All these fates, bar one: it is not fading. According to an decades old, (unverified) estimate, 30 million presentations are made every day, and take 15 million person-hours to view (15 million people for one hour, for example). 

To excavate the deep design of this division, we visit both sides, though not to broker a peace, and we examine precedents and look at human nature for answers. Start by re-emphasising its sheer prevalence, hidden by its everydayness.

At work and play, peace and war, schools, colleges, businesses, armies and governments are in its thrall. When, in 2001, McKinsey presented to PM AB Vajpayee its case for infrastructure spending, newspaper reports actually referred to PowerPoint by name. In 2013, Mickey Arthur, Australian cricket coach dropped his vice captain and three others key players from his Test side for failing to submit presentations on team strategy. Schoolchildren are taught it early, and often are required to submit project work as presentations.

Articles denouncing PowerPoint often quotes the US military, which seems to both rely on it and jeer at it. An article by a US military officer called it ‘Dumb-dumb Bullets”. A slide picturing America’s Afghanistan strategy has become a widely shared joke—the head of US forces famously said, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” Another general called it an “internal threat”. Yet both generals use PowerPoint. 

Articles denouncing PowerPoint often quotes the US military, which seems to both rely on it and jeer at it. An article by a US military officer called it ‘Dumb-dumb Bullets”. A slide picturing America’s Afghanistan strategy has become a widely shared joke—the head of US forces famously said, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

To the point, and typical of the criticism, is the second General’s remark that PowerPoint is “dangerous” because of the “illusion of understanding and…control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” 

Here’s the holy pope of graphic information visualisation, Edward Tufte:  “…the PowerPoint style…disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. PowerPoint presentations… resemble a school play—very loud, very slow, and very simple.”

It’s fatal simplicity that Tufte’s talking about. PowerPoint slides were blamed for the vague information that led to the approval of faulty surface tiles on the ill fated space shuttle Columbia. A commission led by him concurred: written notes, photographs and data were recommended as both more effective and more efficient. Senior US army officers say that PowerPoint is appropriate for those press briefings where the goal is to not convey information—“hypnotizing chickens” is the operative phrase. And at Harvard, a peer-reviewed, experimental study,, found PowerPoint no better, and arguably worse, than a talk without presentation aids. 

The Defence, or not quite

Much of the criticism of PowerPoint springs from its strengths. In response, one can argue that any tool can be misused. Its naff graphics, and overwhelming popularity make it an easy target.

Much of the criticism of PowerPoint springs from its strengths. In response, one can argue that any tool can be misused. Its naff graphics, and overwhelming popularity make it an easy target.

The presentation itself is not new—as film slides, or overhead projection. But with its reincarnation as PowerPoint, came an unprecedented level of ease, and impact. PowerPoint is a watershed in human communication, as much as the open web. It democratised communicative agency: a shy 23 year old accountant could plausibly take on a boardroom..

The crisp fonts, graphics, and finish and the ease with which they could be combined weren’t new either: desktop publishing had seen to that. Both give even half baked thoughts the legitimacy of the printed word. But sounds, video and magnification let the presenter dominate the darkened room. 

But

In truth, PowerPoint leverages of the evolutionary primacy of sight over hearing, and especially to detect motion. It’s primordial. If it moves, I watch it, to eat it or be eaten. But the monster must be fed: next bullet, next slide, and the next. Presentations steal our attention, but misuse it, leaving a hollow where an idea  might have been.

In truth, PowerPoint leverages of the evolutionary primacy of sight over hearing, and especially to detect motion. It’s primordial.

The purely visual, false sense of authority that PowerPoint gives (even to specious logic) is hard to unsee. Bullets and numbered points give a surround-sound of insight. Boxes group incompatible concepts into buckets; and the arrows that connect them don’t just look like they convey causality. No, they are causal, they must be. Slippery word play can take the place of genuine idea formation: use the right font, and bomb the slide. Don’t speak.

This is the halo effect at work: what looks good must be intelligent and true. In a well studied experiment, when a well-groomed man in a suit tells a group of walkers that it’s okay to cross the road even when the sign says “Don’t Walk”, they follow him. 

But the halo effect can cut both ways. We also trust the person with better language, diction and even better handwriting. That’s a evolved bias too, rooted in the idea that language, articulation and writing took time and effort to acquire, as did the confidence to stand before an audience. They are heuristics for genuine learning. Democratisation can wait.

PowerPoint, in contrast, is the death of rhetoric, unconstrained language and pictures— together, the most potent and ancient ways to convey the complexity of the world.

Finally:

Thanks for listening.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Clear and present danger’ in Business Standard, 18 January in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Most will agree that It’s a Batman and Robin thing, and innovation is the caped crusader. Design belongs downstream. An enabler, in the trivial sense that every man-made thing has to be designed in some degree. Not the founding genius.

Perhaps, but the deeper design of innovation suggests that design and its methods could be crucial to the success of innovation. Not downstream, but central.

What makes innovation and design a pair?  For one, Innovation is at the centre of a hype industry—and funding—and design leaders are attracted to the honeypot. Innovation is as innate to humans as logic, religion or language. Yet there are national innovation councils, workshops and ‘weeks’, design-innovation colleges, and even high schools profess to place it high in their goals. 

Two themes background the hype. First, mature businesses are no longer in a manufacture-on-top position and stand to be disrupted. They see their future depend on innovation, and their organisations are not usually built for it. Two, on the non-market side, governments look at intractably tangled problems like disease, where business can’t or won’t reach. For them too, innovation is the cry. This creates a market with two large client groups. 

mature businesses are no longer in a manufacture-on-top position and stand to be disrupted. They see their future depend on innovation

Both groups put their faith in the artificial world, rather than in the spiritual, social or natural spheres and the systems that connect them. A low-cost infant-warmer, smokeless stove or water purifier obviate the need to wrestle the systemic issues that created the problems that these innovations address. Objects are the fix. They are proof of action, they are novel, and they can be photographed. The artificial world, both physical and digital is where innovation and design hunt together. 

Design can—must— be innovative, but is distinct from innovation. Some designers feel that design at its best is innovation, an occasionally touched high note. But the profession shouldn’t define itself as an assistant to innovation. Most innovations fail, and while we rightly celebrate failure, design methods can help innovation fail less cheaply and less often.

Design’s role is to bring people into the mix. Not just as individual users for whom more usable ‘experiences’ have to be designed, but as members of social systems whose interactions decide success and failure.

The rate of progress of innovation has come to depend more on desirability than on available technology. Desirability is some mix of usefulness— the job that needs to be done — and usability— how easily and pleasurably it gets it done. Designers can best discover, by watching what humans actually do, whether the innovation justifies itself on these criteria. 

The consumer electronics space is rife with innovative failures. Apple, an expert innovator, failed with its docking laptop that doubled as a desktop (you took the laptop out of the desktop dock when you wanted to move). A number of gadgets, twist, fold, or detach in beguiling ways that fail to serve enough of a purpose. 

Innovations build on older technologies and place them in new contexts. The Sony Walkman and Sinclair’s pocket calculator (not cheap, at £400)  proved that small wasn’t just cool, but could change how and where we listen to music or how often we calculate. The iPod followed from the walkman, but it was not the first portable mp3 player. It’s innovation wasn’t just a brilliant design of a user interface but iTunes, a way to make the music industry sells songs without fearing piracy and thus making it so much more desirability. 

Innovations build on older technologies and place them in new contexts.

This is upstream problem-solving, design thinking at its best. Recall that Edison’s light bulb was developed as a way to give homes a reason to get wired up, just as email was the one of the killer apps that drove internet adoption. 

But social permission also determines desirability. Autonomous cars may yet be perfected, and the regulatory issues of accident liability may yet be resolved. However, will drivers be too scared to drive them, or near them? Will they prefer to be in control of their cars, preferring the possible accident to being helplessness before errant software? Google Glass was a technological marvel that stalled because people didn’t want to be recorded. It threatened the human-human interaction.

The Segway is another genius invention, deservedly hyped by celebrity investors. It makes fellow pedestrians uncomfortable, and has failed use case after use case. It’s now a mall runabout, or a diversion for small city tours in areas where pavements can be accessed by wheelchair ramps. Maybe a use case still exists. Can design find it?

So incremental steps that closely involve humans and their environments is the way forward. Failures can be digested without necessarily reaching the marketplace. The Newton, Apple’s failed hand-held digital assistant, begat the Palm Pilot and paved the way for future devices. Perhaps the Blackberry readied the ground for the iPhone. But not all failures need to be expensive. 

incremental steps that closely involve humans and their environments is the way forward. Failures can be digested without necessarily reaching the marketplace.

Design methods can help innovators by creating good interfaces for new products, but can be silently transformative by helping modify the development path of an innovation. Designers can spot when new technologies become cheap or fast enough, making the innovation feasible and viable, and more so by discovering the best ways for their fellow humans to use and enjoy them. 

The bold brilliance of the innovator needs the patient genius of design to make it work, by bringing the human into the picture. Not as a machine made of flesh but a mind that’s brilliant, fallible, emotional and social. Humans, societies and systems interact in ways that matter. Great innovations abound, but great execution is rare. Design methods can be immensely valuable there.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Innovation and all that’ in Business Standard, 7 December in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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You have created a piece of distressed lettering, an enduring and deathless visual trope. It is a manifestation of distressing—the general term for the effect created by the recipe—a broader phenomenon, straddling fashion, furniture and more. Its deep design deserves a look not just because of its ubiquity and vigour, but because design reflects culture—and life.

In the grammar of design, distressing is technique, style and a source of meaning all at once.  But like many approaches to lettering, (stencil letters and brush drawn ones) it amplifies the value of words without having a fixed meaning of its own. It demands, and gets, attention again and again; we seem to not tire of it.    

In the grammar of design, distressing is technique, style and a source of meaning all at once.  But like many approaches to lettering, (stencil letters and brush drawn ones) it amplifies the value of words without having a fixed meaning of its own.

In the materialist view, distressing’s power originates in its purely optical properties. Cultural associations necessarily lie downstream. Distressing belongs to a category of visual artefacts that we have labelled biomotive: we are hardwired to react. We helplessly perceive rounded shapes as soft, and pointy cusps as sharp. We ‘feel’ them as sensations, rather than read them like words or pictures. As with colour, odour or sound, the process of interpretation follows later. 

Over time, interpretations crystallise into tropes or conventions, stored in the well of culture. Subsequent observers learn them, so that distressed means “grungy” in this context and “suffering” in another. But the durability of the sign’s signifying power across eras and continents is underwritten by what we have termed as its physique.

But culture is more than a passive reservoir of memory. Culture sustains the distressed surface like a sugar solution sustains bacteria in a dish (as in a type of blood test known as a culture). It is the theatre of action, and a patron, recruiting distressing for a wealth of roles. 

Given its broad sweep across space, time and material, distressing might deserve a larger title than technique or style. Yet the term movement seems an overreach. Movements seem to need champions, and to be theorised as resisting or proposing a great cultural, political or economic shift. But being versatile and promiscuous, distressing has been pressed—or rubbed— into service for several causes, more like a mercenary soldier than a serving nationalist.

Distressed surfaces, whether in buildings, jeans or lettering can be read as opposing a sterile modernist aesthetic and a fatigue with its neutrality and avoidance of surface ornament. Distressing allows a way of perturbing the continuity of the surface without resorting to ornament. 

By eroding the exterior of things, distressing can reveal structure. Wood is made of grains, and fabric of fibres. Paradoxically, this is an agenda of modernism, like exposed brick or buildings with exposed services, also cliches in the interior design of casual dining restaurants. 

But each of these practices are not mere visual strategies with aesthetic agendas, reacting to an excess of one attribute with another, or ways to relieve the fatigue of plainness. Brickwork and exposed ducts also signal a modest, non-monumental stance towards architecture’s relation with the citizen. 

Several themes explore the same emotional or ideological spaces as the distressed surface. Grunge fashion is one, and grunge typography too. The mega phenomenon of denim is another which is a century old. The tradition of lovingly faded, worn jeans one wore as a teenager has been recast in industrial form, precisely damaged and built to last. Gritty industrial interiors are yet another.  

Underlying these visual trends is the idea-canvas on which they appear. They are global moods or themes that are an amalgam of political and economic shifts, with their attendant social and cultural anxieties. They provoke and support the visible movements. 

Distressing is supported by the idea of underplaying one’s wealth, underlining a lower social status, or stating one’s protest against the economic order. It can be an act of ironic identification. It can be read as an attack on cool, studied rationality. It’s also a cry, a shout of emotional insistence with a suggestion of pain: notice me, and feel what I feel. It’s a neurotic gesture that’s positioned as a survival mechanism. 

Distressing is supported by the idea of underplaying one’s wealth, underlining a lower social status, or stating one’s protest against the economic order. It can be an act of ironic identification. 

The gestures of an underclass are often tamed and co-opted by an overclass. Inside a tony restaurant, we can sit aside a chic distressed wall with plaster scraped off the brickwork, and signal not an identification with poverty but its opposite. Rebels and rulers are both welcome. 

Inside a tony restaurant, we can sit aside a chic distressed wall with plaster scraped off the brickwork, and signal not an identification with poverty but its opposite. Rebels and rulers are both welcome. 

Alongside the co-opting of underclass gestures by the rich sits guilt, best characterised by growth of  anti-corporate sentiment around the world. Guilt can be worn to signal virtue, creating a sort of market for ethical positions. When a flagrantly rich white woman wears a badge that reads “White privilege is real” you know that society’s genius and madness have collided and merged. 

Ironically, the western tradition of the distressed surface has its roots in England’s stately homes of  the 9th century, in ‘antiquing’, a treatment of furniture to create an artificial image of age. Once considered cosy, elegant and feminine,  It has jumped out of its container and cloned itself multiply: gone viral in the truest sense. Given the social and upheavals that are in play around the world, distressed surfaces and their ilke seem set for a very long stay.

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The practices of economics and design appear to have little in common. But they share common ground when it comes to intervening in real world problems. Those, for instance, where poverty must be tackled (or hygiene improved, energy saved, or ever more cars parked).

Both these professions, along with businesses and governments, are one when their work interacts with the consumer, citizen or user—different terms for the same equally intractable and ultimately, central human being, especially when seen as a psychological creature, rather than just a bundle of physical or even rational wants. 

This is territory traversed by previous columns like ‘Good Design: It’s All in the Mind’  which appeared a little over two years ago. It referred, not for the first time, to Daniel Kahnemann, who won the economics Nobel in 2001. And somewhat presciently, to Richard Thaler, who would win the big prize three weeks later. 

BDK’s work is as inspiring for thinking about design as these earlier winners, because it affirms kindred ways of thinking, ideologically and practically.

BDK’s work is as inspiring for thinking about design as these earlier winners, because it affirms kindred ways of thinking, ideologically and practically.

BDK have been recognised for giving great force to experimental economics as it applies to tackling poverty. Their work champions the randomised controlled trial (RCT), a type of experiment regarded as the highest-quality evidence in medicine. Briefly, randomly selected patients are given the treatment that’s being investigated, and the results are compared to the untreated ‘controls’. 

The aim is to discover which (medical, or in BDK’s case, anti-poverty) interventions work, against the background that many programs fail. Incentives, the dominant tool proposed by economic theory, or subsidies, can underperform or backfire. Implementation isn’t always to blame, and indeed the behaviour of the intended beneficiaries can seem puzzling. Or irrational, as economists would have it. 

It finds, perhaps intuitively to some, that the poor stay poor in part because they think differently from the rich. They are less likely to borrow money to make an upfront investment expense that would benefit them in the long run, for example. They are, apparently paradoxically, likelier to borrow to save. A theme that runs through the BDK work is that the poor have trouble thinking in terms of a future. For one, the rich, too, can make similarly silly decisions, but can survive them. The poor may find the effects of a bad call irreversible—no future.

The deep design of the BDK approach rests on human-centred practice, a phrase enthusiastically espoused by designers. By treating the poor as people to be understood, rather than mystifyingly stupid, the practice is inherently empathetic. The poor person is rational, once the peculiar circumstances are understood; the fault is in the intervention, not its target. 

The deep designer will also approve of the BDK method’s deep pragmatism rather than its theoretical nature. It focuses on what it can change, rather than why it works (the ultimate reward for the theorist). It proceeds from a first-approximation observation about the inner workings of a problem and tests it via an RCT. If deworming Kenyan kids improves school outcomes, then subsidising the pills makes sense. (Interestingly the already affordable deworming pills were effectively adopted only when entirely subsidised—why commit to an upfront expense with uncertain benefits?). This gives an unimaginably large return on investment—If it were a school-performance improving drug, what would you pay?

This pragmatism leads to a type of cautious, reluctant theorising that should be dear to the design temperament.  Proceeding from practice to theory is an underrated source of scientific knowledge. And ultimately, maybe the theory isn’t there? So be it. 

pragmatism leads to a type of cautious, reluctant theorising that should be dear to the design temperament.  Proceeding from practice to theory is an underrated source of scientific knowledge.

Yet it’s a common criticism of the BDK way. The interventions don’t always transfer well; the Kenyan experience could fail to replicate. Local situations require local solutions, or they might not. Economic and medical RCT shave the same limitations: the difficulty of true randomisation, or that variations in individual outcomes might be large even if the average effect is favorable, and so on. Some raise ethical concerns (informed consent, and the withholding of benefits to the control arm, for example).

Thinking on poverty has typically rested either on the great themes of economics (inequality or inflation, for example) or on explicit welfarism. Yet their effect on an individual’s experience of poverty is indirect. Put another way, the average person does not experience the effects of GDP. 

Like design, the BDK approach affirms the importance of the small, tangible and directly observable intervention, without challenging grand theory. The recognition that small things matter is food to the design soul. That an experience can be altered to great benefit; that perception is as real as physical reality. 

The recognition that small things matter is food to the design soul. That an experience can be altered to great benefit; that perception is as real as physical reality. 

If a poor person behaves more appropriately when wages are paid directly into his bank account, than paid in hand, then how we pay matters. This marginal detail could be the difference between a path that perpetuates poverty and one that leads, just maybe, to a transition to a non-poor state. A practice that becomes a new default may work where hours of explanation fail, because practice often changes belief more reliably than the other way around. 

Understanding objective factors (those that everyone is subject to, all the time, like prices) in the light of a subjective ones (those that ultimately drive action, for varying reasons, like pride or risk) that results in a good system or well-designed objects. Designers, and problem solvers in the social domain—that’s all of us, to a degree—should delight in and internalise these ways of thinking. Start with reading ‘Poor Economics’ (it’s a breeze). 

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Experiment and Reason’ in Business Standard, 26th October in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Design is practical futurism. It is fundamentally about creating a future state that is preferable to the present. In the everyday sense, the future in question may be very short range, and its impact may be incremental. But at the highest levels of practice, long range problems are in its scope.

The advanced designer’s task in addressing the Future is to scan the present for phenomena (such as technologies) that are driving change, and extrapolate their implications. These coalesce into scenarios, and those judged plausible, or better, profitable, are targeted by a physical product or an intangible system. 

The advanced designer’s task in addressing the Future is to scan the present for phenomena (such as technologies) that are driving change, and extrapolate their implications. 

This product, which is also usually a system, can connect with the present, forcing a rearrangement of existing practice. This is a disruption, the beloved of venture capitalists, who are also practical futurists. 

Like the electric light bulb, Uber is a product-system disruption. New, but existing, technologies and practices (aggregating individuals into businesses) are mated to an old system (taxis).The app and its infrastructure manifest it. It is rearranging, or disrupting, taxi services, but also public transport and possibly even the private ownership of cars.  

Seeing the Deep Design of the future, starts, in Peter Drucker’s phrase, with ‘the future that is already happening’, and a look at the past. Strikingly, the industrial age we are climbing out of may well be the first time in history when we see the future entirely in terms of progress—and  view it as a certainty. 

Also strikingly, we view it wholly in technological terms, rather than social or cultural or otherwise human ways. Ask most people about the Future, and you hear the familiar marching band of  AI, machine learning, and IoT, with robotics and additive printing bringing up the rear. Those most exposed to sci-fi offer dystopian alternatives, where, for example, hi-tech and poverty coexist but the mood is generally optimistic.

Ask most people about the Future, and you hear the familiar marching band of  AI, machine learning, and IoT, with robotics and additive printing bringing up the rear.

But the arch-concept of the technology-driven future is, by a distance, the unified digital grid. This is an extension of the digital world we are already seeing. Understanding it rests on the two following realisations. First, that the central benefit of machine-augmented human activity is best realised by networking both machine and user to other devices and users. The value is in the network, not the thing. An ordinary taxi, connected to a network, is instantly far more valuable, for driver, passenger and the organisation that supports it. 

From this follows the next, that the networks themselves are at their most effective when they, too, are networked. Toaster, car, bank or blood type can all be joined up. Autonomous cars remain stuck less for technological reasons but due to how machine-to-machine and man-to-machine interaction (collisions, to name one) are handled. It would be a lot easier if all cars were autonomous, and even better if they were being driven by the same system. Paradise or dystopia?

A logical conclusion is the perfect traceability of all human activity. This is exactly what is being resisted, as an example, by opponents of the horizontal reach of the Aadhar identity system, with its promise of service delivery on the one hand and privacy concerns on the other. Likewise, all-digital money. It may well all work, with the correct compromises reached. 

But design must concern itself with the ways in which this ongoing revolution interacts with the social structure that hosts it. For both good and bad, innovation proceeds at the rate subject to social permission, and it looks like society is in charge. This does not imply that all is well; corporations and governments are also social actors who cannot always be trusted.

design must concern itself with the ways in which this ongoing revolution interacts with the social structure that hosts it.

Less obviously, a technological revolution, while subject to cultural and societal control, also creates and affects the way we think. For example. the present status of science, and capitalism, is a creation of the industrial revolution, as well as a necessary condition for it. 

Indeed, the fallouts of this Future are several. Digital unification demands uniformity, and threatens an over-organised world. For example, the web is organised by search, a mechanism whose design rewards conformity and punishes the reverse by making it less findable.  

Even less obviously, the digital grid promotes a culture of objectivity (good) that is  unbounded or unqualified (not so good). It treats human instincts and emotions as biases (which they sometimes are). Flowing from this is the notion that statistics can capture reality; that algorithms are perfect. That Google is the truth. That popular is right. 

It is also promoting a world where we are ever more connected, but ever more private. We listen to music on headphones, watch our ‘own’ TV, and speak to social networks, while being less social in a genuine sense. We can mistake our private world for public reality.  

Design will hopefully play its usual role role as an intelligent, thoughtful maker of products and systems and it may do so by favorably negotiating the potential for bad and maximising utility. This is speeding the system as referred to in the opening paragraph. But more crucial may be its ability to provide intelligent friction. 

Design can argue for a culture of experimentation, of trying out the unproven, even the unprovable. It can resist the idea of a single right answer to any question, which is a tendency when the question is turned into a search for a number. It can argue for the apparently illogical; for the value of subjective experiences alongside objective benefits. A full exploration of this subject will follow. 

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Design and the Future’ in Business Standard, 3 August in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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To get there, and there are signs of it happening, designers must, like salmon are reputed to do, swim upstream to lay the eggs of their interventions. Upstream is where the decisions are made about what to design, and how to intervene in a given situation. Downstream of this is where eggs are hatched, and design in the narrower sense of giving form to things lies here.

Business has been drawn to design. Its lodestar may seem to be the fifteen year rise and rise of Apple, seen as the best example of making design a competitive advantage. But it’s not making attractive products alone that matters. It’s the ‘design thinking’ that the management world talks up as enthusiastically as design’s leaders. This is  a toolkit of broadly applicable skills, habits and attitudes that good designers (should) have.

Business has been drawn to design. Its lodestar may seem to be the fifteen year rise and rise of Apple, seen as the best example of making design a competitive advantage.

These thoughts came, as they often do, from random stimuli (openness to which could be skill #1).

Life saving

The first of these was an email from a friend, pointing to a BBC website* slideshow called “graphic design that can help save lives”. It sounded too good to be true; and while it was, the examples are instructive in other ways. Let’s see.

Stephen Doe’s wall paintings illustrate with brutal clarity the symptoms of ebola, in low-literacy Liberia, and probably saved lives during the 2014 outbreak. It went viral, via posters and billboards.

Then there are ‘plain pack’ cigarette packs, with ghoulish graphics of smoker’s diseases, designed to deter, pioneered in Australia. Reports on their success are mixed, but let’s go with those that say they do. (Another attitude: being comfortable with validity, not needing proof).

Stephen Doe’s wall paintings illustrate with brutal clarity the symptoms of ebola, in low-literacy Liberia, and probably saved lives during the 2014 outbreak. It went viral, via posters and billboards. 

Next is the highly distinctive check pattern on British ambulances, which instantly says ‘emergency services’ to Britons, seen through a rear view mirror, or anywhere else. As an aside, another common device, laterally inverting the word ‘ambulance’ on the vans so it reads correctly in the mirror has always struck Deep Design as clever but weak, though evidence is lacking.

In each of these cases, the graphic design itself, in the sense of the visual form given to the intervention, is downstream of the upstream decision to act in that way. The designer’s craft as form-giver is less important, albeit to varying degrees.

Stephen Doe’s wall paintings are effective despite their crudity, not because crudity is somehow a cunning device that makes it effective. Similarly, it’s the idea of placing disgusting graphics to cover cigarette packs while eliminating the brand, that has the impact. It constitutes the upstream design thinking, and the details of how the horrific ulcers are pictured is secondary.

If we were to hype, as the BBC report does, the precise shade of brown used—‘opaque couché’, billed the ‘most nauseating colour in the world’, chosen after rigorous research, we would miss the point. And indulge in misplaced mystification, because colours are ugly only by the associations we attach to them. Pantone 448, as the colour is known, might readily suit an elegant men’s cigarette pack (brown is a staple of men’s products).

Likewise the check pattern that spells ‘emergency’ does so by repetition and its optical property. That they are drawn from Battenberg cake (the checks show up when you cut through one) is, like the ‘world’s ugliest colour’, tag, romanticising a good choice. The choice of the checks is important, but both impact and the balance of creative weight lie upstream.

Smoke without fire

More stimuli came in the form of Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize for his foundational work in behavioural economics, (after Daniel Kahnemann’s Nobel win in 2002)  following a mention of Thaler in the last column, on design and psychology. At the same time came the pre-Diwali fireworks in the form of the Supreme Court’s cracker bans in Delhi.

One of the biases that behavioral psychology explores is “what you see is all there is”. It refers to our tendency to treat the evidence of our eyes as a complete picture of a reality. Events in the news, particularly the images we are exposed to, called ‘available’ in psycho-speak, dominate our thinking.

One of the biases that behavioral psychology explores is “what you see is all there is”. It refers to our tendency to treat the evidence of our eyes as a complete picture of a reality. 

By this thinking, Diwali pollution hogs our attention because both the crackers and their polluting after-effects are strikingly visual, not unlike the uglified cigarette packs. This outweighs its extremely short-lived effect. Instead, it’s the long-term, everyday, ‘permanent’ kind of pollution that matters far, far more. But invisibility ensures its lack of salience.

The Delhi Metro, while it was being built, made diligent use of well-painted and marked barricades, screening us from continuous exposure to dug-up roads. The Commonwealth Games did not, and invited anger. The Metro construction was admired, the Games’ works mocked. This visual factor likely exaggerated both reputations,

A Job Description

Designers with upstream ambitions must reflect on things in psychological terms. But they also know that none of these upstream acts, however well conceived, would have taken place without the skill of rallying facts, building consensus and steering it through a forest of conflicting stakeholder interests. Buckminster Fuller’s (attributed) description of a designer as “emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist” could well include ‘politician’ and ‘psychologist’.

Indeed, some of the best-regarded companies emphasise design with the new position of Chief Design Officer. Their upstream and downstream influence, and the new skills and mindsets that the CDO and his employers will need, deserve to be considered.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘A seat at the High Table’ in Business Standard, Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Yet a vast amount of communications may well be entirely wasted, or at least measured with the wrong scales. We see something akin to an arms race, in which advertisers, for example, build ever better arsenals to penetrate the defences of audiences, who neutralise messages by knowing more and more and believing less and less.

The Deep Design of the phenomenon has to do with signalling, the notion that the what content of a message, conveyed in words, sounds and pictures, matters less than its context. That is, the when, where and who or the circumstances surrounding the message, leading to the why, an inescapable inference about what’s really, really going on. This meta communication trumps the actual message content.

signalling, the notion that the what content of a message, conveyed in words, sounds and pictures, matters less than its context.

Signalling is everywhere. Companies use price signalling in a number of ways, such as luxury goods companies using it to reduce availability, to connote exclusion, not superiority. We use signalling everywhere: LED lighting signals our concern for the earth, and less our pockets. Weddings are expensive, noisy and public to signal commitment. We vote in part to show we ‘care’. Software nerds take job interviews in sloppy (though uniform) clothes, not suits, to signal an obsession with code, and a sacrifice of convention.

Indeed, sacrifice has a lot to do with it. In biology and economics, signals are considered credible when resources are spent—especially inefficiently. A peacock, say biologists, grows a metabolically expensive tail despite its many disadvantages, to signal its health. Stalin’s armies, ever short of arms, shared one rifle among two recruits—”when the man in front falls, take his rifle and advance”— yet armed the guards who stood behind the ranks, to shoot deserters. Irrational, until one considers the signals.

A company that uses mass media lavishly to reach a small audience ‘wastes’ money, but it signals solidity and power. It’s rational to prefer the more heavily advertised product, quite apart from what the advertising messages. It’s one explanation of why advertising works, because its exhortations are expensively public, the more viewed the better. Every viewer knows that the commercials that aired during the cricket were watched by millions of others, tying her into a social lockstep. These are expensive signals. (In contrast, the doctor who rubs his hands with a self-drying gel from a dispenser on his table signals hygiene inexpensively, the latest stop in a 150-year campaign to get doctors to wash their hands more).

A company that uses mass media lavishly to reach a small audience ‘wastes’ money, but it signals solidity and power. It’s one explanation of why advertising works, because its exhortations are expensively public, the more viewed the better. 

A recent Apple commercial shows a sea of people in single coloured uniforms, running parkour-style through the streets, asking us to ‘make room for colour’. It’s beautifully, expensively, made; the track is highly listenable. Yet it is more like an ad for a tv set by an electronics giant than from a company that has defined techno-lust. Apple’s advertising has never leant on incrementally better technology but on a certain swagger. The typical Apple ad is more a statement than an appeal, an assertion of social proof of the iPhone’s desirability, not its functional superiority: if you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone. This ad is an appeal, to better implemented features, and credibly messages an excellent phone. But that appeal may send a different signal: of a lower level of confidence, from which one might infer Apple’s acknowledgement of a shrinking gap with competition. Is there a less vibrant pipeline of new ideas?

Signaling is non-verbal, and so is design. Obviously, designers can harness its power or at least be more aware of the signal value of their products and communications, not simply the rational content that is sought to be transmitted.

Signaling is non-verbal, and so is design.

Packaging is a good example where the wrapper sets our expectations of the product. We are seeing a slew of milk brands of the small food, or organic variety use glass bottles reminiscent of an earlier time. Plastic containers would be far more efficient, but the particular sort of glass bottle signals a score of things. The surface graphic design is secondary.

Apple’s trend-setting identity in the 1980s, by its choice of name, signaled its difference from the status quo in the fledgling computer industry. This act, of not naming it to connote techy-ness was far more significant that other readings of the name (to signify temptation, as one tale goes, or freshness or simplicity).

Apple’s trend-setting identity in the 1980s, by its choice of name, signaled its difference from the status quo in the fledgling computer industry.

Less obviously, expensive, hard to fake, official signage is a signal of competent governance, as has been argued in these columns. Branding may communicates ideas and attitudes, but these are arguable and malleable. But the consistent application of the branding program across geographies, media and applications, powerfully—and inescapably—communicates the owner’s ability to orchestrate thought and action. The wasteful packaging that e-commerce sellers use, where an unbreakable can is swaddled in superfluous amounts of air-filled blistered polythene, and then placed in secure corrugated cartons both assures and signals assurance. However, as environmentally conscious consumers, we might have to perform our own virtue signalling, by opting out with explicit instructions to forego the extra safety.

consistent application of the branding program across geographies, media and applications, powerfully—and inescapably—communicates the owner’s ability to orchestrate thought and action.

Now that you can see signalling everywhere, and appreciate that it’s a human, social tendency, a skilled instinct and not a synthetic learned thing, it’s a surprise that not all communicators or designers are alert to the idea. We’ve repeated, since school, that actions speak louder than words, but we may have lost the essence somewhere.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Signal to message ratio’ in Business Standard, 16 March in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Indian campaigns aren’t really designed in the usual sense, unlike in the US: logos, typefaces and imagery, thoughtfully created and effectively orchestrated. But widen the window of design to view communication, and the effectiveness of Indian campaigns pops into focus.

Consider the campaign as a totality of impressions: actions, statements, media reports, symbolism, and the like. Look beyond the fabulously chaotic visual arena, and attend to the theatres of message and rhetoric. Especially, listen for the unspoken: the signalling, or the suggestions beyond the verbal.

The campaign should include Mr Modi’s last tenure, His governance tends to be in campaign mode: carefully scripted events and messaging.

The winning campaign, defined like this, spoke better to emotion, using reason only to rationalise its appeals. By this reckoning, Mr Modi’s BJP was much the better campaign. Its appeal came from classic visceral, gut-driven methods. It played to the anxieties of millions, not always expressed (except in the last few years).

It sharpened these anxieties by underlining group identities, both of its flock and of its opponents. Moreover, it was coherent, that is, the messages across the ecosystem, from base utterances to presidential statements, reinforces each other and maintained consistency over time. The resulting grand narrative increased their effectiveness.

Central to the structure of the Modi-BJP campaign is the strong, muscular and decisive leader as a centrepiece. Populist toughness is the leader’s personal style which eclipses or subsumes the party’s. Tough talk on internal divisions and neighbourly relations was and will be positioned as a necessary antidote to impotent intellectualism.

The responses to the Uri and Pulwama strikes became perfect opportunities to display militarism. The film dramatising Uri became a top grosser. Pulwama’s timing halted the talk of opposition momentum. Personal credit was given and accepted, the strongman won the war.

Just as visceral was demonetisation, a daring display of will, regardless of its economic failure (or success) and its allegedly political intent. The signal is everything: bitter medicine, unconstrained by feeble intellectualising or corrupt interests (the opposition’s two faces). The film portrayal of Manmohan Singh as a weak PM came in handy as contrast.

Identity is tied to this by having the strong-leader-centrepiece represent a broad consensus of the anti-intellectual, unlearned, earthy common-folk, pitted against the previously ruling classes. To them, the speculation that Ganesha’s elephant head suggests ancient plastic surgery might well have been upheld as genuine theistic belief, rather than a lack of science. Likewise the prime-minister’s self-reported intervention, sending in fighters in cloudy weather to evade enemy radar may have demonstrated the victory of audacity and common wisdom over timid technocracy.

Mr Modi was, and is, pictured as celibate, an ascetic, a fakir, and thus a man of sacrifice. TV caught him meditating in a man-made cave, during, naturally, the ‘silent period’. The other side: all family skeletons, and atheism leavened with new-age Buddhism or new-found Hindu-ness.

Identity in this campaign was also signalled by actions that challenged nominal secularism as a criterion for leadership. The religious populism of a Mahant-strongman served as a trishul against other strongmen. Opposed groups were reduced to termites (or to Pakistanis) by various arms of the party machine, allowing a bundling of Muslims and their political support as the enemy.

An identity war needs an enemy. Its figurehead remains the purge-worthy Congress but also a spectrum of civil and political dissenters. Their supporters’ tags are designed to attack both class and politics. Urban Naxals, Lutyen’s types, Tukde-tukde gang, presstitutes—they are of a class foreign to the flock. Chaiwala and the chowkidar sub-campaign were more than deft retorts to a Congress slur in 2014 or a corruption charge this time around. The class resonance is unmistakable, and may have even earned Mr Modi some subaltern sympathy. I (we) are one of you; they are the opposite.

But their opponents were observably foreign in origin. Priyanka Gandhi’s playing with a snake was swiftly recast as oriental entertainment. The tagging of the young Gandhis as both un-Indian and baba-log resonates with earlier mocking references to ‘Italian uncles’, their mother and angrez-minded great-grandfather. This is coherence.

The closest the opposition came to a campaign theme was ‘the idea of India’, which criticised strongman-style nationalism,and purported to protect democratic principles (secularism, tolerance, dissent) and institutions (from universities to central banks) from Modi’s BJP. These abstractions don’t appeal to the visceral instinct. They require Class IX civics and some reflection to appreciate. Rafale corruption flew briefly, but was grounded for technical reasons. The Congress president did try to connect suit-boot ki sarkar to crony capitalism, a start of a coherent theme based on a potent visual (following the PM’s choice of suiting), but couldn’t sustain the connection.

Set against the chatterati’s clucking were the young voter who appeared regularly on evening television. He would admit that his lot is bad, yet underlined his faith in the potency of the national strongman, above his party, for reasons that seemed unnecessary to explain. Gut level feelings like these make or break election campaigns. Reasons are rationalisations, but emotions drive actions.

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If one sees design as a primarily visual field, the commentary on an Indian election might seem rather bare. Unlike, say the US elections, Indian election campaigns aren’t designed, or not in a sense that professionals or their audiences (that’s you) would recognise.

But seeing the deep design of things requires us to transcend appearance, and consider communication more broadly. It is the designer’s task to observe and interpret the world, keeping an ear out for the unspoken.

So consider the campaign not as designed object but as a totality of impressions: actions, speeches, statements, media reports, advertising and the like. Upon reflection, the signalling value of these acts appears. Their diversity coalesces into a grand narrative, the meta-communication behind the words.

the campaign not as designed object but as a totality of impressions: actions, speeches, statements, media reports, advertising and the like. Upon reflection, the signalling value of these acts appears.

Marketers will recognise this as way brands come to take root in a genuine, cultural sense. as a whole comprised of its many acts: advertising, products, pricing, distribution, the company image and many others.

In recent US elections, graphic design has been conspicuously recruited in the service of the campaign. Big name talent is called in. Perhaps it’s intuitive that these examples of designed campaigns are from Democrats, the side of the fence more readily associated with the intelligentsia and by extension, the arts. Here, relatively arcane things like typeface choices have been noticed and commented upon enthusiastically, as in Obama’s campaign, to which the cult street artist Sheperd Fairey contributed a memorable image. The Hillary campaign employed a sophisticated visual identity system designed by Michael Beirut, a celebrated designer.

On the other hand Republican campaigns, from Reagan onwards have tended towards visceral nationalism. Here, overt visual design seems beside the point, and even weak. Trump’s campaign, visually speaking, was criticised as crude. Did design cost Hillary?

Indeed, visceral campaigns and leaders of this sort have been a feature of recent years. Many, including this column, have commented on the rise of a certain type of leader: anti-intellectual, earthy strongmen who speak plainly and speak tough.

Visceral campaigns and leaders of this sort have been a feature of recent years. Many, including this column, have commented on the rise of a certain type of leader: anti-intellectual, earthy strongmen who speak plainly and speak tough.

They speak of trade isolationism, and an inward looking view of national self-interest, with a suspicion of multilateralism. They promise, and invoke a populist toughness, often reflected in the leader’s personal style. This toughness is positioned as a necessary antidote to impotent intellectualism. Their opponents are a foreign or sinister enemy presence; while opposed groups are de-humanised (macaques, termites, and so on) by various arms of the party machine.

Narendra Modi’s campaign, in which we must include his years of governance (much of it in campaign mode) are an example of this phenomenon. On the basis that emotions rule our preferences, the Modi campaign looks a far better bet than the opposition’s. It’s not just the PM’s oratory skills, and ignore the lows to which the speeches (on both sides, to a degree) have fallen. Admire the coordinated way in which national interest has been framed to tap into anxieties, and the opposition positioned as arrayed against it.

Thus the responses to the Uri and Pulwama strikes became the perfect opportunities for a public display of militarism. The film dramatising Uri become a top grosser. Pulwama’s magical timing, in this way of thinking, seems to have reversed the opposition momentum that sections of the press were talking up. Fear stokes, and belligerence quenches.

The stance on Kashmir may be criticised as insensitive but can be read as precise signalling to a certain popular mood. Demonetisation was a high impact display of visceral action in the same vein. Ignore the economic analysis of it as a failure (or success) and the political tactic it was alleged to be, as side-effects. The signal is everything: tough action unfettered by wimpish objections bleated by those entrenched in the black money system. The film portrayal of Manmohan Singh as a weak PM comes in handy as contrast (BJP supporter Anupam Kher played the ex PM).

Demonetisation was a high impact display of visceral action in the same vein. Ignore the economic analysis of it as a failure (or success) and the political tactic it was alleged to be, as side-effects. The signal is everything: tough action unfettered by wimpish objections bleated by those entrenched in the black money system. 

The opposition counters these by positing an ‘idea of India’ (other attacks are tactical). It accuses the BJP of attacking institutions, both abstractions (democracy, secularism or liberal thought) and organisations (from film institute to central bank). But these are higher-order constructs, appealing to urban audiences and to considered, learned judgement rather than basic instincts. Corruption is a more workable route, but Rafale may have peaked too early. The opposition’s calling-the-referee type protests against distasteful language only signal weakness in the eyes of those who yearn for a strong leader.

Cultural referencing is the PM’s area of mastery, much more than the opposition’s. Chaiwala, and chowkidar may have caught the eye, but notice how Priyanka Gandhi’s playing with a sapera’s snakes was swiftly reframed as a colonial entertainment for the oppressors, by the oppressed. The analogy fitted poorly but the consistent painting of the young Gandhis as un-Indian resonated with decades of earlier references to their Italian-origin mother and English-minded great-grandfather. But it’s the young Gandhis’ very Indian grandmother that Modi channels: opponents as puppets of a foreign hand.

This is the cult of the strong leader capable of strong medicine with shades of adventurism. Evening television shows us citizens who acknowledge, but seem willing to ignore great gaps in their welfare, appearing to cling to the promise that the muscular leadership represents. If these gut-level feelings are indeed persistent, they will trump any appeal to reason. The Congress president had his moment when the PM’s wardrobe went wrong, but it is the sarkar, with a more emotionally directed campaign, who has the stronger suit.

This is the cult of the strong leader capable of strong medicine with shades of adventurism.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Emotion Trumps Reason’ in Business Standard, 11 May in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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In the logo and fashion design commentariat, much press has been devoted to the recent and clear trend of established, iconic fashion companies rebranding themselves with plain, sans-serif lettering, moving away from the classic forms of Roman, serif letters. A defection to an enemy country!

At first glance this hardly matters to our lives, and can be dismissed as designerly passion. But it may tell us something about how we relate to visual branding, among the most defining features of the landscape of modernity—just look around you. The Deep Design of the issue requires us to interpret and appreciate the hype, consider some explanations, and calm some fevers. And stir a sprig of speculation in to the pot.

The littlest of these little things is the serif—those little feet at the ends of letters in some typefaces of Latin alphabets like English. Even the smallest serif effectively alters the appearance of the letter. These typefaces, also called serifs, have dominated printed communication for 400 years. You are reading one such typeface (on the paper, not on the website).

the serif—those little feet at the ends of letters in some typefaces of Latin alphabets like English

Typefaces without these serifs, or ‘sans-serifs’, or just ‘sans, tend to dominate screens. I wrote this on a computer, viewing my words in Arial, a typeface typophilic snobocrats love to hate. They first appeared in the 1700s, but only really found their stride in the 20th century.

Apart from the serif itself, serif typefaces are also distinguished by an obvious thick-to-thin variation in their strokes, known by the trade term ‘contrast’. Sans-serifs have very little contrast, as if the letter were drawn with a single line, giving it the name ‘lineal’ in the trade.

With this primer, let’s look at these examples.

These great fashion brands originated in the Old World of Europe. They were led by individual creators who lent it their vision and name, which bore connections to aristocracy. Those identities, and the lettering they wore, came from a high-ceilinged world of pedigree, tradition and antiquity, the kind of place where a butler announced your presence upon placing, on his salver, a calling-card (the ancestor of the business card ritual).

These great fashion brands originated in the Old World of Europe. They were led by individual creators who lent it their vision and name, which bore connections to aristocracy. 

That’s why the arrival of Calvin Klein on the scene marked a distinctly American, or New World gatecrashing. In 1979, its logo represented a distinctly New York flavour, with its geometric sans serif typeface breaking away from the modern fashion lettering code, influenced by Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue mastheads. So perhaps these new logos also acknowledge the end of an European reign and bow to a new internationalism.

The new brands also convey the end of a lineage: As Jean-Noel Kapferer puts it, a true brand is born when its creator dies. A new label also satisfies the obsessive need to be in the conversation, to signal the arrival of a new creative boss, and a break from the past. In this sense, the new sans-serif lettering washes away the brand’s past, leaving a clean canvas for its future. Neutrality is in play, to open new doors to the mind.

It wasn’t a sudden realisation of age that drove the change, a quality many modern brands wear proudly. For one, not all the lettering has aged. Burberry’s could be quite serviceable today. Balenciaga’s was already a sans-serif, but morphed into a serif typeface that’s unexceptional to the point of anonymity. YSL retired its quirky lettering, already a sort of modern design classic, for another bog-standard sans in a black square: more Silicon Valley startup than to Parisian couture.

A functionalist explanation is their superior rendering in digital media. But their suitability for lower (though rapidly increasing) resolution screens makes more sense when one considers how the modern fashion brand makes money.

For these brands, the large volume sales of ready to wear, T shirts, shoes, and accessories offsets the low-volume and high cost business of couture, ramp shows and new collections: design, R&D and publicity cost a lot. Lineal lettering reproduces well on canvas, plastic, and leather things, where the logo’s presence earns a clear premium (20%, according to one brand)

A neutral brandmark allows for greater range: the old Balmain logo may not sit well on a T-shirt. The neutrality of these letterforms, stripped away of their distinguishing detail, is an advantage.

Further, these spin-offs are less crucial to the brand’s expression, and accordingly can bend more to popular trends and wearability. A neutral brandmark allows for greater range: the old Balmain logo may not sit well on a T-shirt. The neutrality of these letterforms, stripped away of their distinguishing detail, is an advantage.

Indeed this neutrality is also at the root of the philosophy that underlies modernism in design. This is the notion of modern design as a container rather than a design in itself, able to host any stylistic variation.

More generally, the modernism that these logos wear may also be part of a democratising process for brands. With the internet ensuring the death of authority as a marketing position, more brands attempt to invoke the regular-guy archetype and don’t talk down to us. Brands need to engage with contemporary ethical issues in the way shown by Benetton (yes, in a sans). In like vein, the distaste for overblown consumerism has moved from the trendy sidelines to a more mainstream thing.

These new logos also signal the declining importance of a single, unitary mark to brands that rely so much on controlling the spaces where they sell. Products must make a mark on their own, and the logo adorns it, rather than carry the burden of encapsulating all the brand’s meaning. Homogeneity is a risk. Finally, decoupling the logo from the brand’s heritage also disengages it from continuity, and more rapid reinvention will be the order of the day. Not such a little thing.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Little Typefaces Matter Much’ in Business Standard, 18 February in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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