Research shows that despite all the technological advances, we are less satisfied with things that we use in our life today – our household utilities, cars, tools, and numerous wearables – than we used to be even a few decades ago. Fifty years ago, the ownership of a personal espresso maker placed you at the top of the social ladder. Just having the opportunity to enjoy the hot drink while still wearing pyjamas had been bringing joy to millions of homes for many years since the coffee machine has secured its place in the kitchen. Those coffee machines were far less advanced than their modern rivals, yet still managed to bring in more happiness to their owners than shiny ultra-modern machines do.

So, our accessories are getting more advanced, but we feel less happy about them. Aren’t we missing something here? We did make a gigantic technological leap in the last decades, but are our technological advances alone good enough to call it progress? Isn’t the core purpose of progress to make our lives better? Isn’t technology just one of the tools of getting us there – a very important, but by no means the only one?

If you ask unhappy coffee maker owners about the reasons for their dissatisfaction, or simply read their reviews on the retailers’ web sites, you are likely to come across the following answers:

The water tank is too small. If only it could hold 100ml more, we could make our Sunday coffees in one go.

I wish I could press coffee and froth milk at the same time.

Nozzles need cleaning every month.

The owners found those reasons compelling enough to give the product a 4- or even 3-star rating. Whatever other qualities the machine had – its aesthetics, efficiency, or, at the end of the day, the taste of coffee it produced, – the obligation to run a simple monthly cleaning routine cost it 20% to 40% of the owner’s appreciation.

It goes far beyond coffee machines. In every area of our lives, while the products that we use are getting better technologically, our satisfaction with them keeps degrading, often due to miniscule inconveniences they create for us.

We get irritated with a smart TV that fires up for too long. We complain that the automatic rain detector in the car occasionally runs the wipers at wrong times. We can’t stand a couple of hours of outage of our banking app. All of those are ingenious creations that involved huge amount of technological brilliance. They do their job perfectly 99% of the time, making our lives way more comfortable than they used to be even ten years ago. When and why have we become so obsessed with perfection, and so easily annoyed with that 1% of tiny barbs and burrs?

Perfectionism has little to do with it. A lot of that is about how the ways we live our lives have changed since Francesco Illy’s Illetta paved the way for modern-day coffee-making spaceships one hundred years ago. But before we talk about that, let’s take a quick diversion and look a bit closer at how our thinking process works.

The two systems

The human brain does not process every situation or task that lands on our hands in the same way.

When working on a familiar or habitual task, the brain uses what Daniel Kahneman calls the System 1 – a fast, automatic, subconscious, low-footprint approach to problem solving that relies on emotions, associations, and known patterns. System 1 is very good in leveraging mental shortcuts, such as by applying solving patterns to reoccurring tasks or employing analogy to find answers for similar questions. It is something that we refer to as intuitive or autopilot thinking. Making a daily cup of coffee, taking a shower, and driving the usual route to work are examples of System 1’s work. In a way, we can do System 1 tasks with our eyes closed – that’s how good we are at doing them.

Conversely, when faced with an unfamiliar or unusual situation – something that we can’t navigate using our habitual or mechanical memory – the brain employs a different system called the System 2. System 2 is a rational, logical, and magnificently smart brain operation mode tailored for handling complex and non-straightforward situations – the situations that involve deep thinking. We resort to System 2 when solving intricate mathematical or engineering problems, but we also use it for smaller, not as complex, but just as creative and conscious daily activities. Examples include figuring out the best route for this week’s shopping list, driving in traffic while still getting used to the width of the new car, and adhering to the rarely used coffee maker’s cleaning cycle procedure.

As our day progresses, we switch between System 1 and System 2 multiple times, adjusting to activities and challenges that we face in the moment. The assortment of tasks that comprise our day involves both systems in some proportion, and the more practice we have in doing some of those tasks, the more of System 1 is involved, and the less of System 2.

Balancing the loads: Too little or too much?

It turns out that the load that we put on the two systems, and its allocation between the two, makes a big difference to the ultimate efficiency of our thinking process. Put simply, what we think about and how we think about it can affect the quality of our decisions and influence our mood, energy, and even willpower.

Conscious deep-thinking activity performed by System 2 is expensive. Every activation of System 2 consumes a sizeable amount of mental energy from the brain’s reserves. The more work packages we give it to handle, the more energy it draws from the brain’s battery. Conversely, the lightweight associative thinking of System 1 consumes very little brain energy, leaving almost no footprint on the battery.

If we put too much pressure on System 2, we eventually may end up draining all the available brain’s energy, reaching the state known as cognitive fatigue. A person experiencing cognitive fatigue feels exhausted, emotionally tired, and lacks willpower to continue with their further commitments. This is how we often feel after sitting a complex exam, participating in a prolonged brainstorming session, or finally finding our way through central London. The fatigued brain is prone to making mistakes, taking suboptimal decisions, and falling victim to mental traps and cognitive fallacies.

Under-using System 2 has its flaws too. By regularly putting too little pressure on System 2 we can cause the brain to adapt and involve it less in the thinking process. Eventually this may make our decision-making harder and more energy-consuming, similarly to how our muscles feel when pulling weights after a long physical activity gap. This, in turn, could lead to us reaching the cognitive fatigue state sooner in the day.

The top mental performance is reached through keeping System 2 under pressure just below the cognitive fatigue level.

One important conclusion from all of this is that to reach the top level of our mental productivity, we need to use both systems in the right proportion: just enough to stay below the cognitive fatigue level, but still enough to keep System 2 occupied to be close to that level. Keeping that delicate balance is what great operating environments strive to provide.

The Disruptive Nature of Change

Now we can see the difference between the processes of coffee-making and running the cleaning cycle. The coffee-making process is a straightforward mechanical task that we have gone through hundreds of times. Our brain uses System 1 to handle it, quick and simple, drawing almost no energy from its battery.

Running the cleaning cycle is different. Our brain does not have that much experience with it: we need to watch our hands closely or even grab the instruction manual to make sure that we are following the steps correctly. Running the cleaning procedure activates the expensive System 2, and that is a crucial part of what many of us are annoyed with.

Some might argue that it didn’t seem to annoy us that much fifty years ago, even despite the cleaning activity taking longer to complete, and being, in fact, quite a dirty job. Our dads and granddads loved their dumb, basic coffee machines, and they loved them with all the inconveniences that came in the package.

That is true. It is exactly the fifty years that have passed that have cultivated this change in us.

For centuries, the pace of our social, creative, and technological development was slow. From the perspective of human life, progress was hardly noticeable. The biggest disruptive change of the recent times, the Industrial Revolution, took eighty years to unravel – twice the life expectancy at that time. Up until about the middle of the twentieth century, the environment a person was born into stayed pretty much the same until they reached their deathbed. Things did change, but they were doing it at a pace that a common person could leisurely absorb.

Dealing with change and responding to unfamiliarity has become one of the biggest mental challenges of our modern lives.

As economies were reaping benefits of the Industrial Revolution, the tempo of technical progress kept gaining momentum. By the beginning of the 21^st century, the spiral of change has reached an enormous speed. Those born in the early 1900s have led exciting lives, having witnessed the invention of air travel, mass market cars, recorded music and colour television. That went far beyond exciting for their grandkids born fifty years after. Having lived through a medley of revolutionary changes, in healthcare, computing, public transportation, and entertainment (they saw the rise and fall of at least five music distribution techniques), by the time they reached their senior years they found themselves in a fundamentally different environment.

The change itself has become an inevitable part of our life. Every day we navigate through a multitude of new, reinvented, unfamiliar objects and processes, for which we don’t have established autopilot routines. This unprecedented quantity of previously unexplored encounters makes much stronger pressure on our System 2 than we used to experience at any time in the past. Dealing with change and responding to unfamiliarity has become one of the biggest mental challenges of our modern lives. In today’s world, the mental system of an average person is working on the brink of its capacity, and much of that is only to grasp the change that every new day manifests to us.

Being a unique self-adapting mechanism, our brain does its best to save us from mental meltdown. It aims to protect itself by offloading as many tasks as it can from the heavier System 2 to the lighter System 1. That’s where the notorious “superficial” Gen Z attitude comes from: born in the era of technology, they have quickly adapted to the ever-changing operating environment and learned to protect their minds from the mental pressures it creates. They think wide, not deep. They glance, not look. They keep it simple by not attaching. They minimize their use of System 2 in favour of System 1. As the spiral of technological advances gets tighter, that trend will be manifesting itself even more in the years to come.

And that is at the root of our annoyance with the cleaning cycle. This activation of System 2, however short, feels like an unnecessary expense, something that we should not be wasting our valuable System 2 energy on. We experience a similar feeling when presented with an unexpected delivery charge, or a hidden fee in a free service, or a sudden need to reboot to install software updates in the middle of our workday. Running the cleaning cycle puts extra pressure on System 2, fully avoidable in our eyes. Subconsciously we understand the footprint this unimportant activity makes on our brain’s battery and are getting frustrated with it.

For the same reason Gen Z avoid deep thinking at all costs. They understand that if they activate their System 2 too much, they won’t make it through to the end of the day.

Cognitive Efficiency

There is no doubt that in the near future System 1 will be playing a much bigger role in our decision-making than it used to in the past – and it already is. However superficial, hollow, or error-prone that prospect may look to those of us with analytical minds, denying it will not do us any good. We need to learn to live with System 1, to make friends with it, and to learn to use it to our benefit – otherwise our minds will quickly collapse, unable to cope with the massive mental pressures of the modern life. We need to figure out the way to not let the reduced involvement of System 2 and the weaknesses of System 1 (which there are plenty, and we will be talking a lot about them later) affect the quality of our decision-making.

A great share of this strategic goal can be addressed with designing the things and processes that we use – coffee makers, smart TVs, phone apps, cars, takeaway queues, and many others, – in such way that they satisfy this radical change in the way we think. This approach, which we refer to as cognitively efficient design, is an important part of Empathy, the second E in SEQUENCE.

The cognitively-efficient encounters reduce the load on the person’s cognitive facilities by decreasing pressure on their System 2 and maximizing performance of System 1.

The cognitively-efficient design generates energy-efficient, zero-thought, no-brainer solutions. It is invisible, anticipating, and smart. It provides the answer before the user even notices the question.

The concept of cognitive efficiency goes far beyond coffee makers and other utilitarian everyday things. Interfaces of digital products. Living spaces. Road furniture. Town layouts. Security protocols. Classroom schedules. Business operations and marketing strategies. Every environment or process that interacts with people in one way or another can be designed by following the same principal idea: provide the best value that requires the least thinking.

On the surface, a cognitively efficient product, process, or environment looks familiar and predictable, even if we see it for the first time. It is easy to grasp and straightforward to use. Instead of punishing us for our imperfections and ignorance, it acknowledges and forgives them. Instead of requiring from us to learn how to use it, it guides us through the process – in baby steps, if need be, ensuring that every action we take is clear and safe. It appreciates that we chronically lack knowledge, experience, and time to familiarise ourselves with thousands of systems that we meet in our busy walks of life. Instead of focusing on itself, its imaginary uniqueness, its self-proclaimed coolness and congeniality, it focuses on us, our needs and wants, our time, and our weaknesses.

Cognitively-efficiect designs appreciate that we chronically lack knowledge, experience, and time to familiarise ourselves with thousands of systems that we meet in our busy walks of life.

Throughout the past twenty centuries, product design quality was measured in a variety of units. In different times, to be ranked as well-designed, the product was expected to be practical, creative, neat, beautiful, ugly, branded, hand-crafted, simple, sophisticated, defiant, economical, or lavish. The core feature of a well-designed product of the 21^st century is its cognitive efficiency. A great product not only does its job well, but it builds around the user’s life and avoids introducing any friction to it.

And yes, it is the right of the user of the 21^st century to refuse to take any less than that.