The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

“The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress.”  - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us”  - Juhani Pallasmaa paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty

Are we seeing too much?

In The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa argues for the importance of our sense of touch and the dangerous dominance of vision in our thinking, design and buildings. Vision was the last of the senses to develop in evolutionary terms, but has become our dominant sense accounting for around two-thirds or more of sensory processing (you can read more on vision here and more on touch here). Like all the other senses, our sight is embedded in our skin and is an adaptation of it. Vision originated as light sensitive skin cells, and our eyes still have a covering of skin. Our skin is still sensitive to light and experiments have shown that some people are even able to detect colour from their skin’s sensitivity alone (that is, they can see with their skin!). Read more »

Colourful designs

Colour is used by designers and marketers to attract attention, group elements, provide meaning and enhance aesthetics, making designs more visually interesting and appealing and reinforcing the organisation and meaning of elements and features in the design. When badly used, colour can impair the form and function of a design, but there are well used guidelines for how to use colours properly in any design work, and the main themes are summarised below. Read more »

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”  - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”  - Albert Einstein

Connecting the dots

Are you drowning in the sea of data yet? As the world becomes more and more complex, with more and more information to understand and less and less time to do this, the importance of integrative thinking becomes more and more important. In The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin presents a number of convincing business case studies, including A.G. Lafley at P&G, Jack Welch at GE, Michael Lee-Chin at AIC and Martha Graham (who revolutionised modern dance), all of whom were able to see problems from a range of perspectives, think in terms of total systems and not component parts, and simplify complex ideas into straight forward (and often disruptive) solutions to problems. Read more »

Should communication be adapted for local markets or be consistent and global?  Accommodation theory was developed in the 70s by Howard Giles and others, and describes the process where we adapt communication styles (word choice, accent, dialect and other aspects) to minimise the social distance between ourselves and others (or in some contexts we may do the opposite and emphasise or maximise the social distance). The theory argues that such behaviour is noticed and appreciated by others, as we all find those similar to us more attractive and persuasive (as Robert Cialdini explains). Read more »

The sign of control

In design, pictorial images are often used to improve the recognition and recall of signs and controls. Such representations and images make actions, objects and concepts easier to find, recognise, learn and remember. They are used in signage, computer displays and control panels for various purposes including identification (for example, company logos), efficient alternative to text (remembering that we process pictures much more quickly than words, so for road signs these are much more efficient), or to draw attention to something without the need for information (error icons in a display). Designers use four different types of icon: similar, example, symbolic and arbitrary. Read more »

Reading (baby) faces

Baby-face bias is the tendency to see people and things with baby-faced features as more naive, helpless and honest than those with more mature features. Round features, large eyes, small noses, high foreheads, short chins and relatively lighter skin and hair are all considered as babylike, and as a result perceived to have  more babylike personality traits such as naivete, helplessness, honesty and innocence. By contrast, more mature features are correlated with perceptions of authority, intelligence and seriousness. Read more »

Four Ways to Relate

In Structures of Social Life, Alan Fiske outlines four forms which can be used to construct all human relations. He argues convincingly that these four forms are sufficient to describe all possible forms of human relations, as well as social motives and emotions and social morals. Although the details of the models differ from culture to culture, the underlying structures are consistent. Read more »