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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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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The success of a name comes from its instant memorability. When it precedes the product or brand experience, it creates an expectation of a certain quality or personality. It prods the instinct, provokes a reaction and directs curiosity. This is triggered by the sound of the name, by employing the appropriate use of phonetic aesthetic.

What are Names Made of?

The Sound of Names

Certain sounds have phonetic properties that appeal to deep-set instinct. The name Google, we argue, has less to do with its derivation from the googol (a very large employing known only to math-heads) and more to do with its resemblance to a baby’s blabber (known to every human). It is clear that the Google identity wears the visage of a curious child by using primary colours and basic shapes that cloaks its world-dominating, and some say sinister ambitions, with a childlike personality.

Similarly, culture (the noise through which the name passes from sender to receiver) can influence how we process a name. Take the case of the brand of mashed instant potato mix we named Vegit. Its brevity incites immediate action–do we hear ‘Just do it’ somewhere? It beckons the consumer to listen to his hunger and act on it instantly, no instruction manual required. The name semantically and phonetically suggests efficiency.

Similarly, a name like Inme immediately paints a picture of a confident but naive, childlike presence. Inme is a pioneer in the summer-camp business in India and they speak of the uniqueness of every child. The name is a simple utterance, designed as self-directed positive rhetoric that is meant to echo in every child—I have [desirable trait] in me!

Making Meaning

But this is not to say that the deeper meanings associated with names don’t work their effect. A name like Vrixa (our name for a human-resources-focused technology fund) has all the phonetic intent to turn heads, as also the x, which phonetically suggests efficiency. It’s a playful take on the Sanskrit ‘vriksha’ meaning tree, because tree names are beloved of venture capital firms, which need to suggest stability and growth at once. By astutely addressing this dimension the name first sets and later entrains a customer’s expectations.

Think Global, Say it Local

Local cues can make brands seem closer and more recognisable. For example the name Minute Khana addresses the ambitions and concerns of a modern homemaker who loves the convenience of ready-to-eat food but also finds the idea alien. While the quickness and convenience is implicit in Minute, it is the Hindi word ‘khana’ which alludes to a wholesome Indian meal that inspires her to include this product in her kitchen.

Another example is our name for Haldiram’s triangular nachos-like chips. Panga, an untranslatable slang usage in Hindi (roughly, a casual confrontation) phonetically echoes the sharp taste and angular shape of the product, giving it the edge of a light-hearted confrontation; not quite playing nice, but always with a wink.

Despite the enthusiastic allusions to tradition and local aesthetics, sometimes it serves the brand to avoid parodying its own culture. Haldiram’s foray into South Indian snacks was done with poise: our name Southern Delights, exemplifies southern restraint as it purveys ‘murukku’ to the North. Yet it has the sound of a small-town eatery that the Indian ear will pick up.

Constraints

…can often be the stimulus for innovation.

Design begins with empathetic conversation, but awkward situations arise when clients have preferences for particular sounds or letters based on feng-shui, astrology or vaastu. Clearly, the High Tech Robotic Systemz, looking to rebrand, needed to communicate their expertise more succinctly without compromising on its youthful energy. But there was a caveat— the name had to be numerologically sound and begin with the ‘th’ sound. We settled on Thebo, suggestive of a robotic pet (and rhyming with ro-bo, as robot was sometimes pronounced).

When the couture brand Ashima Leena decided to launch a pret line, as a daughter brand, it was to be similar in spirit but different in form. It required a link to the established original but also the freedom to be itself. The name Alias neatly resolves the contradiction. Embedded within the name is the abbreviation AL—a cheeky nod to the original brand Ashima Leena. To visually articulate this lineage, the logo itself carries the letters A and L from the Ashima Leena logo and completes the heist.

The Visual Word

Words are heard, and read; but they are also seen. And the way they are spelt or graphically represented augments the force with which they are read or heard. Our name for Haldiram’s healthy ‘namkeen’ snacks Snac Lite economically uses two syllables, doing away with the k to accentuate its ‘liteness’.

Vrixa’s identity also visually buttresses the sound of the x. The sound and look are simultaneous: they are synesthetic, or sensed together in a way that can’t be pried apart. The x marks the spot, and the x multiplies, as the tagline “HR x tech” implies.

Atomistic Naming

The phonetic, semantic and graphic aspects of a name are the ways in which minds, ears and eyes can be drawn to a name. But whole words are not necessary, nor always ideal. The use of word fragments can lend flexibility and precision. From these atomistic units, a new compound can occur, much like a chemist creates one in her lab. Vegit, encountered earlier, is one such.

A fragment can work on its own, too. Exper is our name for a leadership development firm that trains senior, junior or mid-level teams. Their methods involve no classrooms, but are experiential, their advice backed by the experience of the trainers as businessmen, as they help leaders maximise their expressive potential for exponential benefits. Apart from the extensions it suggests, the truncated word fragment Exper is a phonetic exhalation, a whisper, thus achieving a lightness that wholly befits the brand.

However, the best cases are when the chemist has creative influence over the goal of the experiment itself. Read on.

Integral Design

Not always does identity design influence the ethos of a brand. But when it does, the brand’s identity and ethos seem inextricably intertwined, making a telling and authentic statement. A new design school was to be positioned as a Master’s course at the center of design thinking, helping students tackle real world issues through design methods. The brand implores designers to grapple with the complex interactions of society, economy and technology. The name School of Integral Design is just as unassuming as it is profound. It communicates the serious intent of the school clearly by integrating the ethos into its name. The skeletal visual identity echoes this by revealing its structure while allowing ample room for creative play.

The Opportunity

The potency of a name must not be understated; it is the irreducible expression of a brand’s values. At ICD we encourage clients to invest time and effort in naming so that the brand and the consumer are coupled in text, speech and graphic. And in meaning: the word ‘logo’ is derived from the Greek ‘logos’ meaning ‘word’, and also ‘reason’ or ‘meaning’. Identity starts here: a name that points to its logos, and its ethos at the same time.

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They picture: a bicycle; a hand pulled rickshaw; an Ambassador car; and, that most beloved of urban symbols, a three-wheeler scooter rickshaw (TSR in sarkari bhasha; to some foreign tourists, a tuk-tuk). Visitors usually register them with micro-smiles, given with faintly amused approval and without comment.

Deep Design settles in to the soft cushions and runs a speculative eye on the road travelled by these variously-wheeled vehicles. How did these objects of everyday utility turn into what we may call figures of fun?

Visit an appropriately tony gift shop and note that these images are commonplace, reprised repeatedly by designers, named or anonymous. The bicycle is a popular street toy in wire. The Amby, as the Ambassador is affectionately known, appears as a toy, has served as muse to many nameless designers, also to eminent photographer Raghubir Singh who shot a documentary book around it, and celebrated contemporary sculptor Subodh Gupta who cast one in metal. (Gupta’s work frequently references quotidian objects, revealing a grotesque comedy of class manners). The TSR is a curio favourite, and the illustrator’s pet..

There are more such: the little bronze miniatures of coal-heated irons, the massive istri your presswala (the Delhi term for ironing man) flattens your clothes with (pictured); the ‘bhopu’ or air claxon that served as a horn on the TSR long after cars went entirely electric.

The ubiquity of these images, and the certitude of their interpretation, is the reason that my typical guest gets the image, without comment. You could say these images are in the ‘popular culture’ (itself a pop culture term) except that the term ‘popular’ assumes that we know who is or isn’t included.

An American, as a first time visitor, for example, would not warm to the TSR or the Ambassador in the way ‘we’ do. Without the shared reference, the image does not travel from us to him in the manner it travels amongst ourselves. This sort of generally westernised, English-speaking Indian visitors to my drawing room can be expected the access the encoded meaning of the images; the American cannot. We say that these images form an index, a code that is shared by a specific group.

But shared reference is not enough to enter an object in the index; nor is the property of antiqueness, or ordinariness, sufficient. A Honda car may feature as a toy car, but has zero status as an image for consumption.

To be indexed for enjoyment, the property that an image/object needs is what I call distance, a degree of separation from the object, so that it is taken out of our everyday, our present. Thus, the TSR driver and the ironing man cannot be expected to share in our jollity on their everyday tools being picturised, as innocent, glorious or fun.

The meaning is created not by the shared reference of the coal iron or TSR as objects, but by the distance from them, shared by members of a class that is characterising the other. By imaging and framing these objects, a class further distances and separates itself from the other (in this example, the dhobi and rickshawala class) by emphasising the object’s foreign-ness, and viewing it with a ironic, if affectionate gaze.

a class further distances and separates itself from the other by emphasising the object’s foreign-ness, and viewing it with a ironic, if affectionate gaze.

So the shared meaning is in the gaze, not in the object.

Class is thus a fecund source of image codes. Image and identity make each other. The objects both indicate and sustain a kind of intra-class signalling, making the mundane exotic, and the adjacent foreign. The result is the creation of a vernacular.

Meanings can also be reinforced by members of powerful outside groups. The westerner’s fascination with the TSR signals or reinforces its value; the class that can access and align itself westwards, now finds redoubled enjoyment in it. A kind of inter-class signalling.

Not just objects but styles and aesthetic themes can emerge from class or group signalling. Businesses can appropriate the codes thus created.

Not just objects but styles and aesthetic themes can emerge from class or group signalling. Businesses can appropriate the codes thus created.

In India, we recognise as a kind of kitsch the styles that emerged from Hindi cinema posters, now lost, as we do the swaggering (or swooning) dialogue that we parody. The use of polychrome gods on a notebook as a kind of urban chic (pictured), and the instructional “Ideal Boy Charts” (pictured) that now have meme status depend on this class-located gaze. The ironic enjoyment of these is for those at whom the original images were not aimed, in order: the not-filmy-at heart, the well-schooled, and dare I say it, the ungodly, to whom the notebook might be a mild sacrilege, or attract devotion, not a wink.

What’s in all of this for design? Design’s first task may well be the creation of better outcomes or adding value to a client situation, but it cannot be left at that. A residual task of design is to contribute to the visual world, leaving it better. We remember whether products were beautiful or ugly long after we took for granted that they worked, or didn’t. To do this, and perhaps even to be effective in her primary task, the designer needs a heightened awareness of how things come to mean something, and especially, to whom.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘A Class Apart’ in Business Standard, 31 March, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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The uber-construct in the modern liking business is personality, or the attribution of human psycho-social traits to non-human things. It’s the most-used framework to understand and structure liking. But it was not always so.

Modernity

Tools for thinking about liking are understandably limited to ancient, if evolving, canons of proportion and form. These tend to treat humans as alike: indeed, for much of time, people were differentiated mainly through social roles: home, family, and occupation.

So the appreciation of individual differences in a high-resolution way, and their becoming a subject of analysis may well be a feature of modernity itself, wrought by manufacturing, marketing, and organised work on the one hand, and the evolution of psychology on the other. Starting about 1950, according to one widely used periodisation, marketing introduced the concept of a customer’s lifetime value, and thus the need to build a relationship, opening the door to a subjective understanding of the consumer.

Just like a man

Personality’s uber status comes from its popularity. It is instinctively understood by the lay person, partly because imbuing things with human form and psychology is innate: we do it to gods, aliens and cars. Yet it can be dissected by the expert with pedantic detail.

The key to its usage is that it can be applied to abstractions such as products, communications or brands as well as describe the person using or consuming them. In most versions of the technique, the thing’s personality traits (like bold, tenacious and witty) can be matched to similar profiles, presuming an attraction of likes. This is the first theory of marketing that is also a theory of liking.

Personality has its deniers who insist it’s a fiction, or at best an artefact of popularity and function. Yet it does have an empirical existence, even for the most rational. In an experiment by Kapferer, doctors were willing to describe the personalities of medicines with multiple traits. Analysis of trait data showed that drugs with higher scores for some traits (like dynamism or, interestingly, creativity) were more often prescribed than low scorers on the same traits. Conversely, those that rated high on ‘cold’ and ‘hard’ were prescribed less.

But predicting the traits to match correctly is not an easy task, as the example above shows. People may not be attracted to likes; they may instead be looking to fill gaps in their lives, just as a confused person seeks clarity and security rather than more options. It’s one thing to say that we can match personalities, but our audience may be very disparate and their behaviour driven by context and circumstance.

Do this

So a more durable way to look at this is to use personality not for pure attraction by matched traits, but to render the ideal ‘sender’ of the message as a credible source of the benefit being pursued.

use personality not for pure attraction by matched traits, but to render the ideal ‘sender’ of the message as a credible source of the benefit being pursued.

Those seeming arch-rationalists, the computer and software industry were quick to see that interfaces with human-like objects were better understood and worked better. From birth, the Macintosh has sported a distinct folksily-human personality to support its ease-of-use promise. It too anthropomorphised the Mac giving it a face which continues today with a hat-tip to Picasso. At its unveiling, the Mac spoke, thanking Steve Jobs, “who’s been like a father to me.” Microsoft’s assistants like most early robots were humanoid.

Thousand words, but hazy picture

One of the attractions of personality as a framework is that the human character provides a catalogue of thousands of traits. Or at least, words for them: this is the so-called lexical hypothesis which proposes that traits important to us must have words for them. This problem of plenty is tackled with factor analysis, a statistical technique to reduce them to a handful of master traits, with several lesser traits supporting each.

Here the problems begin. A trait-word can be located under several master traits, as their meaning changes with context. Worse, some industries centre around favourite traits: Kapferer points out that computer brands, cluster around advanced or clever, and ice creams are sensuous. Neither are strictly personality terms, but are functional or physical traits. Next, cultural lenses can get in the way. A Millward Brown paper, which uses a trait inventory system based on ancient archetypes, found that the iPhone’s traits added up to it being a ‘seductress’ in the UK and a ‘dreamer’ in Japan. In India, Deep Design finds all brands want to be ‘friendly and approachable’.

Cultural lenses can get in the way. A Millward Brown paper, found that the iPhone’s traits added up to it being a ‘seductress’ in the UK and a ‘dreamer’ in Japan. In India, Deep Design finds all brands want to be ‘friendly and approachable’.

And it just keeps rolling along

Despite practical and theoretical problems (for example can the identity concept encompass identity, or must it be the other way around?) personality seems indestructible. Celebrity marketing seems eternal: we can see an intuitive fit with the brand, without needing to agree on the list words that attach to the personality and to the brand.

Maybe it will take a new idea like machine learning to make the old one of personality really hum. Digital marketing can deliver different versions of the same campaign to selected users; one test demonstrated 20% more ‘buy’ clicks with individual targeting based on user’s scores on the Big Five, currently the most validated personality model. What’s of note is that software can infer personality on the fly, typing the user in context as he surfs…

Scary? Relax, it’s me, the friendly, human social media machine.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Personality, the uber-construct in the modern ‘liking’ business’ in Business Standard, 19 August, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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In the popular mind, for longer than we can remember, the role of designers has been to make beautiful things.

Understandably so. Up until the 19th century, the word design meant a ‘pattern’, to decorate, or manufacture utilitarian objects, such as a Wedgwood china teapot or a brass surahi from a ‘manufactory’ in Moradabad. Even today, the qualifier ‘designer’, applied to, say, a water faucet, promises us a sleeker or otherwise more beautiful version of its ‘undesigned’ poor cousin.

Up until the 19th century, the word design meant a ‘pattern’, to decorate, or manufacture utilitarian objects

For much of the 20th century, too, design was tasked with the higher-order concern of influencing our visual culture with manufactured objects, communications and spaces. Of course designers always did much more crucial, often invisible, work than this. But the role given to it was not always resisted: and even if not always concerned specifically with beauty, an aesthetic frame was how design talked to the rest of us.

But towards the century’s end, certainly by the 21st, buttressed by decades of being a university-level discipline, the profession gave itself a new discourse. Now design was ‘problem-solving’ and its superior 21st century analogue, ‘design thinking’ (a tautology? An oxymoron? Depends on whether you are a sceptic or a paid-up member).

But towards the century’s end, the profession gave itself a new discourse. Now design was ‘problem-solving’ and its superior 21st century analogue, ‘design thinking’

Both these new formulations posit core design ability that has gone ‘demat’, or divorced from its manual or visual forebears. It’s seen as transferable to any domain, and to hear some tell it, capable of taking on any knotty problem from poverty to parking. Graphic designers, for example, no longer serve just the publishing or communication industries but think up ways in which ordering a taxi on a mobile phone can be intuitive and efficient. They are designers of user experience, or UX.

The subtle effect of all this is a uber-rational discourse, in which beauty (looks good!) is pitted against performance (achieves an objective), to be somehow balanced or traded off. Lost is the point that beauty and the other sorts of value are not independent variables but co-dependent ones. Don Norman is a seminal figure in the field of field of usability. The following examples and some of the discussion we owe to him.

beauty is pitted against performance, to be somehow traded off. Lost is the point that beauty and the other sorts of value are not independent variables but co-dependent ones

Research shows that beauty, and even the lack of it, can be harnessed to improve the performance of the product. It’s easy to see that attractive things are preferred, but less easy to see that they can work better. In one case, an attractively laid out bank ATM was ‘perceived to be easier to use’ than otherwise identical ATMs. Such a perception is profoundly self-fulfilling: perceived to be easier is easier.

But other profound effects may be at work. When I chop onions with a knife I really like, I experience a feeling of control. This leads me to relax; it actually causes a dilation of my pupils, a tiny decrease in my skin’s perspiration rate and my breathing (lie detectors work on this principle). I am more open to cutting onions, more open to help, more trusting and able to absorb stress. I will likely feel more skilful, which will translate into a more skilful performance. This process needs a little more unpacking.

First, we must widen our conception of beauty to include the entire experience. I loved the design of the knife when I saw it, for a number of reasons. Its weight and balance in my hand felt just right. The motion of cutting was rewarding in the way the steel went through the onion, and rested on the solid board below. The grip remained firm and comfortable and completing the task produced no fatigue. This led to feelings of control, skill, and perhaps pride. The resulting flows of dopamine, (the brain’s hormone of reward, among other things) enhanced memory formation, making sure that a repeat experience is anticipated pleasurably, reinforcing the cycle and etching the the grooves of a behaviour. Anyone familiar with the creative life understands the effect of positive mood on performance.

We must widen our conception of beauty to include the entire experience

When we say, therefore, that the performance of the knife depended to a degree on its appeal, we incorporate the human using the knife. It’s futile to measure the knife’s sharpness, because the knife isn’t designed to chop onions of its own accord.

This attraction has two parts. The first, relates to an object’s physicality, or what Deep Design has frequently discussed as physique. This form of liking (or disliking) is automatic, instantaneous and is what psychologists call an affect: a sense, before the act of labelling takes place, and before the associative processes of memory and judgement can be brought into play. The term ‘pre-personal’ is used to describe this unstructured, but potent sensation. Some theorise that ‘physiqual’ affects relate to primal sensory abilities that helped us sense safety or danger.

But physique is also being simultaneously evaluated and processed, in a continuous flux, not as boxed stages. In the knife example, ‘control’ is a feeling, or a label I give the affect (the sensations of seeing, holding and cutting). The label is a product of my learned experiences, such as culture, and associations. Pride, and the projection of it, are further maturations, and all these are born of realisation. Realisation is both cognition and emotion, both personal and social. I use the word because it connotes a process, by which emotions are formed and recognised. A coming to know, rather than a destination.

The most used model to structure, and thus to synthesise attraction is personality, or the use of the human being as both as a metaphor for organising and occasionally, expressing, elements of physique and realisation into an understandable whole. Without human beings, there are no stories; but that story must be left for another time.

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Design, properly understood, is inherently social. Designers make objects and symbols, for the eventual use of other people, to fit into, or sometimes transform socially determined situations. So an invitation to ‘share a fresh perspective’ at a consumer summit, to an audience of marketers, should hardly have caused unease.

But inquiry is born from unease; in this case, from Deep Design’s dawning realisation that designers don’t really deal with consumers. They aren’t trained for it.

Marketers and designers want to work together more closely, but they lack a common view of the humanscape. Wherever the marketer can speak for the consumer, he has the mike, so to speak.

Design, to use the current argot of the trade, is centred on users, or humans—a carpenter using a drill, a reader scanning a newspaper page, book or website, a mother manoeuvring her toddler into a high chair. It addresses the unchanging human system: the body and its limbs; a sensory apparatus dominated by sight; a logical tendency, subject to a fickle attention and the twitches of the lizard brain; perhaps some rudimentary notions of pride.

Finally, design’s problem-solving orientation focuses on the user’s behaviour in the context of interacting with the designed solution, not an inner drive. We care about a score of things: from whether her task got done, to whether our work left society better in some way. But not whether this user was insecure about her future, socially constrained, or struggling with being modern: a user is a user.

Joy to the world, the consumer is born

Advertising created the consumer, or a person viewed purely by a propensity to buy, use up, and buy more of something, when industrial capitalism started to produce increasingly better but increasingly similar products. Human ingenuity responded by creating new needs, (like the ability to impress friends at a party) and fears, (like the failure to be a good mum). Not much design here; and while the human traits assumed here are fairly universal, it does introduce psychology into the mix.

More sophisticated efforts from the time of Cheskin’s sensory marketing have co-opted design, realising that a product’s visual imprint can transcend its function. These marketers were not just after simple beauty, but saw form as whispering to a consumer psyche, per the psychological fashions of the day. So Bernays’ stunt of getting suffragettes to simultaneously light up cigarettes, during a march down a Manhattan avenue, was meant to convince women to overcome their unconscious (Freudian) fear of the cigarette’s ‘phallic’ shape. Post-war American cars were endlessly re-designed, to engineer their appearance to work with the consumer’s hidden mental apparatus, arguably to appeal to masculinity and power.

But consumer theory is a braid with two strands. One strand is empirical, quantitative and cognitive. It aims to tease out the best approach to (for example) segmenting markets, studying things like demographics, spending power, geography, and physical constraints to buying. Rather like applied economics, it deals with the consumer’s rational side, offering benefits like efficacy or economy that are universal. Complexity notwithstanding, a great deal can be made out by careful statistics and reason working hand in hand, to some degree of certainty.

I have a feeling

The other strand hypothesises the consumer as an emotional being who is an actor in a social, cultural and economic drama, to explain or identify her deep motivations and anxieties. It uses data, but interpretively, and also pays heed to trained impressions. Its findings are qualitative and uncertain. It seeks validity, postponing the need for certainty.

Of particular interest are the consumer’s values and culture. This is an attempt to extend our knowledge of the consumer including but beyond his observed behaviour in the context of our product or brand, but a deep orientation that influences his actions, at various if not all times. The idea is that a brand’s values can resonate with that of a group of consumers, and make them loyalists. (Go back to paragraph 3 and appreciate the contrast).

These groupings offer a kind of alternate market segmentation, cutting across income classes, social class lines (defined by entitlements like access and status) or communal ones (such as religious, ethnic or national). For example: the multitudes that see in a Trump or a Modi a corrective to a historical power grab by a mealy-mouthed elite. Or others who belatedly learn ritualism from a previous generation to compensate for the Indian-ness they see evaporating from their lives. Each grouping, united by attitude, offers multiple predictions, not for a single, narrow product or context, but with multiple economic, social, cultural and political possibilities, with lasting implications.

Design speaks up

It is in this second strand that designers can come into their own, not in their accustomed role as downstream providers of expression, who take their cues from marketers. Instead, as intelligent observers and interpreters of culture, especially the visual. They are uniquely placed because they pour products into the stream of culture, as well as fish in it for reference and inspiration.

Designers can observe how people express themselves visually: the fashions and codes their choices seem to converge on. How we decorate our homes (why is a comic book style print of Meena Kumari doing on that cushion cover?), and how the groom’s niece dances at a sangeet function, why not? And yes, how they buy. Then, they need to join the dots: what does this say about people and their responses the forces shaping their life? The anthropologist Grant McCracken, who studies culture and commerce, sees this as the source of design’s power in the boardroom.

Alessi is more

Or take the Italian household appliances maker Alessi, which commissions famous designers for its products, and has several iconic products among them. The business scholar Roberto Verganti, who has studied the methods of innovative Italian businesses, points out that these icons are not merely awards-circuit darlings but broad commercial successes. They command significant price premiums and disproportionate volumes, for years together. That last criterion implies deep attachment, not an acute social contagion with a brief, steep peak.

Alessi’s method relies on trusted interpreters, who identify large cultural swells (a fatigue with a joyless modernity, for example) and select a designer based on the likelihood that his temperament can speak to that mood. Their choices may be surprising: Alessi’s best known classic, a kettle, came out of a collaboration with the American architect Michael Graves.

The challenge for marketers with this type of thinking is to tolerate the uncertainty of a payoff, in exchange for its size and longevity. Innovative products or market strategies need more than a jaap of the Steve Jobs naam. Designers need to be able to not just observe and imagine, but to convincingly interpret and act. They can start by convincing themselves.

So, I accepted the invitation. Will you?

The post Design to Consumer: I’m Not Sure We’ve Met? appeared first on ICD | Blog.

It was a film-maker friend on the phone.

“I’m making a film,” he said, “on a new script that’s been developed for the Wancho language, spoken in Arunachal Pradesh. Right up your street.”

Perhaps my friend was referring to my interest in typeface design? But my friend, aware of the distinction between the script (a way of writing) and typefaces (their printed form), went on, “The script itself has never been professionally examined. So I thought you might want to. Or is it linguists who look at such things?”.

I replied that I wasn’t aware of anyone who evaluated scripts, perhaps because they are handed down to us, and shaped by the same evolutionary processes that shape languages. (Imagine giving a Devanagari a B-).

Scripts, are handed down to us, and shaped by the same evolutionary processes that shape languages…

But to a designer, a synthetically developed script like Wancho presents a fascinating opportunity to develop criteria for evaluation. For instance, if ease of learning is an objective, we might ask of a modern script to represent related sounds with similar shapes (not significantly implemented in Wancho, as I found out). There could be others.

Design starts with why: why Wancho needs a script at all. I asked — and that’s when the penny dropped. The rest of this column is mainly about what I didn’t tell him, and a little of what I did.

The Wancho are a hill tribe, related to the Naga. About 50000 people speak Wancho, one of tens of Tibeto-Burman languages that dot the north-east and surrounds; none has a script. Wancho now does, thanks to the 11-year labours of Banwang Losu, a Wancho teacher.

The Wancho script, it was explained, is needed to capture Wancho’s phonetic peculiarities. The script, once established, would help preserve the entirely oral traditions (lore, prayer, song) of the Wancho and save the language from extinction.

But Wancho is unwritten, not for want of a script but for want of a culture of literacy. Such little Wancho as is written relies on Devanagari and Latin. Latin, an alphabetic script, serves, with small modifications, nearly all European, South American and modern African languages. And Arabic with local modifications has done duty for centuries, for 60+ languages. Phonetic functionality is moot: pronunciation is taught, written conventions learnt.

But the Wancho script is an original work, not a modification. Its need to exist comes from an assertion of Wancho’s membership among the comity of languages. In a uniquely modern moment, it has, since its inception in 2014, gained a typeface, designed by Anurag Gautam, a student at the National Institute of Design (NID); an animated primer on YouTube (by the first Wancho animator, Wangdan Wampan, also from NID) and a book by Losu on the same subject available on Amazon. In an instant, the Wancho language becomes, at least to its own users, more important than others in its neighborhood.

Wancho is an invention, but entirely synthetic and does not claim to be derived from antiquity. Yet it shares some of the same motivations with ‘invented traditions’, an idea popularised by E. J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger. Their best known example is the invention of a Scottish ‘highland’ tradition: the adoption of the kilt, till then worn by farmers, as aristocratic wear, appropriately styled and accessorised. Along with bagpipers and the assignment of tartan weaves to aristocratic clans (rather than just regions) a visual toolbox became available to construct and give a visual face to a Scottish national identity. As a parallel, imagine the male Punjab government ministers turning out in Bhangra costume as if it were the way it always was.

Wancho is an invention, but entirely synthetic and does not claim to be derived from antiquity. Yet it shares some of the same motivations with ‘invented traditions’

The marketing significance of this invented tradition is immense. It enabled the promotion of ‘authentically traditional Scottish products, like its whisky which rose to prominence around the same time (the 18th and 19th centuries). The ‘rougher liquors of Scotland’ were promoted as the libation of choice of England’s aristocrats, perhaps sped along by Queen Victoria’s love for Scottish fashion.

the invention of a Scottish ‘highland’ tradition: the adoption of the kilt… Along with bagpipers and the assignment of tartan weaves…a visual toolbox to construct and give a visual face to a Scottish national identity.

Marketers love invented traditions: many sorts of mass-market food and alcohol products among others, pretend to some form of tradition, however spurious. Consumption rituals are often invented, and grown, by coopting what some consumers do and teaching it to the rest: drinking Corona beer requires the piece of lime wedged into its neck (Tastes better? Sure. All rituals enhance consumption). Don’t ever wash, or mend your Levi’s (creating a market for faux-distressed jeans). Even major religions coopt and re-make traditions.

Marketers love invented traditions: many sorts of mass-market food and alcohol products among others, pretend to some form of tradition, however spurious.

Paradoxically, all traditions are invented (and re-invented) at some point of time. If the Wancho script beats the odds and survives, it will become a tradition in twenty years. No other script seems to have managed the feat in this century. Well, not quite: Klingon, the fictional language of the Klingon people in the Star Trek movies of the 1970s and 80s was invented with a vocabulary and a grammar to give realism to the dialogue. Fans have extended it become a spoken language, complete with songs, poetry, and a script, even a language institute.

Like with Klingon, the written script is a particularly potent library of symbols—letters—around which the community can cohere and belong everyday, whether the language is fictional or real. Eventually it’s about an identity more than the survival of a language. The historian Benedict Anderson argues that modern nationhood has much to do with the merger of print technology and capitalism: the rise and standardisation of a local language, in all its uses.

Identity is a master-concept in design, marketing, politics and culture. Identities are not simply national, ethnic or linguistic: ‘authentic Corona drinker’ is a tag I can add on top. Modernity seems to compel the formation of these temporary and multiple identities, to re-balance a felt lack or anxiety; it seems to show them up in its complex and furious stride. Visual symbols buttress identity; so we attach ourselves to symbols, collecting, burnishing and drawing meaning from them.

Modernity seems to compel the formation of these temporary and multiple identities…Visual symbols buttress identity; so we attach ourselves to symbols…

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“I refuse to add to the chorus,” said DOPE, as the the Designer Of Practically Everything was known to his colleagues, “dissing the Rs 2000 note’s design. Instead, let’s treat it as an occasion to ask explore what design means.”

I looked sadly at the new Rs 2000 note my newspaper had sent for the interview. We sat in a bare, brightly daylit room, whose walls were covered with a jungle of cardboard shapes, and unrecognisable sketches made with fat markers.

There are as many definitions of design as there are animals, he insisted, and it’s continually evolving. And as with natural evolution, all definitions of design co-exist, said the DOPE, watching a linear drawing of something come to life on his laptop screen. Just as bacteria, fish and humans coexist, and even feed off each other. None is superior: all thrive.

There are as many definitions of design as there are animals, and it’s continually evolving. And as with natural evolution, all definitions of design co-exist.

Let’s use this Rs 2000 note, he said, much to my relief, to illustrate how design has evolved. He held it up to the table lamp and peered at it through a small lens.

For many people, design is decoration. This was its dominant 19th century meaning, produced by artists, artisans and ‘makers’ of all kinds in two or three dimensions. This note has several kinds of ornamentation, as though different artists were at play; older notes show a more grace and coherence.

Design is persuasion. The market and media explosions of the 20th century created design as persuasion, to sell goods, lifestyles and even ideas (join the war effort, for example).

Design is product. Industrial design extended desire to appliances and automobiles. It also made us conscious of progress, of how things work, and introduced new materials into our lives. A currency note, said, DOPE, must be durable and easy to handle, especially by ATMs (and not need lakhs of them to be re-calibrated, unless there’s a devious design there). It must be difficult to manufacture, on budget, and include an array of visible and hidden security features.

Design is discourse. As Art began to respond more consciously to the changed world of the 20th century, and ideology became the bridge between the arts and design. Constructivism, futurism and and other intellectual movements left their impress on design, unleashing a series of assertions on what design ought to be, for the first time.

International modernism, a mid 20th century bloom, called for a universal, rational approach to form. A doctrinaire modernist might give primacy to the universality of the banking function, with a clear, highly legible (in all light conditions) design, equally at home in India, or Germany. Even the Rs 2000 note could have done with numerals positioned and sized consistently with older notes, or provided a better way for the future.

Post-modernists might see a kind of imperialism in this ‘narrative’ of universal functionality. They might also argue that Gandhi’s image is a fraud perpetrated by power, advertising morality in the face of a corruption: off with his portrait.

Design is brand. In this age of commercial symbolism, this Rs 2000 note design under-represents the national brand; and second, offers an out-of-touch, backward projection of India. The Mangalyaan may have replaced dams and kisans, but the note’s design hardly projects capability or confidence. It suffers from all the gaudy, verbose clutter that we have come to expect, so what’s new?

In this age of commercial symbolism, this Rs 2000 note design under-represents the national brand; and second, offers an out-of-touch, backward projection of India.

These perspectives, said DOPE, sneaking a quick look at a dancing line on his laptop, are overlapping and simultaneous. They are not exhaustive: we can see design as culture, for example. But note that each of these is concerned with form, physical or visual.

Two relatively recent perspectives promise to transform that.

Design is experience. Experience designers (like UX designers) seek to map money’s journey from bank branch to wallet to exit, from the user’s point of view. But beyond this, she may muse on the experience of payment, physically or electronically, making it smoother. She might even ponder the ATM, and collaborate with a product designer to re-work it. Demonetisation as an experience? Sure, though her compulsion to prototype solutions with real users might be the deal breaker! DOPE chuckled for a minute at this.

Finally, design is thinking. Attracting interest lately is the designer’s ability to deal with incomplete information, and tackle complex situations by creative experimentation, and learning from failures. It aims to think beyond products, about systems, creating a pure problem solving process.

If such a designer thought about a cashless future, she might muse that electronic payments might not reach remote areas for some years. In the interim, imagine local-area cash, valid only in a specific off-network area and bankable in designated machines.

Perhaps the sheer mobility of cash makes it king. Networks fail unpredictably; a small bribe needs to be paid to a cop; a pushcart vegetable seller might have lost his card terminal. Maybe ATMs could dispense ‘temporary’ cash with 3-day validity, introducing friction as a solution to discourage cash.

Could this friction could be physical, giving cash a less convenient form? Maybe notes should occupy space proportional to their value. Imagine a 10,000 rupee note as thick as a sandwich, or as big as a tabloid page.

Psychological issues may obstruct a perfectly electronic world. Cash is a natural, visual means of relating to money; dashboards are not. Alternative visualisations of money may be needed to counter cognitive blindness.

Psychological issues may obstruct a perfectly electronic world. Cash is a natural, visual means of relating to money; dashboards are not.

Such apparently whacky alternatives frame the problem in productive ways, break the rut of the past, and eventually lead to previously unimaginable, working solutions that move us from an existing situation to a preferred one.

The post The Currency of Design appeared first on ICD | Blog.

“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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