I was supposed to write a new blog post today. But I didn’t feel inspired and wasn’t sure what to write about. So instead, I went to a botanical garden with my girlfriend and ate psilocybin mushrooms. The experience ended up giving me a deep appreciation for good product design. And a new understanding for how psychedelics can help with testing the design of a product! This is how it all happened:

During the first few hours of the trip, I started noticing insanely beautiful things around me. The effect of the drug was enhanced by mind-boggling garden installations, complete with bamboo jungles and mirror cabinets. The trees started to make funny faces and an old willow flirted with me, swinging her golden hair voluptuously. The path turned into a rainbow from Mario Cart and here I was with my Princess Peach.

There was a small amphitheater. It looked so majestic that we were not sure whether it was real or just a product of our imagination. We marveled at it from a distance before deciding to walk over. When I sat down in it I felt like an emperor on his throne. I realized how generous and egalitarian good architecture could be:  Anyone could sit on these stones and feel elevated for a moment – at virtually no marginal cost. The amphitheater didn’t care who came to it. It simply remained there, gracefully indifferent, offering its splendor to the world forever and for free. 

We continued our walk, awestruck, sometimes forgetting to close our mouths. However, people started giving us weird looks and we realized that we were definitely too high to be out in public. So we decided to go home. That was when I started noticing less appealing things around me. I had been able to see immense beauty in nature, architecture and design. But my sensitivity towards negative thoughts and emotions had also risen.

In the back of my head, I was still trying to find ideas for my next blog post, so throughout the experience I used the otter.ai application to record voice notes on my iPhone. I suddenly realized that there was a serious design flaw with that app: Whenever I open otter I have an important thought in my brain that needs to be recorded as fast as possible. Nevertheless, the start screen of the app presents me with a clusterfuck of calendar events, previously recorded notes and feature announcements. The record button is placed in the bottom right corner – prominently, but not prominently enough! When you have a thought and are scared of losing it, you want the app to show you a blank page right away with only that record button and nothing else to distract you. Fix this, otter!!! (in case you didn’t hear my raging voice note about it already).

Then something else disturbed my general euphoria: It had gotten cold and my nose was running. So on our way to the exit, we stopped by the bathroom. When I looked near the sink, instead of a paper towel dispenser, there was only a Dyson airblade hand dryer. I don’t like airblade hand dryers, no matter how many rainforests they save. They have an elegant and modern look, but they simply don’t solve my problems in the bathroom. So I walked over to the toilet stalls to grab some toilet paper. I opened a door and a fresh, unopened roll of Scott Control greeted me. I removed it from the hold and tried to pull off a few pieces. But I couldn’t find the beginning! It was not clear how to break it open. So I wasted what felt like an eternity, turning and scratching the rough, recycled fiber before I could finally rip off a sheet and blow my nose.

That’s when it hit me: This was a low quality roll of toilet paper. The creators of this toilet paper had done a poor job. They did not bother to design a smooth first-open-experience. They didn’t test it properly in their own homes. They used up their budget and decided that they were done when something very obvious could still have been improved. Adding an optical marker for the first sheet or a piece of paper that stands off as a handle would have increased the cost of the product and someone had decided that it was not worth it. I felt offended!

I want the products I use to be so well designed that I cannot easily figure out how to improve them. I expect its creators to have obsessed over the entire user experience for a long time and figured out a solution for every detail. I am willing to pay the price for that because I don’t want to waste a second of my life being annoyed by a product. And I definitely don’t want to spend an evening writing about toilet paper!

When I do choose to think about the creation of a product, I want to be amazed by the genius that went into it. I want to feel that someone poured their soul into it, that someone stayed up late to make it work because they had a feeling that there was something left to be done. Just like me staying up right now to make sure that this thought is well formulated and expressed. That is what allows me to accept a product as perfect enough for my life. And that is what inspires me to put my own genius into the products that I am creating.

If you are an industrial designer in search of a new job, you should consider going to Scott and devoting your life to making the experience of opening a toilet paper roll more smooth. That would be a truly worthwhile career. And it would be handsomely rewarded. By focusing on this problem and fixing it you would prevent millions of people like me from having a tiny negative experience. A tiny bad trip.

I laughed at the fact that I could get an idea for a blog post from toilet paper, flushed and pocketed the roll as a reminder to actually write all this down.

I don’t want to downplay the risks of taking drugs. Without knowing your individual circumstances, I definitely cannot encourage you to try this at home. Just take it from me: Clutter and design imperfections become extremely annoying when you’re in the heightened state of consciousness induced by psychedelics. When you are at that level of mental clarity you have a strong vision of how you want your life to be. Your mind becomes hyper-perceptive of all the details in a product and you know exactly what you want a product to do for you. When a product fails to serve that purpose you become painfully aware of it.

It makes total sense to me now that someone like Steve Jobs, who led some of the most significant design revolutions of our time, had also been a heavy user of LSD. I would even go so far as to make a prediction: In the near future, businesses will pay people to test their products while high on psychedelics. (If they are not doing it already.)

Footnotes

1. Title image by https://unsplash.com/@mullyadii