Hello,
Before we dive into this week’s edition, I wanted to let you know that next week we will be coming to you from our new hosting platform, Substack.
What stays the same:
The latest trends and signals across all things pleasure and wellbeing.
What gets better:
Exclusive access to our Pleasure Codes framework, with weekly, actionable ways to put it to work. Which is why we’re renaming the newsletter The Pleasure Codes.
An optional Substack app experience if you’d rather read there than in your inbox and get access to our community, comments, live chats, and videos.
I’ll be bringing your email into the new platform, so you don’t need to do anything, but please mark the new email as safe so it doesn’t vanish into spam.
You will likely see a quick “you’re subscribed to The Pleasure Codes on Substack” email as things switch over, so keep an eye out for emails from Angelique Green <[email protected]>. If anything looks off, you can always reach me at [email protected].
A huge thank you for being here so far. I’m excited to give this thing a home that makes it easier to explore, engage, and generally revel in all things pleasure.
And now… here are this week’s headlines:
From flavour-shaping ceramics to shoes that soothe the mind, brands are redesigning how we feel, focus, and find comfort.
From walls that whisper to your own thoughts that transmit from chips smaller than salt - the future’s starting to get more curious than you think.
Joyful bears, glowing oceans, and musical playgrounds, this trio celebrates the power of play, light, and letting loose.
A week where small gestures carried big meaning, turning everyday moments into reminders of what really connects us.
What Sky got so wrong is the blueprint for everyone else to get so right.
Enjoy the read.
Angelique
Brain Signals: How the New Neuro Aesthetic is Redesigning Pleasure
I first clocked it somewhere between a jelly bed video and a porcelain dessert plate swirling with colours that looked good enough to lick.
I was curating signals for a client when a pattern started to glow: brands, creators and designers are leaning on neuroscience to tune us, using the brain as a brief for how pleasure should feel.
These signals use neural insight to restore pleasure, connection, safety and sensation. Less “biohack”, more brain-aware design that subtly reframes both product and experience:
A bowl becomes a flavour amplifier
A bed becomes a mood
A shoe becomes a mental coach
A phone becomes a pocket therapist
In a world where the “moodification” of products is everywhere (just look at the drinks aisle), the opportunity to make people feel something, buy something, return to something… starts with the brain.
HAK Studio / Design Boom
Design That Shapes Taste
HAK Studio’s UMA pieces use glaze, weight and form to alter flavour perception, applying cross-modal perception research – how colour, texture and heft prime our taste before we even take a bite.
The plates don’t shout about function; they invite a tiny ritual. You lift a heavier bowl, see a deeper hue, feel a particular edge… and your brain quietly adjusts the story of what you’re about to eat. Pleasure becomes something you plate up as much as something you season.
TikTok
Hyperreal Comfort Fantasies
AI-generated jelly beds are flooding feeds: translucent, bouncy, impossibly inviting. You know you can’t touch them, yet your nervous system leans in anyway.
These loops are comfort fantasies for fried brains. A visual stand-in for softness, safety and total surrender. They show how even pure pixels can give our bodies a micro-holiday, hinting at a future where digital spaces are designed first for nervous-system regulation, and only then for “engagement”.
Nike
Footwear for the Mind
Nike’s Mind 001 and 002 shoes weave neuroscience into the sole: weighted tooling, tuned cushioning and sensory textures aimed at calm, focus and groundedness.
It’s a subtle but important shift. The shoe acts like a portable environment for your mind, a small, steadying zone you carry with you in a culture of constant overload.
Apollo
Smart and Soothing
Apollo Sessions turns phones into calming companions through rhythmic vibration patterns designed to activate the vagus nerve. Instead of another alert, you get a pulse that tells your body, “You’re safe.”
The device stays the same. But the relationship changes when an anxiety trigger becomes a haptic anchor.
Mass Live
Rising Rituals
Dunkin’ and Hatch teamed up on Brew and Renew, a coffee alarm and sunrise experience blending sound, light and scent. The brand moves from “drink branding” into “waking-up branding”.
By designing the moment before the first sip, they tap into a more potent part of the brain: anticipation. Pleasure starts in the nervous system as the room brightens and the aroma hits, long before caffeine enters the chat.
Houghton Festival
Festival Feels
At Houghton Festival, EBBA’s Pulse installation turned tree signals into calming light and sound. Sensors captured the forest’s rhythms and translated them into an ambient piece you could stand inside.
It’s a bridge between human perception and the more-than-human world. Instead of simply looking at nature, people get to feel in sync with it for a different kind of buzz in a context usually dominated by man-made stimulation.
Neuroscience is rapidly becoming a practical design tool. In these examples, it supports the most human parts of us. The parts that crave calm, safety, connection and aliveness.
Seen through that lens, the ultimate design brief becomes: what state of mind are we creating?
Two prompts for your next design sprint:
What emotional state does your product actually create – and is that what you intended?
Map the unintended feelings (friction, anxiety, overwhelm) as rigorously as you map features. The central nervous system is part of the user journey.Where could sensory design do the heavy lifting?
Before layering on more tech or complexity, ask where texture, sound, weight, light, rhythm or temperature could deliver the desired brain state in a simpler, more pleasurable way.
The signals you’re seeing?
They come straight from Future Possible®, the world's only trend platform that uses pleasure as its compass. Built by The Mighty Shed. Trusted by Coca-Cola, Britvic, Taco Bell, 19Crimes. £95/year. No committees required.
Wait, What?!: Sci-fi Tech Hitting the Real World
In China, engineers have built AI-powered smart bins that catch rubbish before it hits the ground. Using motion-tracking sensors and predictive algorithms, these bins spot objects mid-air, calculate trajectory, and glide into position to intercept. It's a tiny missile-defence system for litter, and with AI declaring war on trash, the future's looking a whole lot cleaner.
Researchers at UCLA and Japan's Nara Institute of Science & Technology have built a camera that sees through walls by reading polarised light. Using the same principle as polarised sunglasses, it reconstructs hidden objects with just a polariser and smart algorithms, turning ordinary walls into information leaks. The tech gives the potential to help rescue teams find survivors under rubble and gives autonomous vehicles vision beyond blind spots. When walls stop hiding what's ahead, even the unknown feels a little safer.
Loyal is developing the world's first anti-ageing pills for dogs, with FDA approval expected by 2026. LOY-002 targets metabolic dysfunction in senior dogs aged 10 and older, while LOY-001 and LOY-003 focus on large breeds, which have shorter lifespans. The FDA granted "Reasonable Expectation of Effectiveness" - the first time any longevity drug has received this designation. With 1,300 dogs enrolled in trials showing improved vitality and mobility, your dog might finally live to 1,000... well, in dog years anyway.
Cornell researchers have created a neural implant smaller than a grain of salt that wirelessly transmits brain signals. At 300 microns, it's the smallest ever built - powered by infrared lasers that deliver energy through the skull while the chip beams data back using satellite tech. When brain chips can stream your thoughts in real time, thinking out loud becomes optional.
The Cata-Lyst:
3 Mind-Expanding Finds We’re Tuning Into
Three invitations to play with colour, light and sound in much bolder ways.
Design Boom
Full Colour Freedom
Paola Pivi’s new show at Art Gallery of Western Australia is a riot of joy, feathers, and playful rebellion. From neon polar bears to upside-down planes, her work blurs the line between fantasy and freedom, inviting viewers to feel, laugh, and let go. A useful nudge to let joy be louder in our own work. Even when the brief sounds sensible.
Radiolab
The Glow Below
Radiolab’s The Glow Below follows the eerie, glowing layer that stretches across the ocean: bioluminescence, sonar, and the world’s largest daily migration happening out of sight. It’s a reminder that the most powerful movements are often invisible until you tune in properly. And a prompt to look for the hidden rhythms under any culture you’re trying to reach.
BBC
Sonic Playground
A Suffolk primary school’s new sound garden turns the playground into an outdoor studio, full of instruments and acoustic sculptures woven into the curriculum. Kids learn science, music and wellbeing through banging, listening and moving. It shows how physical spaces can carry ideas for us when we design them to be noisy, curious and inviting.
4 Great Marketing Moves
Together, these ideas share a subtle ambition: Take a pint pour, a meal, a game, a national event, and add one precise twist that lets people feel the care behind it.
The work here is subtle: help people protect what they love, say what’s hard to put into words, and recognise themselves in the story.
Shielded Pour
Guinness launched the “Guinnbrella”, a tiny umbrella designed to keep pints safe from the rain. A traditional serve becomes a piece of shareable bar theatre.
The move taps into the way fans already fetishise the perfect pour. Guinness leans into that ritual and offers a physical wink: if you care about the pint this much, we’ll meet you there with an accessory that’s equal parts daft and devoted.
Blank Canvas Meal
McDonald’s UK stripped the iconic red from its Happy Meal box and replaced it with a plain white version, plus crayons and the prompt: “draw how you feel”. Research showed 42% of kids aged 5–10 struggle to verbalise emotions, while 73% find it easier to draw them.
Packaging shifts from billboard to tool, turning a fast-food treat into a tiny emotional check-in. It’s a smart read on modern parenting: families are looking for easy ways into big conversations, and brands that provide those openings earn a different kind of loyalty.
Build It Together
LEGO’s holiday spot remixes Lionel Richie’s “Hello” into a minifigure choir, asking families: “Is it play you’re looking for?” We follow kids and adults using bricks to bridge moods, ages and distances.
By showing play as shared emotional language, LEGO moves beyond festive sparkle into something more durable: a reminder that connection isn’t scheduled for one day in December. It’s assembled, piece by piece, whenever someone says “come build this with me”.
Tomato Athletes
For China’s 15th National Games, Heinz turned tomatoes into 34 sporting heroes, one for each discipline, across giant OOH in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau. The line, “Every tomato that strives to win is in Heinz,” links sporting grit to ingredient quality during a major national moment.
The work plugs Heinz into a cultural high point without an official sponsorship, using charm and personification instead of heavy branding. It shows how a brand can step into a national moment without a logo overload by using one familiar ingredient, staged 34 different ways, to feel present, memorable and actually invited.
The Halo Effect: Building Better Teams
There’s been plenty of takes on Sky Sports’ Halo TikTok channel “championing” women’s sport as the “lil’ sis of Sky Sports,” so I’ll keep it short.
Halo wasn’t just a bad idea, it was a time capsule. A pastel, patronising “for women” sports channel built as if the last decade of cultural progress simply hadn’t happened. Three days online, and then the internet, athletes, pundits, fans, collectively said: absolutely not. Women didn’t suddenly become more engaged, more vocal, more present in sport. We’ve always been here. It’s the industry that’s only just catching up.
The real issue isn’t the misstep, it’s the mirror it holds up. If the people shaping the work actually reflected the culture it needed to land in, Halo wouldn’t have made it past the first meeting. This isn’t a call for workshops or apologies. It’s a call for different rooms, built with the right people in them from the start.
See you next week 🔮 👽 🎩 🪄