Everyone has an assigned seat.

The plane isn’t leaving without you.

And yet… boarding always feels tense.

In this episode of Curious by Design, we unpack why airline boarding feels chaotic, stressful, and strangely competitive, even when, on paper, it shouldn’t be.

Airline boarding isn’t designed around comfort. It’s designed around constraints passengers rarely see: turnaround time, overhead bin interference, narrow gates, and predictable departure schedules. What looks like disorder is actually a system shaped by operations research, behavioral psychology, and monetized scarcity.

This episode explores why “efficient” boarding methods often fail in the real world, how overhead bins, not walking speed, create the true bottleneck, and why systems that are mathematically faster are often rejected because they feel unfair. We look at how standing creates the illusion of progress, how vague boarding groups reduce conflict, and how charging for checked bags turned early boarding into a competition for survival.

Airlines don’t optimize for happiness.

They optimize for reliability.

The result is a boarding process where position feels like value, waiting feels like risk, and movement feels like safety, even when it changes nothing.

The next time you find yourself standing up before your group is called, hovering near the lane, or guarding your place in line, remember: you’re not being irrational. You’re responding exactly as the system was designed for you to respond.

That’s Curious by Design.

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You’ve pressed it.

Probably more than once.

And almost nothing happened.

In this episode of Curious by Design, we explore why elevator “close door” buttons often don’t do anything, and why they still exist anyway.

Elevators are among the most carefully engineered systems in modern life, designed around safety, predictability, and shared use. But as elevators became automated, designers ran into a new problem that had nothing to do with mechanics and everything to do with psychology: people hate waiting, especially when they feel powerless.

For years, the “close door” button actually worked. Then accessibility laws standardized how long elevator doors must remain open to ensure safe entry for everyone. Shortening that delay was no longer allowed. Removing the button entirely would have confused users and required costly redesigns. So manufacturers left it in place, familiar, lit, and reassuring, but often inactive.

This episode unpacks how perceived control reduces frustration, why shared systems prioritize predictability over individual speed, and how design sometimes favors comfort over clarity. The button isn’t there to speed things up. It’s there to make waiting feel easier.

The next time you press “close door” and nothing happens, remember: you’re not being impatient. You’re responding exactly as the system was designed for you to respond.

That’s Curious by Design.

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Time feels natural. Constant. Inevitable.

But the way we experience time today is almost entirely invented.

In this episode of Curious by Design, we explore how time went from something humans observed, sunrise, seasons, cycles, to something we track, schedule, owe, and feel constantly behind on.

For most of history, time was local and flexible. An “hour” changed with the seasons. Noon was simply when the sun was highest where you stood. That all broke in the 19th century, when railroads needed synchronized schedules and consistency became a matter of safety. In 1883, American rail companies quietly erased local time, resetting clocks nationwide in an event later called “The Day of Two Noons.” Time became infrastructure before anyone voted on it.

From church bells to factory whistles, punch clocks to atomic clocks, this episode traces how time evolved into a system of coordination, productivity, and control. We look at how industrialization turned time into money, how precision created anxiety, and how modern life layered calendars, deadlines, and notifications onto a natural phenomenon that was never meant to feel this rigid.

Time isn’t just physics.

It’s culture.

It’s design.

It's construct.

And most of the stress we associate with it comes from systems less than two hundred years old.

The next time you feel rushed, behind, or like there’s never enough time, remember: you’re not failing at something natural. You’re navigating a design, one built for order and efficiency, not peace or presence.

That’s Curious by Design.

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