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.

The post Distress Signals appeared first on ICD | Blog.

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.

_______________

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

The post A Seat At The High Table appeared first on ICD | Blog.

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.

____________________

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.

The post Signal to message ratio appeared first on ICD | Blog.

That was two decades ago. These days, Deep Design often deals with the corporate brand, and must uncover what makes it tick in its own special way. This inevitably begets close encounters with the company’s Vision and Mission statements, hanging lifelessly in the conference room (or above the photocopier in the utilities room). A polite attempt must be made to decode its vague and impenetrable corporate speak. It can then be safely forgotten, for assuredly no one from the company will remember or care.

And every now and then, a company might ask to have one of these things crafted. Deep Design takes arms against the problem: please find here, not advice on how to build one, but your columnist’s experience of what seems to go wrong when a group gets down to it. Why the result, so often, is empty bombast, without the capacity to inspire or guide; why it lies ignored and forlorn.

That’s an opportunity lost, because words matter. They can indeed provide an unwavering compass, a reminder that reinforces better thoughts and action, especially in times of uncertainty, and last a decade or more.

Some definitions follow. A Vision is an aspiration for the company’s future destination, a ‘some day…’ statement. A Mission sets the course for the journey, a “today, we…” promise. A company might also add Values—non-negotiable choices, irrespective of reward or disadvantage. Or a Purpose—why, beyond the obligation of profit, the company exists.

The words must be short, sharp and capable of triggering images and action. Yet, this is not a mere copy-crafting exercise. Words matter only if they flow from the depths of intentions, when they have consequences.

The words must be short, sharp and capable of triggering images and action. Yet, this is not a mere copy-crafting exercise. Words matter only if they flow from the depths of intentions, when they have consequences.

Without consequences, the statement ensures its irrelevance; it will make no one’s job harder, no one’s stride quicker, because participants have no skin in the game. The surest sign is an absence of fear, because an outcome is guaranteed, and failure is ruled out. The tacit, collective responsibility is to ensure sufficiently imprecise language.

In this condition, expect the words to be borrowed, not owned, and at worst, from the vision statements of the most admired firm du jour.

While listing Values, quality, for example, is a perennial. Every business aims at it, but is the word a given? Qifaayat, a budget home goods brand, may define quality differently in both criteria and degree (neat, reliable, and just good enough). This brand need not enshrine quality as a Value. It might leverage its own way of doing business and express a Value like “domestic happiness for everyone”.

Getting to a value or a purpose demands questioning one’s business recursively: why does Qifaayat care about affordability, and in turn, what does affordability enable? Introspection is necessary to select an idea from a bunch of facts.

But group discussion dynamics favour competitive aspiration (I’m more ambitious than you). Introspection is suppressed, for it is best done alone and without the need to impress peers, or put up a brave face to consultants. Nothing wrong with ambition, but you reach there tomorrow from here, today. Unanchored ‘positivity’ is empty. Leadership is needed to facilitate honesty.

Even when a future position is rooted in reality, the talk may precede the walk. Spotting this needs maturity. Indeed claims, slightly in advance of capability, may be a tonic, and some businesses thrive that way. But mind the dose, heeding Henry Ford’s warning that one cannot build a reputation on what one is going to do.

Conversely, we see the failure to appreciate the company’s unique strengths altogether. Apart from pessimism, a false understanding of uniqueness may underlie this. Uniqueness is not absolute but governed by context (such as the competition and the category and the combination of special circumstances). Recognising it takes patience, and an appreciative mindset. Often an outside eye may do the job better.

Groupthink is also hospitable to consensus, a good thing if it is not compromise, or an attempt at completeness (include every attribute just to be safe). The latter two will result in a weakened vision. There’s often genuine cause: everyone’s participation is essential if change is to be subscribed to. But in that guise can come special pleading on behalf of a narrow interest, which poses a leadership challenge, especially when the pleader is an important person.

The statement must be precise and clear enough to be falsified, that is, possible to observe as being false. JFK’s “man on the moon by 1960” is falsifiable; “expanding frontiers of space” less so. Such specificity and measurability will be casualties in the face of compromise, the unwillingness to confront or appreciate today’s position, and the raging hormones of ambition uncoupled from reality.

The statement must be precise and clear enough to be falsified, that is, possible to observe as being false. 

All these are defects of process, mindset and the right conditions for discussion. But the most serious issues may be structural, stemming from the company’s leadership, and beyond the reach of the facilitator. The CEO must take honest personal counsel.

The first is a fear of fixity: the apprehension that clear statements reduce optionality and cramp the business’ freedom to operate. More serious yet is a lack of agreement, not on what the statement is, but what it does, its role in the company’s daily life. Will it be displayed (how, where?) Will we begin meetings with it, or quote it to resolve arguments? Will it influence our systems of reward, our allocation of money and people, our marketing?

An answer may be to avoid blue sky thinking. Instead, let the business run till the facts are in. Let the group form an appreciation of the company’s phases of success, and a theory of what it did right then. After reflection, define it and resolve to make the company even more like it already is, when at its best. This may be the best way for the vision and mission to be more than just a wordy decoration.

____________________

First published in a slightly modified form ‘The Vision Mission Exercise’ in Business Standard, 16 June, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

The post The vision-mission exercise appeared first on ICD | Blog.