Why UX will become 'urban' planning for the phygital world
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Moe Hachem
- September 1, 2025
Why UX will become ‘urban’ planning for the phygital world
Here’s something I learned the hard way:
If you want to waste a lot of money, hire an academic architect.
Beautiful ideas, zero feasibility, and massive budget blowouts.
I say that as someone who studied and worked in architecture, moved into UX, and saw the same pattern repeat in tech:
- Chasing visual trends like “glass UI” or skeuomorphism
- Obsessing over Figma gloss instead of user transformation
- Shipping beautiful decks that solve nothing
I’ve seen, and helped companies avoid burning $25,000+ on polished UI work that never addresses the actual user or business problem.
Meanwhile, the real friction? Still there, still killing trust, still blocking, if not actively destroying value.
Thing is, AI is coming for that kind of work.
If your edge is styling pixels, you’re standing on melting ice.
So what is the future of UX?
Well, look at where we’re headed:
IoT. Digital twins. Smart cities. Spatial computing.
See a pattern here? We’re not just designing screens anymore.
We’re designing how humans move through a phygital world, part physical, part digital, fully interconnected.
That’s not UI. That’s digital urbanism.
UX is evolving into:
- Urban planning for interaction systems
- Experience zoning for digital neighborhoods
- Traffic management for emotion, trust, and flow
The future UX designer? Less pixel stylist. More systems architect.
Less “make it pop,” and more “make it livable.”
Why does this matter?
Because systems don’t exist in isolation.
- Every wasted design hour is time and money that could’ve gone toward something meaningful.
- Every inefficient experience taxes someone’s time, dignity, or trust.
- Every design choice either adds to someone’s sense of agency, or erodes it.
Beautiful pixels are cheap.
Systems that protect meaning? That’s the real work.
A personal twist for me that I find hilarious:
I left architecture, and somehow, it feels like I’ve become an architect all over again.
