the marble, it’s in whether the flow holds together without a fuss.

Luxury brands spend fortunes on surface. The right serif typeface. The right depth of cream on a website background. The right stock gsm on the brochure. Product renders with depth of field and lighting artefacts. But luxury UX cannot stop at veneer. If the underlying structure is clumsy, if journeys collapse into confusion or friction, then no amount of polish will hold that illusion.

The truth is that structure itself carries brand equity. The way a digital product is architected, how steps are ordered, how rules are introduced, how decisions are simplified, does more to signal competence and care than a thousand pixels of perfected pack shots. At Jaguar Land Rover we learned that millions of pounds of glossy configurator rendering and photoshoots is wasted if the journey collapses under its own contradictions.

When veneer is not enough

Consider that car configurator (I know I’ve been there before). The surface details may be flawless: chrome toggles, cinematic photography and transitions, elegant typography. Yet if the underlying structure forces a prospective customer through contradictory options, backtracking, or endless reloads, the brand is weakened. The luxury dissolves. Instead of modernity, the prospect experiences muddle. Instead of trust, they feel doubt.

Luxury is clarity disguised as ease. It is the sense that someone has already edited the path, made the trade-offs, and left you with decisions that feel not just coherent but inevitable. That coherence is structural. It is information architecture, not simple brand varnish.

Structure as invisible luxury

In regulated sectors, be it finance, healthcare, mobility, the stakes are higher still. Here, the user must feel that the product knows where it is going. A well-structured flow reassures not only through compliance but through a designed rhythm: disclosure followed by choice, choice followed by confirmation. In finance, disclosure sequencing is as much brand equity as trust marks in the footer. At Aviva, I saw how form ordering and timing mattered more than any banner, ad or brand flourish: get it wrong and trust collapses, get it right and the entire flow feels humane.

    This isn’t just true for luxury. At parkrun, where we were engaged to think about participant and volunteer profiles, the brand moment wasn’t surface polish but whether participants could find a barcode or book a roster slot without friction. There are quieter sectors away from money and luxe, but the principle holds: structure carries the brand.

    Hospitality and the British lens

    Top-end hospitality has always understood that structure outlasts surface. A hotel lobby isn’t luxury because of materials and furnishings alone; it’s luxury because check-in is peaceful, calming, effortless, because luggage appears without fuss, because the guest never feels unwillingly abandoned. The choreography, the sequencing of service, is the brand. Digital is no different. Done well, it is hospitality by other means.

    And here, for me, Britishness adds something. Where continental, EMEA or American luxury can lean toward performance, grand gestures, overt pampering, British luxury often communicates through understatement. Polished restraint. A dry nod over a champagne cascade and a platter of Dubai chocolate. That sensibility, translated into UX, means editing with discipline: fewer options, quieter confirmations, a flow that carries the user forward without ever drawing attention to itself. Not austere, not joyless. Just less show, more order.

    Brand equity in restraint

    A luxury brand earns equity not just through what it offers, but through what it withholds. The best experiences show judgement in what not to display, what not to demand, where to pause. Luxury isn’t ensured by the liberal application of gloss. Sheen can be appropriated, copied, imitated overnight. What endures is structure: the edits, the sequencing, the courage to strip things back until only what matters remains.

    When the experience lands with this quiet integrity, the user may never notice the scaffolding beneath. But they will feel the brand in the unbroken rhythm of moving forward without friction. That is luxury UX beyond veneer, luxury as restraint, stewardship, clarity. A quiet moral order and the calm assurance that polish and structure belong together if the experience is to endure.

    AI: This piece was written by me. I used ChatGPT as a sub-editor to keep tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpt and image that accompanies it.

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    Sep 23 2025
    socio-cultural

    Life’s Too Short to Scrape the Lurpak. But Maybe That’s the Point

    A nearly empty white Lurpak butter tub with a stainless steel knife inside sits on a light wooden kitchen countertop. Beside it is a small ceramic plate scattered with toast crumbs. Soft daylight falls from the left, casting gentle shadows across the minimalist, muted interior with wooden furniture and a blurred potted plant in the background.
    Life’s too short to be buttering existential crises out of a plastic tub.

    This morning I found myself scraping the bottom of a Lurpak tub.

    A white, gently bowing receptacle with just enough residual butter to tease the knife, but not enough to make it worth the effort. And yet, there I was: wrist contorted, scraping sideways, skimming over craters of cold margarine laminate, determined to liberate one last smear.

    For toast.

    I paused, mid-scrape, and felt the creeping absurdity of it all. Why do we do this? This frugal choreography. This dignified desperation. Is it habit? Shame? Some Protestant hangover of moral rectitude that equates waste with weakness?

    Or is it worse than that, is it training?

    A kind of domesticated eco-asceticism, learned not out of genuine conviction but out of decades of thinly veiled moral instruction. Don’t waste. Save scraps. Rinse your yoghurt pots. Aspire to net zero in all things, including pleasure. Butter, it turns out, is not neutral.

    I don’t want to be the kind of man who scrapes the last dregs of butter from the corners of a tub. It feels small. Slightly emasculating. A man reduced to margarine management. And yet, aren’t these the very values we claim to admire? Moderation. Responsibility. The quiet dignity of thrift.

    There’s a strange modern tension here: the aesthetic of abundance, paired with the rituals of restraint. Middle-class frugality presented as virtue. A lifestyle of minimalism, yes, but premium minimalism. We don’t waste Lurpak because it costs £4.50 a tub. Because we bought the “Spreadable” version as a treat and now feel complicit in dairy decadence.

    But scratch deeper and it’s not really about the butter at all.

    It’s about effort. It’s about where we place it. We pour our energies into small, containable acts of domestic diligence because the larger systems feel untouchable. We cannot fix politics, housing, the climate, or the cultural entropy of our time, but by God, can we finish a tub of butter.

    And maybe that’s OK. Maybe part of surviving modern life is choosing the scale at which we can still act meaningfully, however trivial it seems. Scraping the butter is absurd. But so is most of life, and at least this kind of absurdity ends with warm toast.

    Still, I didn’t finish it. I threw the tub away, started a new one, and felt a small thrill of liberation.

    No one applauds the man who knows when to stop scraping. But they should.

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    Sep 18 2025
    work

    So the Hallway Shuts Up About It

    A quiet, lived-in Edwardian kitchen with soft natural light streaming through large sash windows. A brushed chrome tap stands over a deep white Belfast sink, set into pale wooden cabinets with faded cream tiling above. A worn oak table with mismatched wooden chairs sits in the centre of the room. To the right, a slightly scuffed stainless steel Maytag fridge and an old gas cooker are tucked into the corner. The space feels unstyled, with muted grey and off-white tones, and subtle signs of use but no clutter. The mood is still and contemplative, as if someone has just stepped out.
    When you renovate every other room and the kitchen starts looking at you like it knows it’s next.

    We’ve been doing up the house. Nothing dramatic, just the slow, financially ruinous crawl from upstairs to down. Bedrooms first. Then bathrooms. Then the living room. And now the kitchen (inherited from the previous owners) is sulking. Every time I walk into it, I swear the tiling looks a shade more shabby-shite 2006.

    It’s not that much is broken. Except the tired Maytag fridge freezer, a burner that doesn’t ignite and the sink tap leaks, oh and the ruinously-expensive-to-repair-out-of-warranty Miele dishwasher. It’s just been… outclassed. Like turning up to a wedding in M&S when your wife’s in The Row.

    And this irritates me, because I’d quite like to think I live with a bit of restraint. I’ve written before about resisting the upgrade spiral. About not living like a man permanently preparing for an estate agent’s photoshoot. But it turns out that once you start, the rest of the house doesn’t politely wait its turn, it stages a coup.

    The formal name for this, according to Rory Sutherland, is the Diderot Effect. You buy one nice thing and everything else starts to look shit by comparison. Diderot got a red dressing gown and ended up replacing half his house. We bought a fancy shower mixer and now the kitchen tap feels like it came out of a skip.

    Which is how we end up here. Discussing a kitchen renovation because although it’s neither urgent, nor falling apart, it’s because the surrounding rooms have raised the bar to a level our sad little units can’t clear. And I hate myself for it. Because I also know that if we do go ahead, the new kitchen will make the hallway feel dingy, and the garden and patio will look lazy and provincial, and so on until we die or go bankrupt.

    And yet, this is the maddening bit, I also know we’ll probably do it. It’s not vanity. We don’t want quartz or fluted wood or some comically oversized kitchen island, we just want to stop thinking about it. To be able to walk through the space without mentally adding it to a list.

    It’s the tyranny of the unfinished, the psychological admin of rooms and spaces you haven’t yet dealt with.

    There is, of course, a way to dodge all this. You could adopt the Sutherland doctrine and buy a 16th century house. One of those glorious old piles that look better because they’re full of crap. But we don’t live in a Tudor house. We live in an Edwardian semi in Surrey where any attempt at minimalism makes the place look like a probate sale, and maximalism makes it look like you’re an edgy creative that’s gone mad on Etsy.

    So here we are. Planning a kitchen. Not for resale. Not for guests. Not even for ourselves, really. Just so the hallway shuts up about it.

    AI: This piece was, as ever, written by me. I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.

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