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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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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