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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Defence, or not quite

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

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

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

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

But

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally:

Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This false urgency exaggerates their significance: these aren’t catastrophic, black-swan events (wholly unpredictable—until they happen!) but slow processes already in motion. These ‘trends’ are tendentious and exist only in the eye of the observer. They are a form of navel gazing, a year-end meditation when we pause to be communitarian, and give thanks. And to indulge our need to see our biases confirmed (I told you so).

With those warnings, here’s what we saw in the Deep Design of trends-for-2019, and a speculative interpretation thereof. Call it a trend of trends.

First, digital technology is at the centre of the design conversation. Products, services and communications have converged on our devices, and most of the new ‘products’ we saw belong to this space, not only in where they operate but how we discover and evaluate them.

digital technology is at the centre of the design conversation. Products, services and communications have converged on our devices, and most of the new ‘products’ we saw belong to this space

The devices themselves are at the centre, too. The march of the mobile continues but there are signs of a correction. Design is coming to recognise the excesses of the mobile platform, a carrier that breeds a million agents vying to steal our attention, creating a society that is at its most frazzled, not to mention depressed.

The backlash will be in many forms, starting with the quick fix of Apple’s IoS and Android offering digital wellness features that essentially nudge us to be abstemious in our digital lives, helping us heal, be mindful and perchance, to sleep. The broad direction will be a kind of essentialism.

Technology will have to find ways of easing cognitive pressure. We will want fewer apps but more relevant ones, so all-in-one apps may not be the answer. Innovation is required, to save us from the excesses that made it succeed.

Technology will have to find ways of easing cognitive pressure. We will want fewer apps but more relevant ones, so all-in-one apps may not be the answer. Innovation is required, to save us from the excesses that made it succeed.

The answers will have to be found in our daily lives, at home, on the road, and at work: the data that we capture, use and convey, and its potential for tyranny as well as for being misinterpreted and thus becoming more noise than signal.

Outside the digital world, we will be drawn to products that tread lightly on our brainspace, and the earth. Younger consumers are already sensitive to waste in packaging for example, paying more for sustainable, re/up-cyclable products. This dovetails with a long-running yearning for simplicity. In fashion, for example, the call will be for more functional wear, and versatile enough for work and leisure.

Fewer products, with general applicability will be the ask all over the home and workspace (and the two may blur). Functionality will be defined as fewer features done better, trading absolute capability for less space, economy, and cognitive ease. Indeed, the support for de-cluttering is a popular theme, and a mini-industry. Marie Kondo, a best selling Japanese author and star of a Netflix show, teach a legion of followers to de-clutter and do with less.

Fewer products, with general applicability will be the ask all over the home and workspace (and the two may blur). Functionality will be defined as fewer features done better, trading absolute capability for less space, economy, and cognitive ease.

Perhaps this will extend to ‘smartitecture’, or the design of repurposable spaces rather than purpose built ones. Digital sockets will populate homes, public spaces and workspaces. A conference room forms where space exists, and the required facilities will appear as needed. The formality of chairs or decor may be irrelevant, and agility will be the rule. A charging point for mobiles built into airport lounge chairs is a tiny step in that direction.

In like vein, expect automation at the city level. It’s bound to strike a municipality that while it’s good not keep street lights on at night for general safety, they can stay dim, or be off, and light up when a car is sensed. A lone driver on a long causeway at 3 a.m. might find the street lights switching on in her windshield view and switching off in the rear view mirror. An Internet of lamp-posts, so to speak, while the IoT (internet of things) is still not ready as a consumer application.

This will require governments and citizens sharing data, and while it raises irksome issues, the prediction is that many will welcome it for an IoT that really works (not a thing, yet) and other services. Some government data will become available. Deep Design bought an air quality monitor which is controlled by an app (of course) which also accesses government pollution data. The reverse too, why not—tell the government about your smoggy street.

The tension between private and public is a creation of the tech decades, starting with the personal computer, going on to personal everything. The social consequences of this are many, but expect extreme ‘mass personalisation’ to trend in more and more services.

Meanwhile the trend of brands looking like and speaking to consumers as one of them continues and authority as a communication position continues to be more and more untenable. Apple pioneered the trend with its name and its folksy Californian demeanour, a refreshing contrast to the tech companies of the day. But today Apple comes across as an uber-designed high priest, its hardware decked out in pristine materials. Expect tech brands to be less Apple and more Lyft, the very millennial ride sharing service whose sense of colour and playful imagery make it a likelier standard of the new attitude. Not coincidentally, Lyft has bet heavily on design, appointing six designers to CXO roles. That’s another trend that’s likely to continue.

Expect tech brands to be less Apple and more Lyft, the very millennial ride sharing service whose sense of colour and playful imagery make it a likelier standard of the new attitude. Not coincidentally, Lyft has bet heavily on design, appointing six designers to CXO roles. That’s another trend that’s likely to continue.

Finally, it appears that the influence of tech companies on design for the rest of us is also at a zenith. Many of them imitate each other, with a super-clean, minimal, hyper-functional identities, but the ‘startup look’ may have spilt over everywhere, from cosmetics to milk. You should bet on a correction this year, with brands showing more individuality and a larger emotional repertoire. Conversely, expect apps to be warmer and quirkier, in ways beyond the friendly/chatty personas that all of them adopt to the point that they blur into one (oops, something went wrong).

Community, mindfulness, and warmth: a hopeful start to the new year.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Now Trending’ in Business Standard, 18 January in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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If you are looking for ways to use psychology to boost the value of your design rupee, go elsewhere. Try one of several excellent web pages on the topic or the tens of shallow ones. You will find them absorbing, but ultimately disappointing. Incorporating formal knowledge into practice is an act of deep learning that designers (should) do.

Yet scarcely a season goes by when some senior designer or other doesn’t have this epiphany: why, why, don’t my junior colleagues understand psychology—it ought to be taught in design school! Resisting the impulse to ask, never mind the juniors, do you get psychology, where did you study it (and can you teach me some?) uncovers this intriguing question. Is psychology’s place in design all important, either as deep background or penetrating insight? Or is it just a source of thumb-rules to be opportunistically summoned to justify a design decision, or simply a curiosity?

Or perhaps, you say, the question is unfair. Design, like all the arts and humanities, is inherently and implicitly psychological; its practice itself carries all the psychology it needs, and designers learn the psychology as they go. It’s just, you add, that psychology has formed itself into a university discipline, and a new profession, at around the same time that, say, economics and design did, all relatively recently. And take a look at this overlapped view of the historical frequencies of these three words from the computational search engine Wolfram Alpha.

Design, like all the arts and humanities, is inherently and implicitly psychological

This may have led many disciplines to feel the want of a more explicit understanding of psychology, Some more than others: economics, conspicuously. Never mind those Viennese economists who see their discipline as a branch of psychology, the mind-business empire struck back by whipping up behavioural economics, rescuing economics from the improbably rational thing it is. Since Daniel Kahneman’s 2001 Nobel win, his best selling book has become required reading, spawning a flood of others. Every professional has a pet ‘Cognitive bias’ she loves to quote. Airport bookshop shelves creak with the stuff.

Perhaps design’s greater age as a word-concept (see graph of Wolfram data) reflects its protection against this particular insecurity. Even while suffering from the odd bout of insecurity about a lack of formal knowledge, designers themselves tend to believe the ‘implicit knowledge’ defence (see the second paragraph). Art, for another, expresses no desire to learn psychology.

And there’s the rub. The daily practice of a highly psychological art leads to an illusion of familiarity and command; and soon the design practice becomes the insight and the psychological principle it embodies appears to be a pedantic codification. Ironically, there’s a cognitive bias for that: deformation professionelle, when a professional believes that his trade gives him a total, rather than a very partial views of the mind—and the world.

Scan a typical ‘how to use psychology in design’ page and you realise that psychological principles are either too broad to apply, or too specific to be of more than very occasional use, or obvious. Designers, and you, will likely be underwhelmed by, say, the von Restorff Effect which reminds us that a single red umbrella will stand out in a row of otherwise identical white ones. Or Hick’s Law, which agrees that people take much (logarithmically) longer to choose with every additional choice presented to them.

Incorporating formal knowledge, with nuance, into one’s own insights and observation becomes crucial to whether they will find use in practice. The trick is to use psychology, but not as a yes-no heuristic, or as a trump card to settle an argument.

Incorporating formal knowledge, with nuance, into one’s own insights and observation becomes crucial to whether they will find use in practice.

Instead, make its mental models (a rough mechanism of how the mind works), a part of your toolkit. Refine them with your own experience, recognising that the real-world scenario before you is much more complex than the idealised conditions under which the experimental theory was hypothesised and tested.

Their value lies in using psychological models to question the validity of your work in what knowledge experts call the ‘forced scan’, using deliberate, slow and systematic thinking (a concept made popular by the aforementioned best seller “Thinking, Fast and Slow”) to pick up what intuition, common sense or over-confidence can miss.

That’s partly why the digital technology world, the most rational of rational communities, has made a fetish of these principles. User experience or UI/UX was born when cognitive psychology met engineering. The term ‘mental models’ owes to the foundational book on usability, “The Psychology of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman (who wet met in the last Deep Design) which was renamed to replace “psychology” with “design”. It’s a close link.

How many items in a menu can the mind take in and act on? (six, most likely, but there are caveats) and the precise placement or colour of a ‘buy’ button are all matters of interest. As are psychology of waiting (how my journey through an app can feel shorter and easier, and therefore likely to be repeated). And errors: why an ATM appears to have eaten your card. (It hasn’t: you left it in the machine, because it paid cash before returning the card; the sigh of cash fired an “end of transaction” signal in your brain. A classic mismatch of mental models.)

Designers also seek to influence users to take certain actions, and the field Persuasive Design attempts to do just that. The IT industry is its biggest client, with ‘conversion’ as its goal (think ‘buy’ or agree’ buttons). Its oldest success story, though: the image of a fly printed on the bowls of the men’s urinals at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. Men, like boys, like to idly aim their pee at it, improving ‘spillage rates’ dramatically.

Governments are in the persuasion design business, too. The UK experimented with a Behavioural insights Unit, affectionately the ‘Ministry of Nudges’, (named for the book ‘Nudge’ by Thaler and Sunstein which argues for benign trickery to get citizens to eat better or save more, for instance). In the early 2000s, Delhi adopted traffic light countdown timers to ease drivers’ nerves (yes, the psychology of waiting). Drive around the Central Hexagon and you see the zebra signs painted to look, from the viewpoint of an approaching driver, like solid blocks installed on the road. Psychology becomes street wisdom.

This world of nudges is the work of supreme tacticians, not grand communicators. It feels like a cognitive trick, done to smooth an interaction, or to get and direct attention. While these are worthy goals, design has a wider canvas. We also want to get liked, to bond; to inspire or defend; to be remembered. This will require looking beyond the cognitive, into the worlds of affect, emotion and instinct; and the highter cognitive functions of associations. It’s a world that Deep Design has often looked at. But those are areas where literature and the human story may be a better guide than the study of psychology.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Good design: It’s all in the mind’ in Business Standard, 16 September, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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