Designing the inevitable sequence

You walk down the stairs of the subway station. Pay at the turnstiles, step onto the platform, and your train arrives. Once on the train, you remind yourself to switch at 59th Street for the uptown express. You pull in at 59th Street, and the uptown express is waiting, doors wide open. 

You made your connection. Next stop, home. 

A perfectly arranged set of moments makes for a satisfying experience. 
But what happens when things don’t line up quite so well?

Frustration, questions, anger?

To me, good design is often a matter of sequencing experiences to result in an inevitably great outcome. Arrangement not reinvention can lead to the most satisfying of experiences. 

Recently, I came across two thoughts that highlight this theme, and they come from radically different perspectives, fields, and time periods. 

First, I was listening to how John Williams describes composing the iconic Indiana Jones theme song. He said,

“A very simple little sequence of notes, but I spend more time on those little bits of musical grammar to get them just right, so they seem inevitable, they seem like they’ve always been there they’re so simple. And I don’t know how many permutations I will go through with a six-note motif like that — one note down, one note up — and spend a lot of time on these little simplicities, which are often the hardest things to capture.” 

And then, after youtube, I was reading  Plato, as you do ;-) and the following idea struck me as connected. In The Apology, Plato wrote,

“I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.”

Taking the time to arrange experiences an order, and with connections between experiences, that feel, as Williams says, “inevitable” can lead to lasting satisfaction, maybe even “success,” over time.