In 2003, the info visualization knowledgeable Edward Tufte traced that yr’s Columbia catastrophe—by which seven astronauts died when their shuttle disintegrated—to a bit of software program. It was PowerPoint, he argued, that prevented individuals at NASA from understanding the gravity of the dangers going through the shuttle. PowerPoint all however pressured “breaking apart narratives and information into … minimal fragments,” “a preoccupation with format not content material,” and “a smirky commercialism that turns data right into a gross sales pitch.” Severe risks acquired buried on the backside of a multilevel hierarchy of bullet factors below a much bigger, sunnier title. If solely the knowledge had been delivered in a correct technical report, Tufte implied, the astronauts may nonetheless be alive.
Twenty years later, there’s a brand new workplace instrument conserving us from absolutely expressing and processing essential data: the digital whiteboard. These boards are huge canvases on which you’ll be able to add and drag round just about limitless portions of textual content, photos, tables, diagrams, emoji, and shapes. Of their typical state, they’re principally lined with sticky notes on which individuals have written a phrase or three. What the phrases signify in context can shortly change into arduous to recollect, however that’s OK. Like books used as decorations, they get their worth from the truth that they signify one thing.
Digital whiteboards owe their aesthetic and its underpinning logic to design pondering, an ideology that has gathered steam in all types of establishments over the previous 20 years. Design pondering is like self-help for organizations trying to make modifications. Its codified steps—empathize, outline, ideate, prototype, take a look at—promise radical transformation. Within the brainstorming classes which have come to outline it, individuals use Put up-its to scribble concepts and stick them to a standard floor the place everybody can see and rearrange them. This follow is meant to make conferences extra collaborative, priming individuals to think about a wide range of choices earlier than converging on the perfect one. However because the MIT Expertise Evaluate described the expertise of a former Google designer in a current article about rising criticisms of design pondering, “for all the thrill and Put up-its they generated,” the classes he led “didn’t often result in constructed merchandise or, actually, options of any form.”
As a substitute, photos of such classes turned merchandise themselves. Images of Put up-its affixed to whiteboards appeared in every single place—displays, articles, case research—as indicators that innovation had occurred. After spending 5 weeks as a participant-observer at a Put up-it–laden “innovation workshop” in 2014, the anthropologist Eitan Wilf concluded that Put up-its had change into key to reproducing the “typical visible templates of what a sound perception ought to seem like.” He additional noticed that the fragmented concepts individuals wrote on them had a fuzzy relationship to the workshop’s objective of enhancing a web site.
By the point Wilf was making these observations in a Midtown Manhattan workplace constructing, sticky notes had already expanded their vary into the ether. The primary digital whiteboards had been bodily objects, usually utilized in faculties, whose screens you could possibly contact along with your fingers or a stylus. Starting across the late aughts, a succession of corporations made on-line variations. Whereas some are designed for schooling, many are organized round “on-line sticky be aware collaboration,” as one of many first of those corporations described its product. Through the Covid-19 pandemic, when individuals may not brainstorm in individual, digital whiteboard use grew quickly. Miro went from having 5 million customers in spring 2020 to 50 million in spring 2023, together with employees at 99 of the Fortune 100. Microsoft relaunched its Whiteboard in 2021. A yr later, Adobe introduced plans to purchase Figma for $20 billion, partly to accumulate the corporate’s whiteboard, FigJam. And Apple launched its Freeform app, which now comes commonplace on iPhones and Macs.
These boards—usually gentle grey and overlaid with a refined grid—are helpful for visible or spatial duties, like arranging photos or making a diagram. However whereas they’re usually marketed for “visible collaboration,” it’s writing—on sticky notes—that occupies a lot of their customers’ time. On-line, sticky notes have shed the bodily limitations that destined them to short-term use earlier than winding up within the workplace trash. By giving them a spot to persist indefinitely, the digital whiteboard has turned Put up-it collages into absolutely fledged paperwork. Whiteboards now supply numerous templates for the sorts of written data supposed to durably convey complicated ideas. Many of those templates—corresponding to these you will discover on Miro for a quick, a constitution, a analysis repository, or assembly notes—make heavy use of sticky notes. Even people who don’t use them have a tendency to attract on their iconography, that includes colourful, text-sprinkled blocks.