I was gone from my suburban St. Louis elementary school a lot. My Dad knew how to deal with the principal, or said he did. "He'll learn more on these trips than in school, anyway." The more they said it, the more they convinced themselves. I accepted it as true. I would learn more out there.

Like a kid, I took this as normal, and agreeably tried to make my education come true. It's taken awhile.

These trips were long car trips around two-thirds of the continent. Dad's expense account took him to Rural Electric Co-operatives in small western and mid-western American cities that were, by definition, off-grid. By age 12 I had 42 states notched off. Much of that endless time suspended between two equally random destinations (like Casper, Wyoming and Tulsa, Oklahoma for instance) I was sprawled lengthwise on the white leather back-bench of our 1972 Buick Riviera, then the pumpkin-colored leather of the 1974 Eldorado, internalizing variations in the road drone, reading paperbacks until it was too dark, and poring over the highway atlas for funny town names and undiscovered theme parks and larger patterns. Returning home to St. Louis was satisfying, completing a lap, but sleeping in the same bedroom every night seemed like an odd way to do things.

This was true for seven or eight years.

Circumstances changed after that but I had already been ruined. Take the late-blooming American café-and-motel air-conditioned daydream highway culture of the 1970s as a base, then stack on the officially-educational National Parks and museums and war memorials, the conventions in big city hotels and low-lit surf-and-turf restaurants and convention centers, stack on the yearly 2000-mile-round-trip trip to Uvalde in West Texas, stack on some endless afternoons in motel rooms taking in local television and the local commercial vernacular with my Mom, and you see my curriculum. From Mobile Alabama racing a hurricane, long midnight runs through Oklahoma excited by any light on the horizon, introduced to buffalo in South Dakota, a young connoisseur of cloud formations and game rooms, young sugar-packet collector, young Holiday Inn expert. Local television newscasters were all different but they were all alike. I had my favorite road food: club sandwiches in the afternoon, jumbo shrimp in the evening, late-evening Dairy Queen sometimes. Those were the years when 'See Rock City' was painted in huge red and black letters on roadside barns all over the mid states. Yeah, we saw it.

It was in a small café in Salina Kansas with its angled plate-glass windows oriented towards a two-lane road that it dawned on me that the arrangement of doors, windows, counter, stools, booths, the ceiling, everything, was creating some kind of dynamic between people. You could see it when new customers walked in from the gravel parking lot. They automatically knew what to do. It also set out the patterns between cook, waitress, and customer. That Salina café was as tightly engineered and waste-less and suited to its purpose as a small airplane. Put the same café in Lebanon Missouri, it would work the same. My parents agreed, happy I was noticing something, but that was it.

This paradox began to take shape: places sculpt behavior and have enormous psychological effects on people, but nobody seemed to know exactly whose job this was, or how these effects worked.

Although I was distracted over the next years, to varying degrees, by the demands of everyday life, this paradox never left me. I eventually grew up, went through school, got an MBA and a good but ordinary job, got married, had kids. The cross-country roadside education of my childhood left me with a need for travel, a set of unconventional perceptions, an easy affinity with army brats, and a nagging sense of unfinished business. I had an 'interest in architecture', which is a common ailment. Many practicing architects used to have an interest in architecture.

The issue still seems important. Good news: when I describe the issue, people usually get it instantly and enthusiastically, with a "Yeah, of course," as if they've thought about the user experience in the built environment themselves, which has validated my suspicions. These feelings are common. People can feel their surroundings operating on them. They can tell good places from bad. They're not dumb.

Places do have an enormous, compelling effect on people's behavior, mood, physical choices, self-image and health, especially children. Your places do contribute enormously to your quality of life. People do spend huge amounts of time and money on their physical surroundings - the pursuit of domestic real estate in itself is a foundation of the American economy - and yet. Everywhere you look, users are either being neglected in the urban landscape, spatially manipulated in malls and theme parks to get at their disposal income, squeezed into conformity in developer-built houses that look and feel like financial holdings, or, in the products of our so-called "star architects", outright punished. There was no consistent, sensible explanation of the user experience in architecture, and nobody to take the side of the user. So I thought I'd take a shot at it.