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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You see it everywhere, absolutely everywhere: rough-and-ready brush lettering or something like it. It’s proudly imperfect and knowingly naive.

Brush lettering has long existed as a contrast to the mechanical perfection of type, of manufactured letters. But these new roughly wrought creations are distinct from the skilfully writtten, neo-calligraphic styles that commercial sign makers introduced us to.

The durability of this phenomenon is somewhere between that of a major historical shift like Modernism and a trending hashtag, A movement? Not in the sense that future histories of design will recognise. Major arts movements were new ideas, championed by charismatic leaders, underpinned by a philosophy that responded to political, technological or economic shifts that were the air.

Modern movements are media-fed, and so faster to peak, ebb, die and be reborn after a time. They start life as styles, arising from anonymous mavens in urban sub-cultures, who may achieve glamour and fame once in a while, like Banksy who now justifies that name in a rather different way. For a phenomenon to survive, is not enough being visually new. Nor will its intellectual underpinnings suffice—such as protest, or the acknowledgement of new technologies. It must have universality, and claim that it can be applied to any situation, medium and art. Modernism is one such style, movement and phenomenon.

To explain why the shaggy lettering phenomenon thrives, we need to understand the emotional realm it occupies. Like great stories, ideas that satisfy emotions can be infinitely repeated without losing appeal.

To explain why the shaggy lettering phenomenon thrives, we need to understand the emotional realm it occupies.

Shaggy lettering’s thriving, as a look into its deep design might lead us to speculate, is because It encodes an ethos. It is associated with the expression of certain categories of ideas that are in the air; you might call it a global mood. It cannot be called a pure style, for it cannot be blindly applied like paint without an eye to the message it is helping to propel.

Expressing certain sentiments slakes a particular thirst. It satisfies an emotional requirement for a global community linked by shared notions, call it a mood. Here’s a speculation of what that mood is, and thus, what its deep design is built on.

Consider its deliberate imperfection; its texture and materiality (inky, splashy and brushy), which can be seen as a fact of life for the sender of the message, or carefully preserved to manipulate the emotions of the receiver. At an elementary level these attributes signal speed of execution and extreme economy of means—improvising to quickly make do with what is around.

Consider its deliberate imperfection; its texture and materiality (inky, splashy and brushy), which can be seen as a fact of life for the sender of the message, or carefully preserved to manipulate the emotions of the receiver.

This economy also signals vulnerability, and instantly destroys distance; it appeals to our instinct to defend the weak. In the new democracy, be an old school authority at your own peril. Status has lost its status, these brushed glyphs seem to say. Better to ask, what do you think?

Economy, vulnerability and immediacy are properties are most true of, and thus most valuable to groups such as makers of organic or local foods, who use this economy of means to signal authenticity (why else deliberately signal roughness?) and difference from the establishment. When there’s a good vulnerability going, can brands be far behind?

Protest is another; we only need to see these awkward letters to know that what they say is urgent and deeply felt.

I believe local tradesmen and protest banners were the progenitors of this lettering, refreshed by graffiti, and the thick marker. It is an irony that in many countries protestors now carry mass made, laser-printed banners. What a betrayal.

Such authenticity and immediacy are transferable outside these domains. Protest comes with a certain strength and a strong sense of personal agency: we can make a difference, but I can too. I need few resources to do so. Join a challenge, do something, try a hack: the fix is in, and it’s cheap and simple, in Steven Levitt’s words. Sincerity trumps nuance and careful consideration. Nuance is the sophistry of elites anyway; like complexity, a smokescreen erected by the Very Impotent Persons. Victory to the Visceral!

This personal agency is best supported on social media, where I can tap out easy outrage or make common cause with a band almost costlessly, where accusation is simple and refutation complex. Political correctness is now pop-correctness. I stand opposite experts or authorities, ready to tear them down if I have the social clout.

Not that social clout and expertise are necessarily mutually exclusive, but I’ll take the expert with the higher twitter engagement. I’ll go with this doctor’s views over another because his twitter feed is eagerly cheered and his skin looks great; ok, he has an MD too. Peer-viewed beats peer-reviewed. Whose peers? Mine!

Don’t think I’m right? Well, I’ll just pick up a really fat brush, dip it in a bucket of paint, and…then let’s see.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘By My Own Hand’ in Business Standard, 4 August, 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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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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