How Feelings Shape the World

The following is an excerpt from Assembling Tomorrow that was featured in Rotman Magazine, shared in this format with permission. Assembling Tomorrow is available now, all images featured are illustrated by Armando Veve and photographed by Patrick Beaudouin.

IF BY SOME MIRACLE, you could dump the contents of your imagination onto a table and spread them out, what would you find? Shiny visions of the future lying next to wispy hopes and glowing dreams. Mushy blobs of half-baked schemes tangled among solid pillars of belief. Decaying regrets and throbbing clumps of worry leaving messy trails behind. Far-flung ideas falling off the edges of the table and scattering across the floor.

Look closely at this heap of ideas and ideals and you will find they’re all made of the same things: fragments of your experience spawned, preserved and reassembled by feelings. Feelings inspire us: What’s an epiphany but an insight laced with excitement? They guide decisions: Get to the bottom of any choice, and you’ll find feelings leading the way. They shift focus: Why is outrage all over the place online? Because feelings capture attention.

Peek behind almost any invention and you’ll notice feelings influencing what we make and how that makes us in return. You can’t separate yourself from your work, and you never know how your work will land with others — but don’t assume that feelings won’t be part of its effect. Feelings show up whether they’re part of the plan or not. Some intangibles exist outside of our bodies. Others, like feelings, lurk within. Nonetheless, they have a huge influence on shaping the world.

Design Begins with Feelings

Frustration is a cheap, watered-down feeling. It’s diet anger — less trouble, but more saccharine. Anger feels strong and purposeful; you can sink your teeth into anger. Frustration feels useless — an awkward burden with little payoff. Negative, lacklustre feelings like frustration are unwelcome guests. We want to slam the door on them and get back to being rational.

But one sunny California morning in 1922, the frustration of C.L. Peckham, an insurance adjuster by trade, was about to pay off. The inevitable conclusion of his experience that day would reshape Los Angeles and help to inspire a redesign of great swaths of North America. Peckham had lived in Southern California long enough to watch the stretch of road he was on grow from lonely rural outpost to bustling commercial district. In Southern California in the 1920s, that could happen in just a few years. On that day, the swift buildup was getting in his way. He couldn’t find a parking spot for his large automobile. Frustration crept in.

On his third loop around the block — still without a parking spot — Peckham’s frustration danced on the edge of anger, but instead his mind spun with thoughts of easy-access parking lots. His exasperated epiphany was simple: shove storefronts to the back of the lot and slap parking spots up front. Frustration motivated him to put the pieces together.

As he imagined it, the first ‘drive-in market’ would be decked out in full Tudor revival with peaked roofs and a faux windmill in front. A few decades and an oil crisis later, that drive-in market would become the template for the real city shaper. The strip mall — the key element on the periodic table of mid-century suburban design, and the fundamental unit of sprawl — was first formed by a spurt of emotion in the mind of an insurance inspector.

Strip malls have good sides and bad, none of which were part of Peckham’s plan. Because most strip mall storefronts are small, chain stores don’t like to move in. They often become havens for mom-and-pop, owner-operated shops, providing opportunity for immigrant families to take the helm. On the flip side, that easy, free parking spawned zoning laws that separated shopping and living spaces, making it much harder to get things done without a car, and left a wake of drive-thru neighbourhoods with distant storefronts, oversize signage and unwalkable avenues.

Peckham’s Ye Market Place saga illustrates how our feelings can play a role in spawning our physical designs and social systems. The built version of his initial concept lost the windmill and sported a freeway-scale ‘Ye Market Place’ sign atop a flat roofline (see photo). Looking at this first concept drawing, we can (and should) muse about the shape of today’s world had the inspiration been that every shopping complex could generate its own electricity with wind. The blueprint of the original strip mall is a blueprint for how we might alter the intangible relationship between emotions and ideas. If necessity is the mother of invention, feelings are the father.

Feelings Help Make the World

We often treat our feelings as distractions, but their role is quite the opposite. The world is a lot to take in. We need something to direct our attention, tell us what’s important and motivate us to do one thing instead of another. Feelings steer our thinking. That’s what they’re there for.

Peckham’s invention story illustrates how feelings spur action. According to Antonio Damasio, a cognitive neuroscientist at USC with a soft voice and loud ideas, feelings set up ‘action programs’ — mental cues that the body uses to coax us to do what it needs us to do. Feelings motivate us to try one thing instead of another and influence what we imagine and create. They highlight which sights, smells and sounds to pay attention to; they flag what’s important to remember. After decades of study, Damasio’s conclusion is that feelings play an outsize role in creating culture itself. In an interview on German public television, he noted, “Feelings are the beginnings of culture. It is feelings that motivate us to build, to invent and to create all the artifacts and instruments of culture, whether you’re looking at art, music, moral systems, governance, justice or science and technology.”

Human feelings spark creation, fuel its fire and provide parking for memories. Your emotional intuition comes from a dizzying mix of influences, from genetics to upbringing to experience; even your daily diet plays a role. With a design frame of mind, one influence rises to the top: circumstances — the way the things we make shape our experience and spur our feelings.

Everything that people design is part of a loop between circumstances, feelings and ideas. Circumstances nudge our feelings, feelings help spawn ideas, ideas bring about new circumstances and the whole thing repeats itself. Consider C.L. Peckham and his drive-in market:

CIRCUMSTANCES COAX FEELINGS: Endlessly circling the block helped spark his frustration and anger.

FEELINGS HELP SHAPE IDEAS: Frustration helped inspire his idea to push buildings back and away from the road and move parking up front.

IDEAS LEAD TO NEW CIRCUMSTANCES: Parking gets easier. But try getting around on foot in a city full of strip malls. Circumstances set the stage for new feelings. And the next loop begins...

That’s not to say frustration is bad. Even negative feelings can produce good work. Frustration can fuel invention. Fear can be a great motivator. But unchecked, feelings are unwieldy. And when they get the best of us, it’s hard to act in our own best interests. To build a world that gets beyond a never-ending loop of temporary fixes to momentary frustrations, it’s worth looking at what motivates us to create. Instead of accepting the inevitability of each step, you can consider it a chance to change things, to heal parts of the system left broken by designs that came before. There are thousands of moments along the circumstances-feelings-ideas loop to pause, reflect and redirect.

WHEN CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECT FEELINGS, step back to explore multiple ways to react and respond.

AS FEELINGS HELP HONE IDEAS, pause to decide whether and how to implement them, consult others, and even look into the future to explore the layers of interconnectedness they may affect.

LASTLY, MONITOR THE ACTUAL EFFECTS of your built ideas and watch for the ripples that go beyond what you could have predicted.

Yes, this is a lot of responsibility to put on a little irritation, but our minds are a powerful part of nature. Human imagination is the source for the quickest, most dramatic way the world changes—people dreaming things up and bringing them to life. You will need your wits to intervene in your often-automatic reactions to the circumstances-feelings-ideas loop. The trouble is, when you’re knee-deep in a runaway design kind of trouble — and even when you’re not — wits can be hard to hold on to.

Judgment can be flimsy even under the best circumstances. In 1999, Baba Shiv, a business psychology professor with a boisterous and contagious wisdom, and his feelings-focused colleague Alexander Fedorikhin designed a simple and elegant experiment to test the strength of human reason in the face of emotions.

It goes like this: subjects show up and get a card with a number. They memorize the number — taking as long as they want — then walk down the hall and recite it. That’s it.

It’s an experiment, so not everyone gets the same card. Some cards have a seven-digit number. Some have two digits. The task is the same either way: read, walk, recite. To the subjects, it feels like a memory test. But as they walk down the hall, they get a friendly interruption — an assistant offering a thank-you treat. In one hand, the assistant holds a fruit salad; in the other, chocolate cake. Take your pick. This is a psychology study, so of course what they’re testing isn’t what it seems. Recalling a number has little to do with it. The trial hinges on this little hallway soirée and the choice between cake or fruit.

It turns out that subjects holding seven-digit numbers in their heads are more than twice as likely to go with the more emotionally satisfying cake. Two-digit number holders, on the other hand, almost always make the smarter, healthier pick: fruit.

At the moment of decision, feelings and reason fight it out. When the rational parts of the brain have to grapple with a seemingly simple task like remembering seven numbers, the emotional bits have room for a coup. Seven digits is enough to short-circuit reason. With that, feelings are free to nudge the subjects toward comfort food to quell an immediate craving, leaving the healthy, rational choice in the dust. If your brain is full (and whose isn’t?), your emotions have an even bigger effect on your choices.

Emotions trigger decisions. This is not bad, it just is. Shiv estimates that “90 to 95 per cent of human decisions and behaviours are being shaped non-consciously by emotional brain systems. You cannot fight that. It’s all unconscious.” So there’s no reason to thwart it, but every reason to respond to it, to be aware of it.

If feelings are going to leak into your decisions and shape the things you make — and they are — the trick is to make them less toxic and more useful. We all try to maximize calm and minimize stress. More calm with less stress makes for better decisions. Shiv suggests many ways to do this. You can sleep. Sleep increases your feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin and helps solidify emotional learning. You can slow down your breathing to decrease the stress hormone cortisol. You can exercise, which helps increase a chemical (adenosine monophosphate, or AMP) that brings oxygen into the bloodstream and helps make more serotonin.

Will an afternoon nap or walk around the block guarantee that you make wonderful things? No, but it will increase the odds. Is every bad design the product of a panicked person? No, but as you create, aim to do it from a place of calm. It will help you see things more fully. Pay attention to your emotions. Treat your feelings and ideas like the public resource they are. If you do, you can help calm things down before the loop begins anew.

Scott Doorley is a writer, designer and Creative Director at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (the d.school). Carissa Carter is Academic Director and an Adjunct Professor at the Stanford d.school. They are co-authors of Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future. Reprinted with permission from Assembling Tomorrow, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Text Copyright 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.