Digitizing Gestalt

A trend has emerged from the plethora of content.

Online magazines post hundreds of stories a week, new startups have new products, growing companies create the necessity to automate work, minimizing production work is at an all time high but is the formula for automation forgetting a key element?

If we forget all of that for one moment and go back to the “good-old-days” and remember why companies were successful in the first place, why people associate brands with certain periods of their life, why we associate some brands with our childhood, how a motorcycle company can create hardcore fanatics, how techies will stand for hours in line for the next iPhone, how women can only trust very few brands with their beauty needs, and even further back, the way we would cherish an album for months/years before rotating it with the next milestone in our lives, our human desire to attach ourselves to pinnacles of our lives is so much deeper than an algorithm. In fact, I would argue that by creating more algorithms we end up pushing people away. Not to say that algorithms are not a great tool to use, algorithms are great, but when a company’s culture is after automation and mathematical formulas that’s when companies become disconnected to people.

Good design plays a huge part in the experience. The beautiful part about design, the reason why people remember and collect posters, the reason why people will drop a bundle of cash for a Le Corbusier LC2 chair is because it gives you an irreplaceable experience. When you buy these objects, a person can feel the craft under their fingertips, these items tell a story, feeling, emotion and most importantly, it provides an experience.

The idea is nothing new. This interconnectedness has existed in print for as long as the world can remember. It has existed in life. It even exists in web sometimes. What people don’t see, however, is the ability to turn the the interaction into a sign.

What I mean is that in order to understand how a brand become’s a part of someone’s life, we have to understand the signs and how they’re going to connect the elements. For instance, something utterly simple, take Figure A, we quietly, in our heads, connect the circles together, we even go as far as making a shape with those circles and by creating the triangle shape we create a positive leaving the squares as the negative space. Our brain is crazy and so amazing!!

The web isn’t as sophisticated yet. We are still unable to bridge the connections between digital layers.

to be continued…

Ideas

Post: Rethinking Email

Read next