I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
Even a dwelling is a device that generates a distinct pattern of daily activities and their relationships. Some buildings are explicitly built for ritual, but the repetition of any activity, either mundane or religious, tends to ritualize them, and by facilitating this, an architectural structure can turn gradually – sometimes even unnoticeably – into an instrument of ritual.
The association of comfort with people and place are reinforced by the ritualized use of a place. Using a place at a set time and in a specific manner creates a constancy as dependable as the place itself. It establishes, in time and behavior, a definition of place as strong as any architectural spatial definition, such as an aedicula, might be. Ritualized use can do more than reinforce the affection for a place. Through ritual, a place becomes an essential element in the customs of a people.
Fascinatingly, one of the other big complaints people had about agile is no iteration. I don't understand how being in an agile environment makes people less iterative, but somehow that seems to be the case. And I think it's because people misunderstand and think that agile is just about putting features out faster, and not about the important part, which is getting something in front of users faster so that you can get feedback on it and make it better.
People are afraid to let design have time to actually figure out the right thing to make, because "whatever will the engineers do?" – fuck you, there's plenty for the engineers to do. Go fix some technical debt. Go fix those 700 bugs that you de-prioritized or marked as won't fix because you're an asshole.
I'm sorry, I love engineers. I don't know why I'm yelling at them. But you know, there's plenty for the engineers to do. There's all sorts of cleanup. They can work on dev-ops stuff! They can work on their build process! Make it faster! I'm not worried about keeping the engineers busy. If you think that the only thing that engineers can do is build yet another stupid feature that nobody is going to use, then you're a garbage designer and you should quit.