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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This is a recipe for eggnog, the ‘traditional’ holiday drink, at any rate in the English-speaking world. Downing a glass induces the kind of warm torpor so suited to reflection, which, with celebration, is part of the deep design of all festivals, especially those that mark a new year. A good place to start is the quote marks on ‘traditional’.

Festival traditions are in a permanent state of slow flux, subject to the processes of evolution, cross-breeding, mergers and a myriad of social and economic currents. So Christmas has several origins, as does Diwali, often referred to as India’s equivalent of Christmas. No single myth governs them. Diwali is a convergence of practice among different faiths, not a consensus of meaning.

This suggests that most festivals that are part of religious traditions, are also connected to older folk traditions. Thus Christmas is eventually Christian, but its traditions and origins were several before they became singular. Christmas lore is an amalgam of the traditions of several countries; even Yule (Yuletide, remember?) is a Germanic, pre-christian festival, and the long-bearded appearance of Father Christmas/Santa Claus/Sinterklaas may wind back to the Norse Odin (or later derivations thereof). And so on and on.

Festivals are co-opted into newer religions as a part of an embrace-and-extend strategy adopted by religious leaders since religions also collaborate with power. (Though differences in degree may distinguish Semitic religions from, say, the Hindu faith).

The point is that since these festivals are neither non-religious nor explicitly liturgical, they are much freer to evolve or invent themselves than religious rituals. The co-opting of festivals by larger, powerful religious movements, or by different communities may lead to a certain uniformity of performance.

In modernity, though, commerce and media are likely the most powerful forces that both stimulate re-invention and crystallise festival tradition. India is not a stranger to these newly synthesised ‘traditions’. The Santoshi Mata cult appeared spontaneously in the 1960s, spread by lore and word of mouth. But an iconography (appearance, dress, texts) are products of print capitalism (posters) and, to coin a phrase, entertainment capitalism, with the 1975 blockbuster film Jai Santoshi Ma.

In modernity, though, commerce and media are likely the most powerful forces that both stimulate re-invention and crystallise festival tradition.

And so it is with eggnog (the recipe above is Jamie Oliver’s, one of the 13.5 million pages answering to ‘eggnog recipes’ on Google). The recent, often commercial origins of many Christmas rituals is common knowledge. The figure of Santa (as a fat man) is said to be a Coca Cola creation, and the current uniform, the ‘Santa Suit’ dates to Henry Nast’s work for Harper’s magazine. A newspaper illustration of Queen Victoria with a Christmas tree is said to have ignited the popularity of the craze, with artificial trees (1930) being introduced by a toothbrush manufacturer putting a spare machine to profitable use. Christmas cards date to Sir Henry Cole who had the first set printed with a common message, and so on and on to every detail.

Consumer media culture has created an exact, and universally agreed set of symbols with which we celebrate, and especially, consume the festival. Design, through media’s power of multiplication facilitates the creation of these symbols. They are born from other, older imagery, by repeating, and re-using them and fixing their shape in specific ways.

Consumer media culture has created an exact, and universally agreed set of symbols with which we celebrate, and especially, consume the festival.

The examples above, (to which add flying reindeer sled, gifts, holly and mistletoe, all drawn from various traditions) are the work of a legion of illustrators, advertisers, songwriters and tunesmiths who have fashioned a commercialised, consistent and largely transnational festival. A red, green and white palette in certain proportions instantly spells Christmas, if it is a certain time of the year. Gradually, less and less figurative detail is needed.

The deity Ganesha similarly is an all-weather icon, made compact, portable and viral. Ganesha transcends affiliations. Even minimally religious people collect Ganesha figurines as showpieces, or they might jostle for space on the pooja rack: no theological specificity applies. A painter down on his luck can survive by churning out a few. Again, his popularity allows the elimination of detail and extravagant simplification of form. Fittingly, communist China supplies both Ganeshas and Christmas decorations. One village, says BBC, has 600 factories that account for 60% of the world’s supply of the latter.

But the graphic plane is not the sole site of simplification. Festivals themselves are radically simplified into a precise choreography of symbols and rituals, driven by commerce, not by community. This objectifies it in two senses. A symbolic code with a set of visual, physical (even edible!) objects; and in the sense of making it objective—tick these boxes (wear the Santa Cap, stuff a stocking) to satisfy the conditions of performance.

In this setting it’s hard to achieve an authentic connection with the festival without escaping into the arms of the Mass or the mandir. A Diwali tied to crackers or a Christmas marked by a sad mall Santa sweating under his cotton beard, picture the world that the communications industry—and designers, too—have helped fabricate.

It’s something to consider when we sit down to design. Our profession fits in the framework of creating value for our clients. Our output, though, becomes a part of the pool of images and artefacts, that we call culture, and therefore can and should be seen outside that frame. Every now and then, we are criticised for our part in creating an ugly world, just as those who see Gurgaon’s commercial district as monstrosities must surely pass some of the blame to architects. But with these images and artefacts, we facilitate changes in practice and traditions. Perhaps we’ll take some of the blame for creating a shinier, prettier, easier world, and in so doing, a trivialised and arguably impoverished experience of this thing called the festival.

Our output, though, becomes a part of the pool of images and artefacts, that we call culture, and therefore can and should be seen outside that frame.

The symbols increasingly substitute the thing, inserting the gaudy, trivial and universally-unrejected in place of the personal, fulfilling but effortful. A bit like an eggnog powder (just add water).

Season’s greetings anyway.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘A brand new Christmas’ in Business Standard, 23 December, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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“It looks like a particularly unhealthy time to be a brand,” said the Slayer of Ordinary Design, a sardonic, sage and street-wise guru known more usually as The Sood, or sometimes the SOD, a term, as he pointed out, for a piece of turf—grass, earth and all.

“First, “ said the Sod, easing into a chair at the barbershop he’d chosen for our chat, “someone suggested that the logo had done its time, (didn’t you write a column on that, too?*) and was no longer central to the brand’s identity. Now you tell me that the art and science of packaging design—the best way to tell a brand story without advertising— is under attack from e-commerce. And I’m not feeling so well either,” he said, pleased with his humour, and fingering the unfashionably grown stubble on his jaw.

“I suppose the argument is that you already bought it, naked, on Amazon, so what use are clothes now that I don’t need to persuade you all over again, right?” I nodded, agreeing that it was a crudely correct summary of the view I’d encountered (packs need to be clean and simple, and stand out on the webpage and the mobile phone).

Truth be told, he went on, there’s something to the charge. The internet and the culture of marketing it brings is making life harder for the marketing as a whole, and packaging, too is a part of that. E-commerce strips your offering down to its objective essentials—you are a puny bunch of database entries. It emphasises price and facts, and turns it all into a entirely cognitive sale. You can’t be more than your product specs, and your brand vanishes in a click.

E-commerce strips your offering down to its objective essentials… You can’t be more than your product specs, and your brand vanishes in a click.

Also it’s difficult to build a relationship with something you can’t touch, where a human isn’t involved, and which you can return minutes after you’ve bought it.

How different things were! he said, taking in his greying hair in the mirror. Until just two decades ago, we bought from a neighbourhood store, with a counter in the front and a deep shop that you couldn’t enter, what’s known as a General Trade outlet. Most of the packaging is too far away to influence you. You came with a specific need; exploration was forbidden.
Perhaps you asked for a brand, learnt from newspaper or TV ads, or from family tradition. The shopkeeper gave it to you, or slammed down his recommendation on the counter, and asked how many you wanted.

When the pack came, your lizard brain kicked in. You had to decide quickly. Behind you was the street and to either side, fellow shoppers pretending not to notice your squirming in uncertainty, some openly staring, some offering or asking advice. Unless you could think of a reason not to buy, the deal was done. Conversation was all but ruled out. Retailer influence was decisive. Advertising and distribution decided matters. The pack’s job was to match the picture in the ad; and then to reassure you via a checklist of benefits, on the front, and then on the back of the pack.

In a way, he said wistfully, general trade is somewhat like an arranged marriage. The elders know best, and you may only refuse or accept. By that analogy, e-commerce is sort of like a responsible dating site, but with more information (vital statistics perhaps). Your partner has a small photograph to showcase herself; comparison is mandatory, and the volume and variety of choice can be stultifying. Reviews from previous daters are conveniently available, but read them at your peril. Rejections (called returns) are easy and commitment is slight.

General trade is somewhat like an arranged marriage. The elders know best, and you may only refuse or accept…e-commerce is sort of like a responsible dating site, but with more information (vital statistics perhaps)…perhaps modern retail is like romance, the start of an affair?

But in this story, said the Sod, we have jumped from arranged marriages, or general trade, to a responsible dating site, or e-commerce. In doing so, we have flown over what must come in between the two: Modern Retail. This type of shop has been proliferating rapidly since about 2000. It is the format where packaging comes into its own. In our analogy, perhaps modern retail is like romance, the start of an affair?

It’s useful to compare the demands on packaging for the three formats. In modern retail, there is no hurry to buy a product; in e-commerce it can be postponed indefinitely. There is little crowding and none of the enforced socialisation from shoppers; you are not on test. Retailer influence is minimal. The lizard brain is quiet, and love can flower.

In general trade and e-commerce, large, clear brand units are necessary to survive reduction when they are reproduced on a web page, and in the case of general trade, in advertising. These packs must be photogenic. Modern retail allows a more relaxed approach to the ‘shelf throw’ imperative that dogs all packaging design discussions: you are closer to the pack. You can pick it up, feel its material, and finishes. Premium finishes have impact; texture and material can be powerful influencers.

In general trade and e-commerce, large, clear brand units are necessary to survive reduction…Modern retail allows a more relaxed approach to the ‘shelf throw’… You can pick it up, feel its material, and finishes; powerful influencers.

Taken together, these characteristics of modern retail allow an unhurried, deeper narration of the brand on the pack, allowing smaller brands to compete alongside larger ones. Also since your pack stands alongside its peers from the category, it needs stand out from them, somehow getting to the essence of its proposition.

In reality, the demarcation between the three formats is not so simply acted on. For one, a pack, wherever bought, may begin a new life on another shelf: at home, in the bathroom or pantry. This is obviously true of, say,for example, a toilet cleaner, deodorant, or a Marmite jar. These can build relationships with their buyers anew. Even e-commerce presents the opportunity—and it is largely under-addressed— to impress the consumer at the point of receipt, when she beholds her date, once it emerges from the retailer’s protective packing. (The barber then took the hair apron off, and the Sod admired his new look in the mirror).

Equally, a product may be present in any two, or all three formats, so, never have the challenges or the opportunities of packaging been greater. Packaging design, under threat? It’s perhaps the strongest, and subtlest, means of turning consideration into conversion, to seduce the buyer into a long, meaningful relationship. Moreover, the pack is virtually the product, as I will explain another time.

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Everyone loves a logo, or loves to hate one. Designing logos is the most easily understood example of the graphic designer’s work. Among the additions to visual culture since the 19th century, the logo ranks with television and cinema. Stand in Tokyo’s Ginza or New York’s Times Square and you will be overrun by them; in India, we experience a booming town through the sprouting of familiar logos on its streets.

Yet the logo is under attack. Dead, say bolder commentators, or irrelevant, say the more nuanced: it is a product of evolution, and eligible for extinction. The London designer Simon Manchipp found them “a hangover from old-school thinking… an old-fashioned approach to differentiating”.

Ironically, to the extent that this view is valid, the logo is under threat from the same processes that made it so successful in the first place. Though logos are ancient in the sense of marks that denoted community (the cross, the shaivite tripundara or the swastika), the modern logo is a creation of trade, media and transportation.

Trade and modern transportation ended local monopolies: suddenly, the village washing-soap maker was competing with imports from another district, and needed more than his initials on the product. Traders (wholesalers and retailers), being closer to the eventual customers, had bullying rights over manufacturers. These gents fought back with differentiated products, now with ‘maker’s marks’, regaining control over the customer and thus, terms of trade. These marks became the modern brand logo. (The tussle continues; the behemoth Amazon is a retailer).

Advertising speeded and sharpened the change in the design of these marks to answer the need for visibility, compactness and differentiation. It’s easy to make too little of the difference between these new logos and, say, the coats-of-arms and heraldry of earlier centuries. Those early marks served to identify, a deliberate act accomplished by reference to convention. In the modern mark, recognition, a more spontaneous form of knowing, along with ownability and recall, that marketer’s favourite, are additionally necessary.

Those early marks served to identify. In the modern mark, recognition, along with ownability and recall

By the middle of the 20th century, the power of the visual trade mark was firmly acknowledged, and the forerunners of the modern brand consulting firms were born. The logo became big business, a store of both value as well as meaning. This is where things started to change.

This turn in the logo’s fortunes was linked to the evolution of the language of marketing, and then a new understanding of the brand, approximately in the last quarter of the 20th century. The brand was now not just the name of the business, but an evocation of new ideas—benefits, values, promises and other more or less emotional fragments, tied by association to its name and other ‘signifiers’, like the logo. Oh, and It had a personality, like a human.

The logo’s fortunes was linked to the evolution of the language of marketing, and then a new understanding of the brand

This bundle was, said the gurus, at once embedded in the product or business and also, separately, an abstraction, capable of being explicitly managed, and concretised at will, into an entirely different product, again a late 20th century phenomenon. It gave rise to a new notion of the corporate brand, now as progenitor of brands, and thus to the concept of brand architecture. Also, the brand could also now be separately valued as an asset.

This complexity now required the logo to distill this bundle of properties, and made it a strategic decision: big business for consultants. But this wasn’t all.

New, geographically dispersed brands, including the modernised corporate brand (so went the thinking) now needed a consistent visual appearance, implemented via a centrally mandated visual system: a set of graphic assets, such as colours, and typefaces and added graphics, governed by rules for correct usage.

Crucially, corporate and other brand owners were convinced that these visual systems were also central to the bundle of associations that made up its brand, this new, mystically powerful lever. In other words, not just visually consistent but ideationally and emotionally linked—enter another new word, coherent.

Over the next decades, these visual systems grew in sophistication and ingenuity. In addition to ensuring recognition, they now cover the style of imagery, and the mood of the communications, across product design, retail spaces, advertising and more. Often not rigidly consistent like their forebears, they may go by names like ‘brand world’ or ‘experience’. The argument: sufficiently well executed, brand worlds obviate the need for a logo, while still delivering a powerful whiff of the brand, so to speak.

These visual systems grew in sophistication and ingenuity. Sufficiently well executed,brand worlds obviate the need for a logo, while still delivering a powerful whiff of the brand

There’s another strand to the anti-logo argument. Logos, by themselves, have no meaning, but derive it from the businesses they mark. Mercedes’ three-pointed star gets its value from the consistently admired cars it sits atop, not the other way around. So why bother with the hype and fuss of designing them to distill the brand into the logo?

We can see these as a clash between two notions: brand as experience, vs brand as a symbol. Deep Design believes that the brand-as-symbol perspective is under-appreciated.
Symbols, as carriers of identity are inseparable from human life, from tribe to kingdom, ancient to modern. And all aspects of brand experience—even the taste of Johnny Walker whisky—whisper to our identity (and are thus signs). Taste is sensory, but also associative, and there’s neurological evidence for this: it just tastes better with the label.

Second, symbols such as logos focus organisational and social energies, by substituting a physical thing for an idea that must be defended, in war or in peace. Most of all, a logo can travel from the bonnet of a Mercedes car to an advertisement, and trigger the same feelings with incredible economy of time and space. Of course, there’s no doubt that it’s a part of a ‘brand world’.

But why design them, if any old logo will do? Because it’s easier to build an association when the logo’s content encourages it. Laboratory-reared monkeys have been trained to ignore snakes and fear flowers, but it’s far harder to do than the converse.

It’s easier to build an association when the logo’s content encourages it

Does the logo rank with television? Just look out of the window: far from a burial, the party is in full swing.

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Brands place a premium on attention, firing images and words shaped into messages to inform and persuade. Indeed, we live amidst a war for our attention, an exquisitely perishable wisp that lives in the now.

But like breath, attention is a quick burning fuel that enables the flow of communication but does not add to its stock: exhale, and nothing is stored. While thieving attention can change behaviour temporarily—quick, here!—more sustainable is a stock of deep meaning. It’s a layered, mysterious lode which reduces our need to chase ever smaller amounts of attention with ever greater resources.

The focus on what brands “wear, say and do”, a popular heuristic, leaves out what the brand or product “is”, an objective, unalterable, and irreducible factual residue that outlasts the messages put out by attention-capturing armies. Provenance, for example, can be overriding: Made in Germany is ‘German’ and therefore a high-spec engineering product.

The focus on what brands “wear, say and do”, a popular heuristic, leaves out what the brand or product “is”

Deep Design’s interest is in the visual atom of this “is”, not least because it falls on designers to shape. I call it Physique: the mental imprint of a thing’s physical image, as a sensory perception (and sight trumps the other senses). The impact of physique is automatic. It precedes, escapes and even governs conscious thought. We sense it before we ‘read’ the thing, treating it as the most reliable indicator of its attributes, whether on a shelf or on a street.

The impact of physique is automatic. It precedes, escapes and even governs conscious thought. We sense it before we ‘read’ the thing

An example is race, which if experiments are believed, still shows up as racism in modern-day US: respondents consistently took a fraction of a second longer to tag faces, choosing between opposites (e.g. dangerous or harmless) when they were African American.

Physique creates stored meaning, or what we call an image, that can be exploited later. I’d wager a new Rs 2000 note that some of demonetisation’s approval ratings are because it targets cash, which is the physique of black money.

The Automobile Story

Physique isn’t simply an image stored like a photograph. It’s the attributes that it implies that stick, and can cast a long shadow on the brand. I’d speculate that Mahindra, whose roots are in steel, succeeded with jeeps and tractors, which register as industrial, rectangular, tough and boxy. SUVs, in physique terms are gentrified jeeps, and found acceptance, but in passenger cars and two wheelers, expect a long haul. Maruti’s iconic small car is burned deeply into memory; did it make the brand’s journey to larger models that much harder? The sales of Swift Dzire, a very compact sedan, overtook its little Alto to become a top seller only in 2014.

Physique need not be only visual: sound and smell can be exploited. Iodex (of old) and Dettol are two great brands whose signature smells signal their potency. Dettol retained a not identical, but clinical smell, and successfully extended into bathing soap. Iodex has sacrificed its smell (was it iodine, we wondered?), its dark, stain-prone unguent and thus its mystique; it has lost itself in a sea of similarity.

Louis Cheskin, Sensation Transference

In the 1940s, the pioneering researcher Louis Cheskin famously demonstrated in an experiment that housewives liked a meal cooked with margarine (then considered to not taste like butter), but coloured yellow, as much as one cooked in butter. Cheskin called this phenomenon ‘sensation transference’. An early proponent of the unconscious influence of form and colour, Cheskin’s elaborate empirical methods had wide success, from packaging to cars (such as predicting the failure of Ford’s Edsel on the basis of design alone).

Personal and Commercial Packaging

Naked form trumps clothes, but clothes can matter. Gandhi and Castro are two popular leaders whose clothes became part of their physique, and defined them: one pacifist, one militaristic. It helped build an aura that proved hard for detractors to attack, and seems to have given supporters the faith to ignore disconfirming evidence.

The commercial form of clothes, of course, packaging. Packaging research is starting to accept that the structural shape is as important as colour (the default no 1 in packaging). Consumers rely on it to perceive hard-to-spot product attributes, more than graphics. But the influence of physique on packaging should not be understood as simple differentiation or attractiveness. This is not to discount the effect of physique on those two parameters: surely the success of Toblerone chocolate owes much to its unique physique, especially for children.

Similarly, elongated packs look bigger than their more squat equivalents even when they pack the same volume of product, and consumers tend to prefer the taller ones even after they know that they aren’t getting more for their money. Natural cork stoppers on wine bottles ‘improve’ the wine, as does the correct glassware for reasons real and imaginary. Yet that’s not the true, subterranean power of physique.

Eventually, physique in packaging unlocks the clue to personality, that near-human relationship consumers can sense in the brands they love. Marmite’s round bottle tells a maternal tale more effectively than an advertisement. Its physique slips into your mind, unnoticed, to do its work.

physique in packaging unlocks the clue to personality, that near-human relationship consumers can sense in the brands they love.

The role of a brand’s ‘wear’ is to reinforce unalterable, favourable prior facts such as provenance and founding inspiration (which may have its own physique). Deep Design has discussed in an earlier column the success of Patanjali’s product line, underpinned by Baba Ramdev, who brings a unalterable, unfakeable physique to bear on his personal brand. Several consumers I talked to saw Patanjali’s gauche packaging as signalling an economical price. Others saw in it a lack of artifice, “not being an MNC” and by inference, a sort of authenticity.

Physique matters. Paradoxically, the more we take it for granted, or somehow look past it, the more insidious its power.

Physique matters. Paradoxically, the more we take it for granted, or somehow look past it, the more insidious its power. When we think we see it, we may talk about its attractiveness or lack thereof, rather than its primacy and the power of its imprint. We need to look deep.

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“The Nobel Committee has won the Bob Dylan Prize,” announced the Always Contrarian Everyman, or ACE, a lapsed academic I’d been introduced to by mutual friends, to help with some research on communications planning.

“Only,” he continued, “that It gave it to itself, of course.” He checked my features to ensure that the inversion had registered, peering through a pair of slightly-too-large glasses with white frames. ACE seemed to belong in the fashionable organic-desserts-only place, a haunt of the swish and the learned, waving at passers-by. Clearly, no Everyman.

Whether Dylan deserved it has been noisily over-analysed, he said—both on grounds of scope (are songs poetry?) and merit (is Dylan Whitman?). But what it means remains under-analysed.

The focus on Dylan, he went on, blinds us from spotting the real gainer: the Nobel Prize brand. (Stop wincing, ACE said, it is a brand). By giving Dylan the prize, the Nobel has taken itself into drawing rooms, hostels and the twitterscape. It has gifted itself a popular relevance not available to it before.

The focus on Dylan, blinds us from spotting the real gainer: the Nobel Prize brand… It has gifted itself a popular relevance not available to it before.

The Nobel follows a line of mighty brands that have bent low to kiss the feet of the popular. The Nobel’s relevance has always derived from authority, its own and others’. Even the Peace Prize’s popular recipients have been yoked to structures of authority; Mother Teresa was canonised by the world’s most powerful religious organisation.

What we might be approaching is the twilight of authority as a way of marketing in its broad sense. But first, let’s look at the Deep Design of authority. Start with the flavours it comes in, ACE continued, propping up the menu like a little blackboard, the ingredients of its authority, and what each tastes like.

What we might be approaching is the twilight of authority as a way of marketing in its broad sense.

At one end of the spectrum are obedience, and then loyalty, which may be demanded, enjoined on us, or enforced by governments and religious bodies like the Vatican church. Yet the papacy has softened: we have a People’s Pope, who loves football, poses for selfies and is soft on homosexuality, abortions and divorce.

But move along the spectrum, and loyalty segues into trust—the kind sought to be induced by more modern entities informally underwritten by government. Public universities and banks are examples, as are railways and airlines.

So are the Olympics and the Nobel. Until 1956, the Games logos reveal an officious face, much like government insignia. From 1960 to 1988 they are broadly modernist and contemporary, and take a celebratory leap from 1992.

The 2012 logo is a frontal challenge to the Olympics’ high-minded ideals, giving it a participative, inclusive face. These visual changes are not fashion, said ACE (stretching a leg to reveal jeans with open hems, finished with elegant white loafers, no socks).

After privatisation, universities have become more like branded corporations, competing for custom. Their identities, long ignored, now find utterance, and are now sculpted to market admissions, to suggest that university is a place to be enjoyed.

After privatisation, universities have become more like branded corporations, competing for custom

Look at the identities of the newest banks, which are searching for their place on the spectrum between solidity and assurance at one end and an extreme friendliness on the other. A case in point is the infrastructure finance and bank company IDFC which sports, in its own words, an ‘un-bank’ identity.

Finally, modern corporation and product brands are a third category, said ACE, his fingers bracketing the menu’s Gateaux section. Its authority is the most subtle.

It derives from the technological revolution of the 20th century, which harnessed electricity, gave us time-saving appliances, telecommunication, television, automobiles and computing. It’s also coterminous with the modern Olympics and the Nobel, a prize set up by a maker of munitions to recognise useful sciences (and Peace, naturally).

These brands spoke with a gentle authority, carrying the implicit assurance that you were in good hands: drive to work, punch in, work hard, and return to a home cleaned by vacuum technology and advanced detergents. It was ‘scientific’ and reassuring, and spoke through mass media.

But the modern corporation’s certainties are under attack.

Big tobacco, Big Soda and Big Food have been rigorously and popularly questioned, and found wanting on transparency and responsibility. Big Finance caused mass destruction in 2008; Wall Street has been occupied. The nudge-wink consensus on Iraq has been disowned.

Big tobacco, Big Soda and Big Food have been rigorously and popularly questioned, and found wanting on transparency and responsibility.

The enlightened new corporation strives for a softer voice. Unilever’s old ‘twin towers’ logo typifies the earlier ideal, solid, imposing, technological and certain. Its new one from 2004 is as relaxed as a spa: happily fragmented, fluid and loving it.

The enlightened new corporation strives for a softer voice.

Further, social media makes it hard to control the conversation, as distinct from the one-way messaging that advertising provided. True as it is, the rise of social media, and digitisation more broadly, is the handiest explanation, but not a sole driver.

The maturing and commodification of manufactured products and services, and greater public scrutiny will make the projection of authority less tenable. Multiculturalism ,and mobility, and the mingling of Asia and Africa into the developed world may be gradually softening Anglo-Saxon confidence.

The maturing and commodification, and greater public scrutiny will make the projection of authority less tenable.

However, reversals do occur. The 1997 British Airways rebrand included a tailfin theme called Utopia featuring ‘ethnic‘ art. It was a step too far: Margaret Thatcher covered the tailfin of the presented model with a paper napkin: ”We fly flags, not these awful things”. By 2001, the Union Jack was back.

Scores of possible drives resist the powerful consensus that governments, business and mass media construct and maintain. Eventually, they beget anxieties among groups of dissenters who may feel threatened or disaffected by unstoppable, slow but seismic economic shifts.

For example, such anxieties may drive Trump’s supporters to find resonance in his egregious misstatements, as long as he channels their fury onto Hillary Clinton, the Yale Law graduate and Washington technocrat with Wall Street connections who personifies their fears.

Communicators everywhere, whether they are governments and their wards, or businesses will need to adjust their mindset, and this will find an echo in the voice they use. To paraphrase Kipling, it may be wiser to cultivate the common touch than walk with kings.

It may be wiser to cultivate the common touch than walk with kings.

It’s a more democratic world, said ACE, spooning some single-estate cacao reduction onto his plate, where Bob Dylan can keep the Nobel in suspense by his silence. Delicious! he said.

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Everyone loves a new, public logo. It’s a polarising icon, and comments are free. So it is with Olympic logos. Deep Design seeks not to praise or bury them, but to discover the meaning interred into their bones.

Olympic logos support a strong, coherent brand, adapting its unchanging core to a dynamic world. The logos are only one of the brand’s elements, but crucial in a media driven world. The five rings, the flame, torch relays, Olympic villages, and the marathon all effectively emote the Greek myth romanticised by Pierre de Coubertin, the comity of nations and the ideal of human potential.

But Olympic logos have another job. A successful Olympics bid is a high stakes win, a sign of alpha-nationhood. Issues of national identity, overt or subliminal, matter. Equally, the fashions, and the design ideologies of the time leave their print on the logos.

Issues of national identity, the fashions, and the design ideologies of the time leave their print on the logos

So do other nations. Logos seems to follow their predecessor’s example, until one makes a huge change. Much like evolution’s Punctuated Equilibrium hypothesis, periods of stability and periods of rapid change alternate.  They thus fall neatly into three ages: Nationhood, Modernism, and the New Age.

Through all these, Deep Design, armed with hindsight, reveals the grand theme: the changing place of the Olympics in our lives and the logo as a sign of adaptation.

Here’s the parade; only summer games are included.

The Age of Nationhood, logos from 1924 to 1956

In an age of unprecedented acceleration in design, art, and modernity, Olympic logos are in denial. Sternly bureaucratic and monotone, they impose (quasi) national insignia upon the Games.

Sternly bureaucratic and monotone, they impose (quasi) national insignia upon the Games

By 1924, Chanel’s timelessly modern fashion and cosmetics are on the street; even the iconic Noº 5 perfume. But art’s capital city chooses its 14th C coat of arms, depicting maritime trade in Paris 1924. Vibrant USA gives us Los Angeles 1932, as if a police department had married an Ivy League college shield, whose Latin motto on scrolls reveal a yearning for antiquity. The land of Bauhaus, instead presents the Third Reich in Berlin 1936, its eagle oppressing the Olympic rings. The London 1948 Games seek to restore calm after WWII, with Westminster’s bureaucratic stiff upper lip. Helsinki 1952 at least shows off new architecture, but Melbourne 1956’s label-like logo reverts to type.

But Rome 1960 represents a thawing. It refers to culture for the first time, picturing the legend of the Rome (not Italy). Its feral snarl is oddly modern and its 3D treatment a tribute to both classical bas-reliefs and Hollywood styling (as in Ben Hur, 1959). The Roman numerals (what else?) bring a smile. Appropriately, it’s on TV for the first time.

The Age of Modernism, logos from 1960-1988

The Tokyo 1964 Rising Sun is a national symbol used as a geometric element. By doing so, it allows the the design to be read as a modernist work, rather than a patriotic symbol from the previous age. It  also shows Japan’s confidence in not projecting an overtly cultural identity. This is unlike the other Asian miracle economies of S Korea and China in the coming decades.

Abruptly, it unleashes Modernist design, as if a dam had burst. It features geometric abstraction and a minimalist ethic that mutes national symbols and history, and subtracts ornament. Also born: the age of corporate identity and design professionalism. From now, designers would be named, and ‘visual systems’ with manuals would become the norm for large projects, giving the practice a technocratic flavour. (Not coincidentally, this is also the age of Milton Glaser, whose ratings of the logos appear at the end of the article; Tokyo 1964 is his gold medalist).

Abruptly, it unleashes Modernist design. It features geometric abstraction and a minimalist ethic that mutes national symbols and history, and subtracts ornament

Mexico 1968, a modern classic, is the first Olympic wordmark. Its design grid is formed around the five rings, but also draws on early Mexican art and op-art, joining part of the 1960s zeitgeist. Munich 1972 eliminates the Olympic rings. The severe abstraction of the sun and spiral form may not, though, live up to its idea of the “Cheerful Games”. Montreal 1976 is typical too.

The cold war superpowers’ symbols appear more patriotic than others in this cohort. Moscow 1980’s shot at modernism is topped by its red star, and LA 1984 reprises a familiar theme, with its own stars, only moderately modern, with a classic touch. Star wars, surely?

In this sense Seoul 1988 is an outlier that hands over to the next age, with a vibrant, but modern depiction of a Taoist cosmology, a universe from which creation springs.

New Age Olympism, logos from 1992 to 2016

Maybe it was the tearing down  of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fade of the cold war that caused this change. But Deep Design, remembering that even causes have causes, is a cautious theoriser, and sticks to what’s observable.

Flowing free forms. human figures and hand drawn art work show a fatigue with modernism’s technological side. Equally, a fatigue with ideals, and a populist desire to bring the Games down from the heights of Mount Olympus, make them human, not godly, to be celebrated, not looked up to. Everyone’s invited.

Desire to bring the Games down from the heights of Mount Olympus, make them human, not godly, to be celebrated, not looked up to. Everyone’s invited

Barcelona 1992 takes the leap. Its designers say that.‘…the symbol could not be made with a …geometric or technological vocabulary.’ Atlanta 1996’s centennial flame, is playful, not prayerful, and the stars even twinkle. Sydney 2000 reduces the Opera House to a sketch, and rides a boomerang. Athens 2004 reintroduces the wreath in the medal ceremony, but with casual flair. Beijing 2008 visually puns the character for ‘culture’ with a human figure. London 2012’s aggressive logo pumps out a megawatt heavy-metal party, painting the Olympics magenta (not part of de Coubertin’s 1912 Olympic palette, which covered the flags of all nations ‘without exception’).   In Rio 2016 the comity of nations becomes a sophisticated carnival in an in-vogue 3D style. Does Tokyo 2020 start something new? Look up Deep Design in 2032.

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Milton Glaser, legendary Graphic designer, ranked Olympic logos. Though his marking scheme is not known, Glaser judges their success in professional terms: logos should be understandable, memorable and formalistically attractive.

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The election symbols of India, part of the democratic tumult since 1952, provide a fascinating view into this process. Their special circumstances, at first glance, seem quite hostile to symbols becoming brand elements.

Political parties do not design symbols, or truly own them. Eligible parties choose them (or apply to do so) from a library of hundreds of simplistic linear drawings of everyday household objects and animals, under conditions set by the Election Commission (EC). Its purely functional aim is to ensure that illiterate voters can identify their party on an EVM button, and in this sense an election symbol is more like an icon than an expression of identity.

we read into the symbol what we read of the organisation, and vice-versa, in a meaning-making cycle.

The paramountcy of these functional considerations turns these crude drawings into de facto party symbols, for the national parties who are allowed to reserve them (unlike state parties, which share them with parties in other states).

Yet, even in this allotment raj, meanings form. Eventually, we read into the symbol what we read of the organisation, and vice-versa, in a meaning-making cycle. Symbol and party make each other. National parties exercise choice at the time of adoption, and learn to manage and even exploit their symbols in different ways. How?

Symbol and party make each other

Even EC’s everyday-objects regime has sensible exceptions. The Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India-Marxist CPI(M) have internationally-derived communist symbols, acknowledging their pre-existence and distinctive politics. Highly recognisable, but easy to mix up, so presumably it takes committed voters or cadres to get the right buttons pressed. The CPI(M) symbol has less detail, but it restores the hammer and the star, the latter perhaps a nod to its internationalism and a further left position than the CPI’s.

In 1977, the Congress chose its third symbol: the open hand. It is the only body part allowed by EC and was first used, with a different rendering (left), by the All India Forward Bloc (Ruikar) in 1952 and thus allows comparative comment.

As a sign, the hand has great antiquity. And extreme generality

As a sign, the hand has great antiquity. And extreme generality: to connote, it must combine with either an object (such as a hammer) or a gesture (a fist, for example) to trigger a code (proletarian protest, in this example). Its current rendering, with fingers pressed together, may evoke the blessing gesture seen in representations of gods and holy men.

Barring this faint signal, the hand’s open-endedness is its most important property. Its pre-eminence from 1947 to 1977 meant that it did not have to specify its distinctiveness. Its flexibility can, in losing times, make it look like it’s being positioned by the competition. The Congress idea, whatever it is at the time, is visible mainly by contrast, like its secularism stands out most against Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Hindutva.

In ways subtle and unsubtle, the symbols of the Bahujan Samaj Party and BJP have more religious content.

Like the hand, the lotus also has antiquity and multiple associations within specifically Asian traditions; BJP ownership makes it more overtly religious. It is pitch-perfect for BJP formulation of “cultural nationalism”, as it can foster a broadly Hindu air while averting the charge of overt religiosity (how could it, as the national flower?).

In BSP’s hands the elephant connotes power over its other popular or ancient associations.

BSP’s elephant too has positive associations for Buddhists, its original constituency, and for the Hindus it now seeks to address. In BSP’s earlier, more aggressive days, the elephant coded a new, unrelenting demographic force, not the placid animal children love. But what marks it out is Mayawati’s investment in the symbol by shrewd, if blatant, assertion of power and Dalit pride, via the Elephant Park, a monument to herself, the founder, and a triumphal regiment of elephants. In BSP’s hands the elephant connotes power over its other popular or ancient associations.

At the state level, the Shiva Sena’s bow and arrow (shared by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in Jharkhand) eerily mirrors its perpetual militancy against non Marathis, the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) broom has been rightly hailed as ingenious crusader branding. While both parties can only reserve them when EC recognises them as national, there’s more to being a national party.

National party symbols reflect their adoption of big, cloud-like ideas, with fuzzy edges.

National party symbols reflect their adoption of big, cloud-like ideas, with fuzzy edges. This is a necessity of national governance, the politics of which must balance a dizzyingly complex array of interests and constituents. Neither corruption, nor even local government can be AAP’s ticket to national government, nor can parochialism for the Sena. I predict that both these symbols will be dropped if these parties progress to being national contenders.

The world’s greatest election shows the strength of an ultimately human urge. Symbols may be born arbitrary, but with a little care, all but the sickliest will thrive, for we are meaning-making machines, as much as tool-making apes.

This article first appeared in the 2nd July issue of Business Standard under the column ‘Deep Design’ by Itu Chaudhuri.

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