PHYSICALISM

The most powerful language is the thing you don’t think about

a communication language for the digital age

Intro In only a single generation we have embraced technologies that sever ties with the physical world, enabling us to share content and information that is artificially represented at the point of consumption. The break from physical limitations has seen an explosion of virtual interactions unthinkable a few decades ago.

For all their rapid pace of development, these new technologies are interacting with human intelligence systems that evolved over millions of years in a purely physical environment.

What lies ahead is a clash between human innovation and human evolution.

Size

Shape

Material

Format

Texture

Construction Weight

Substance

Everything about an object speaks to us

The language is hard-wired

The ability to read objects is hard-wired into every human brain. Millions of years of human evolution have honed intelligent processes that are finely tuned to make sense of the physical world (not the digital one).

We see the world as things Objects inform the basic language of human perception. Our physically-evolved intelligence system is object-focused to see self-contained entities. We place boundaries around abstract ideas and concepts to make them distinct in order to understand them.

We call them ‘things’ even when they’re not.

This

Not this

The Internet isn’t a thing

A virtual, ephemeral, limitless and unconfined INTERconnected NETwork (the clue’s in the name) is essentially alien to our object-focused perception. Whichever way we look at it, nothing about the digital world is innately familiar.

An alien in disguise

Digital technologies disguise their alien nature in a deliberate disguise of pseudo-physical terminology, iconography and representations that hide the innate unfamiliarity of how they actually work.

These aren’t things

App icons that look like buttons mimic a familiar object-based system of organisation — they look like separate entities.

In reality, they’re all part of the integrated, limitless network of unfathomable code.

It looks familiar

‘Sending’ an email isn’t sending (which involves loss and acquisition) — it’s duplicating and remotely replicating a virtual representation on another machine (or machines).

Everything we do on computers that we think we’re doing, we’re not. They make themselves valuable to us by successfully impersonating the physical world we know.

Physicality is now a thing Our object-focused perception likes to contrast and compare.

The profound differences between virtual interactions and tangible objects helps us to make meaningful and revealing comparisons to understand the hidden characteristics of real things.

Real, substantial thing

Virtual, ephemeral network — not a thing

Objects are like us Physical objects are innately familiar to us because we share a fundamental characteristic with them — humans and objects are both self-contained separate entities. We are both defined by our three-dimensional extremities; we all exist in a physical space.

We learn it as infants

Physicality is the first language we learn — before we learn to speak and think. We stick objects in our mouths (because it’s sensitive) and discover our physical limitation: that we are self-contained, just like them.

Wabi-Sabi

The human-object affinity is enshrined in the Japanese cultural concept of Wabi-Sabi, which sees human frailty reflected in objects — how they wear with age and ultimately deteriorate is a dignified reminder that we’re all mortal.

Indexing and memory Almost from birth we consign every physical and tactile encounter to our memory, creating a (sort of) definitive index of what the world looks and feels like, from which we can make predictions without theory*.

*Intuition makes no attempt at establishing causality, it simply tracks patterns, which makes it immune to the bizarre, chaotic and unpredictable.

Familiarity and prediction Intuitive predictions are fast — a stone thrown at a wall will bounce off and hit the ground* — but don’t need to be accurate.

Physicality is the familiar language that enables us to live in the real world.

* Philosopher, Daniel Dennett calls this ‘the physical stance’

Subconscious semantics

Our fluency in physical language enables us to intuitively extract complex and sophisticated meaning from the objects we encounter.

Scarcity

Transaction, acquisition and loss

Origin and provenance

Cultural association

Intimacy

Ownership

Time and history

Resources and energy

Objects are emotive Tactile sensations speak directly to emotions — how it feels is how it feels.

Our relationship with objects is intimate. We project our feelings onto physical things to know them better when they’re reflected back — it helps us learn about how we feel. Objects root us to the world we live in — we call our possessions our belongings.

Feelings (really) are physical Science is beginning to uncover the physiological connections between emotion and physicality.

“Feelings are what arise as the brain interprets emotions, which are themselves purely physical signals of the body reacting to external stimuli”

Antonio R. Damasio, University of Iowa

A universal language everybody is fluent in

The ability to interpret complex meaning from physical signals isn’t restricted to age, race, background, culture or gender. All human beings share a common evolutionary ancestry. The infantile introduction to objects is one of the very few universal human experiences.

We understand without thinking Conscious thinking (needed to read words and interpret images) is arduous, slow and optional.

Physical linguistics are processed unconsciously — speaking immediately and directly to our intuitive and emotional minds without cognitive intervention.

A hotline to humanity

Physicality transmits signals that speak directly to the atavistic, unconscious processes that actually drive most of our everyday behaviour, decisions and the shape of our lives.

Direct emotional communication

Because tactile and emotional sensations are conflated, the most effective way to articulate emotional meaning is via physical characteristics — in packaging, printed materials, artifacts and environments.

Signals, not messages

We pay attention to signals — even when we ignore messages.

In the digital age… Computers are filling our minds with information, changing our behaviour, reshaping our relationship to each other and the world around us, possibly even re-wiring our brains. The abundance of everything is making attention scarce, demanding us to think faster and think less. They’re making us more intuitive.

If computers are alien, physicality is the innately human, intuitive and familiar language.

If you want to make people feel something…

…give them something they can feel

ARTOMATIC helps companies talk to people through the human language of objects and physicality.

It shapes physical communication strategies, as well as create, develop and manufacture physical communications (books, packaging and artifacts) that make deep, emotional and lasting connections with their audiences and customers.

Make objects tell stories.

Communications made for humans

32-38 Saffron Hill Ground floor London EC1N 8FH

Tim Milne 020 7421 9369 / 07831 219335 tim@artomatic.co.uk @timARTOMATIC

www.artomatic.co.uk