Booklist
The Art of Noticing
Rob Walker
Paying more attention to the world around us can improve our well-being and our relationships. It can help us grow to appreciate the wonder in our surroundings—the details that can lead us to be better thinkers, learners and communicators.
But in becoming deeper observers, in breaking from routine thinking, it’s inevitable we’ll have to grapple with uncomfortable questions and brutal truths.
For example: What does it mean to explore an abandoned place or a crumbling environment, like a closed hospital or a shuttered business? Almost every other sort of architecture we encounter is actively maintained and preserved.
Or what do we ask people to muse or internalize if, in a sanctified space (say, a college campus or the front of a courthouse), we place an informational plaque—meant to be noticed, writ full of facts, perhaps bright, subversive pink—against the gray statue of a beloved figure? A figure we know engaged in morally wrong acts?
Honing our perception can help us reevaluate the hegemonic forces we swim in. But to see the vibrance in our ecosystems, we must also see their dereliction, sometimes in ways that challenge our sense of self and sense of security.
Not that it’s always dereliction we’re missing. There’s good abound, too: The physical objects we use our five senses to experience pulse with subtle things, ineffabilities, precious qualia that we detect unknowingly—but do need to be present for in order to extract joy from. Marcel Duchamp made a word to describe this sense-beyond-sense, “infrathin,” which the author Walker teases out.
Infrathin is the warmth of a recently vacated seat. The swoosh of an email being sent. The heat of paper that’s fresh from the printer.
Infrathin and marketing can, of course, be connected. There’s a through-line. Maybe it’s the sssss of a cold can of Coke being opened, which is in my mind as an ad even if it actually wasn’t (hashtag Mandela effect). Maybe it’s the beauty of the shimmering wrapped boxes under the Christmas tree—often admired more than the gifts inside. Maybe it’s the breath taken from us, the disbelief in our own good fortune when we see an outfit in the storefront window that we know is our color, our style—and, for a few moments of fantasy, our way to feel how we want to feel and look how we want to look.
But not everything has to be about marketing. And in truth, marketing is both infrathin and anti-infrathin.
To use a famous example, it is, indeed, an art for a marketer to notice the fact that Lucky Strike cigarettes “toast” their leaves. It seems to set them apart.
In truth, though, “this process did not differ widely from [the] methods of other manufacturers” and “the meaning of the message [itself] was elastic,” sometimes meaning better taste and sometimes meaning less throat irritation.
This all makes me wonder what the role of the marketer actually is—though, of course, not all marketers are the same, and neither is all marketing. The remit for the role, on some level, might be as simple as, “Get people to notice some details—but not all.” Inspire infrathin, which comes from appreciating the little things, while obfuscating a lot of what, on second thought, might actually be obvious.
The Art of Noticing can be purchased on Porchlight, which has also published an interview with its author Rob Walker. You can subscribe to Walker’s Substack here.
“Design is the enzyme that helps people face and metabolize change.”
— Paola Antonelli, Design Emergency: Building A Better Future
Design Emergency: Building A Better Future
Alice Rawsthorn & Paola Antonelli
In an emergency, design is essential for creating clear and actionable communication. It helps people find their way: mentally, emotionally, and sometimes literally in an actual, physical space in the world. In short, as the authors write near the start of their chapter on Covid-19: “Any emergency is also a design emergency.”
(As a quick aside, the pandemic also revealed flaws in the design of hospital gowns and masks, which, as noted in another book, Extra Bold, “are designed to fit a so-called average male body, making them dangerous for caregivers of smaller stature, including many women.” In other words, manufacturers, designers, medicine, society as a whole—pick one?—make it possible for more emergencies to happen, and for them to be worse when they do, by implementing design so poor it doesn’t work for half the planet. But I digress.)
There is a frightful realism—something that brushes up against the reaction one might have when considering the banality of evil, for example (how can something so impactful result from work so mundane, and from something so mundane as work?)—when Design Emergency tells us how the iconic image of Covid, the “spiky blob” with red offshoots, is just the result of a weekend work assignment given to two artists at the CDC.
Their names are Alissa and Dan.
Also arresting is the design approach New Zealand took at the start of the crisis, when people were feeling the most uncertain and afraid. Its government gave citizens (a) clear and positive instructions (b) with easy-to-understand visuals (c) that leaned on the color yellow, which is almost universally understood to mean danger or caution and is at the center of warning theory. (Not coincidentally, the color yellow features heavily in the efforts of multiple countries to protect future humans—who may not speak a language that currently exists, for example—from nuclear waste storage sites.) New Zealand went on to have the lowest death rate per capita.
It’s hard to learn about this extremely modern example and not think to the work of health care reformer Florence Nightingale, whose bicentenary was celebrated in 2020— ironically, the year Covid hit our world.
Nightingale noticed more soldiers were dying from the infections they caught in dirty hospitals than from their actual battle wounds, and visualized this data with pie charts—then seen as niche and academic—for the politicians she needed to get funding from. It worked, and today the Nightingale Pledge, recited by nurses at their graduation, includes a sentiment absent(!) from the Hippocratic Oath, its forebear: a pledge to “raise the standards.”
Good design is good marketing.
And good marketing can inspire us to be better human beings.
Design Emergency: Building A Better Future can be purchased from Phaidon or The Invisible Collection. The authors’ Instagram account for the book can be found here.