2026-07-14 · 6 min read · Raw Drafts / Cities and systems
The Best Products Aren’t Apps. They’re Cities.
A simple attempt to store a laptop, go for a run, and shower after arriving by ferry reveals how cities behave like products, with trust, transitions, and friction shaping the whole experience.
Tomorrow morning, I will arrive in Helsinki by ferry with a backpack, a laptop, and a few hours to spare.
I want to go for a run.
That sounds simple, until the rest of the journey appears.
Where do I leave the backpack? Is the locker safe enough for a computer? Can I shower afterward? Will the place be open at 9 in the morning? Can I enter in running clothes? Am I allowed to leave the building while my belongings remain inside? How far is it from the ferry terminal? Where do I change? What happens to the wet clothes afterward?
The run itself is the easiest part.
The real challenge is whether the city can support the sequence around it.
This is how many experiences work. We tend to evaluate individual places and services in isolation. A ferry terminal transports passengers. A swimming pool provides swimming. A luggage locker stores luggage. A park gives people somewhere to run.
But people do not experience cities as lists of amenities. They experience them as chains of actions.
Arrive. Store. Change. Run. Shower. Work. Continue.
A city can contain every required component and still fail as an experience if those components do not connect.
This makes the city feel surprisingly similar to a digital product. Each service is a feature. Streets and public transport are navigation. Signs are interface copy. Opening hours are system availability. Lockers and ticket gates are authentication. Staff provide customer support. Public norms act like invisible moderation.
The quality of the whole experience depends less on whether each individual feature exists and more on whether the transitions between them are smooth.
A city may have excellent parks, beautiful swimming pools, efficient ferries, and safe storage. Yet if the locker is on the wrong side of town, the pool opens too late, or the storage rules do not match how people actually move, the complete workflow breaks.
This is the same reason a software product can have every requested feature and still feel badly designed. The problem is often not the absence of functionality. It is the friction between functions.
The real question was trust
The most revealing part of my Helsinki question was that I was not mainly looking for a running route. I was looking for trust.
Could I leave a laptop somewhere and stop thinking about it?
Trust is one of the least visible parts of design. When it works, nothing happens. The locker remains closed. The backpack remains where it was left. The system behaves as expected. The user is free to pay attention to something else.
When trust is weak, every small action creates mental overhead. Should I take the laptop with me? Is this locker easy to force open? Is the changing room accessible to outsiders? Have people reported stolen items? Will the staff help if something goes missing?
The physical weight of the backpack is replaced by cognitive weight.
A well-designed city removes some of that weight. It allows residents and visitors to temporarily hand over responsibility to infrastructure. A locker holds the laptop. A shower supports the next part of the day. A transport system connects the steps. The environment quietly says: you can do this here.
The swimming pool as life infrastructure
Public swimming facilities are especially interesting in this context because their value extends far beyond swimming.
They can serve as changing rooms, showers, recovery spaces, saunas, social spaces, and transition points between different parts of life. For someone travelling, exercising, or working remotely, a swimming hall can function almost like a temporary extension of home.
It offers something that increasingly expensive and fragmented cities often fail to provide: a place to reset.
This is a broader definition of public infrastructure. Infrastructure is not only what allows people to survive or commute. It can also support continuity. It helps people maintain routines while moving between places.
A traveller can exercise without having a hotel room. A cyclist can shower before a meeting. A remote worker can move between physical activity and focused work. A person whose apartment is small can access space, heat, water, and calm elsewhere.
Seen this way, public facilities become productivity tools, health tools, and social tools at the same time.
Their value comes partly from flexibility. A swimming pool designed only around the act of swimming is a narrower product than one designed around the full experience before and after swimming.
The same applies to libraries, train stations, parks, cafés, and public squares. Their formal purpose may be specific, but their real role in daily life is much wider.
Good cities understand this. They do not only provide destinations. They support transitions.
Cities compete on friction
This may be one of the most important differences between a pleasant city and a frustrating one.
Two cities might have similar numbers of parks, gyms, public toilets, cafés, and transport connections. On paper, they look equally well equipped. But in one city, a person can arrive, store a bag, run, shower, and begin working within an hour. In the other, the same person spends half the morning researching rules, crossing town, worrying about theft, and adapting to incompatible opening hours.
The difference is not the quantity of infrastructure.
It is the choreography.
This is also why city rankings often feel incomplete. They measure affordability, safety, transportation, green space, or cultural activity as separate categories. But lived experience emerges from combinations.
Can a person complete a meaningful sequence without unnecessary effort?
Can a parent move smoothly between childcare, transport, work, and shopping? Can an older person rest often enough while walking through the city? Can a traveller access a toilet, charge a device, store luggage, and take a shower? Can a teenager spend time somewhere without being forced to buy something?
These are user journeys, even when nobody calls them that.
The best digital products make complex systems feel simple. The best cities do the same.
They allow people to focus on what they came to do instead of constantly negotiating with the environment.
In my case, that means the city succeeds when I can think about the run rather than the laptop, the locker, the shower, the ferry terminal, and the rules connecting them.
The ideal experience will probably feel unremarkable.
I will arrive. I will leave the backpack somewhere trustworthy. I will run beside the sea. I will shower. I will continue with my day.
Nothing dramatic will happen.
That is often what good design looks like.
AI authorship note
This essay was developed from Kris Haamer’s attempt to plan a run after arriving in Helsinki by ferry while carrying a laptop and needing a shower afterward. AI supported research, framing, drafting, editing, and implementation. Kris is responsible for the original observation, editorial direction, and decision to publish it.