#160 Design that feels alive
Game "juice" and an avian automaton 🪄
Hello! In this week’s Design Lobster we’re digging into what makes design feel truly alive. We’re exploring the powerful gaming concept of “juice” and marvelling at the lifelike movement of a famous 18th century automaton. Prepare to be delighted!
I also want to extend a warm welcome to all the new readers from Brazil who subscribed recently 🇧🇷 If any of you are reading, I would love to know how you found Design Lobster!
Question: What is game “juice”?
As a teenager I was always so bad at video games that I was forbidden from participating by friends, and instead would rather forlornly spectate whilst the latest multiplayer Nintendo 64 game was played by nimbler fingers than my own. In spite of my own lack of skill, I have remained curious about the design of interactive entertainment as I believe there is much for the rest of us, especially those of us who design software, to learn.
One concept in game design that more digital designers of all stripes should pay attention to is the delightfully named juice. Ever played a game where every movement just clicks? The jump feels snappy, the sword swing lands with weight, and even the menu animations are satisfying. That’s juice—the polish that makes an interaction feel alive. It’s the difference between a game that simply works and one that feels amazing to play.
Game juice is all about feedback. It’s the screen shake when you land a hit, the subtle camera tilt when you sprint, or the way a character’s animation stretches just before they jump. None of these things change the mechanics, but they change how they feel. They make actions feel powerful, responsive, and rewarding. And of course they make you want to continue playing.
As I wrote about in my recent essay—Bring Back the Bezels—as digital software continues to wind itself ever more tightly around our lives, ensuring that the time we spend it feels satisfying, responsive and well, just nice, is ever more important. In 2025 we should be demanding juice across all our screens, not just the ones with a video game controller attached.
Design takeaway: Where could you add a bit more juice to your design?
Object: The Silver Swan
Our fascination with imbuing inanimate objects with unexpected life long pre-exists digital technology. One especially mesmerising example from centuries past is the so-called Silver Swan, a dazzling automaton crafted in 1773 by Belgian inventor John Joseph Merlin and London clockmaker James Cox. Housed at the Bowes Museum in County Durham, England, this life-sized, silver-plated sculpture combines decorative art with breathtakingly complicated mechanical engineering.
When wound up, the Swan appears to glide across a rippling stream of glass rods that mimic flowing water. It turns its head, preens its feathers, and then dips its beak to catch a wriggling silver fish. The entire sequence lasts about 40 seconds, yet the illusion is so elegant and lifelike it still captivates visitors more than two hundred and fifty years later for its daily 2pm show.
Automata like this belong to a genre of mechanical marvels designed to mimic lifelike motion, popular across Europe during the Enlightenment, when science, spectacle, and art converged in weird and wonderful creations that made their aristocratic audiences coo. In our own era, as artificial intelligence companies breathlessly hail the arrival of autonomous software agents, I can’t help but wonder whether they will conduct their business as elegantly as this swan does?
Design takeaway: If your design was an automaton, how would it move?
🦢 Watch a video of the swan in action here
Enjoying Design Lobster? Share it with a friend, colleague or fellow designer 🤲🦞
Quote: “A design isn’t finished until someone is using it.”
– Brenda Laurel
In Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel reimagines human-computer interaction through the lens of dramatic theory, arguing that digital experiences should be designed like compelling performances—with agency, narrative, and emotional engagement at their core. This quote felt like the perfect way to end this week’s issue, a reminder that that the life in any piece of design ultimately comes from those who actually use it.
Hope you have a lively week,
Ben 🦞
Elsewhere…
🐊 I enjoyed the delightfully surreal branded ice cream sandwiches at the Cafe Lacoste that just opened in Monte Carlo.
⚠️ This Carly Ayres piece on the work of Product Studio Danger Testing got me thinking: “We like this vibe of dropping apps as songs,” Los tells me. “It’s just us and our friends, dropping these songs that are funny, but are also really good—and people want to listen.”
🎚️ OpenAI.fm - lots of juicy details in this interactive demo for their new text-to-speech model
🤖 This piece by Erik Hoel on the recent Ghibli-fication of everything captured my thoughts perfectly: An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure. Once exposed, it’s a thing you have no relation to, really. Just pixels. Just syllables. In some order, yes. But who cares?
Enjoyed this week’s Design Lobster? Let me know by clicking the heart button ❤️
👇