Rise of the R-mode

As you may have felt from looking at the characteristics of L-mode and R-mode, we have a bit of cultural bias toward L-mode thinking and related activities, and we might tend to dismiss R-mode thinking as being the province of lesser mortals. R-mode seems like a quaint leftover, a vestigial appendage from some previous age when people believed the world was flat and thunder was the result of unseen gods at war.

And indeed, it was the strengths of L-mode that differentiated humankind from common beasts; it brought humanity out of the forests and jungles and into villages and towns, out of the fields and into the factories, finally to land behind a desk and a copy of Microsoft Word.

But although the analytical and verbal capabilities of L-mode thinking have brought us this far, we’ve lost some key capabilities from an overreliance on L-mode at the expense of R-mode. To progress, in order to move on to the next revolution in human development, we need to learn to reintegrate our largely neglected R-mode processing with L-mode.

L-mode is necessary but not sufficient.

Now before you toss the book down in disgust, afraid I might ask you to get in touch with your inner child or some other lame, weenie-sounding thing, let me tell you about Robert A. Lutz.

Mr. Lutz is a former Marine and pilot. The picture of him in the New York Times shows a no-nonsense, square-jawed fellow with a crew cut. As I write this, he’s the chairman of General Motors North America. Pretty serious business.

And yet, when interviewed in the Times about the future direction of GM under his leadership, Mr. Lutz was quoted as saying, “It’s more right brain…I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”

He’s not talking about engineering or features. Everyone has those pop-up cup holders and iPod connectors these days. Instead, he’s talking about aesthetics.

But this is not some artist holed up in a loft or researcher espousing some crackpot theory. This is the chairman of the third-largest corporation in America.^[39] Lutz thinks this focus on aesthetics is the right course of action at this point in history.

Author Dan Pink agrees. In his popular book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age [Pin05], Dan makes the case that economic and societal forces have taken us to the point where these artistic, aesthetic, R-mode attributes aren’t a neat luxury for Martha Stewart types who want to craft their own greeting cards; instead, they are positively required for plain old, mainstream business.

Design Trumps Features

For example, consider the effects of commoditization. Suppose you are a large retailer, and you need to sell some common item, such as a toilet brush. You can’t compete on price; anyone can get toilet brushes made in China for fractions of a cent. So, how do you differentiate your product?

Commoditization means you compete on aesthetics.

Well, giant retailer Target decided to address this problem by featuring toilet brushes created by the famous designer and architect Michael Graves. Since you can’t compete on price, you have to compete on aesthetics.

Beyond toilet brushes, look at something closer to our hearts and ears: the iPod. Is the market-leading iPod feature-for-feature better than any alternative? Or is it just better designed and more aesthetically pleasing?

Start with the package itself. The iPod package isn’t very verbose; it says how many songs and videos it will hold. And it has a nice picture. It’s stark but elegant.

By comparison, there’s a parody floating around on YouTube that shows what the iPod would look like if Microsoft had designed it. The parody is pretty brutal—the box is far from simple. It’s packed with a dense assortment of text, branding, icons, disclaimers, and so on.

The box is replete with a multipage foldout of legal disclaimers, third-party endorsements, and, in big print, the fact that it’s a 30GB model* (complete with an asterisk explaining that a gigabyte ain’t exactly a billion bytes, your mileage will vary, and you don’t actually get all that space anyway. I think it also mentions that you’ll burn in eternal torment if you rip your own MP3s, but I digress…).

That’s an important point: the iPod says how many songs it holds.

The Microsoft-flavored parody (and many real competing devices) say how many gigabytes it will hold. Consumers don’t care about gigabytes; only we geeks do. Real people want to know how many songs it will hold or how many photos or videos.^[40]

It’s about the songs, not gigabytes.

The iPod is well-designed and attractive, from the packaging to the user interface. And as it turns out, that’s not just marketing sugarcoating. Attractive things actually do work better.

Attractive Works Better

Several studies^[41][42][43] have conclusively shown that attractive user interfaces are easier to use than unattractive (or to use the scientific term, ugly) interfaces.

Researchers in Japan did a study of a bank’s ATM interfaces; subjects found the aesthetically pleasing button layouts much easier to use than the ugly ones, even though the functionality and workflow was the same.

Thinking that maybe there was a cultural bias at work, researchers repeated the experiment in Israel. The results were even stronger, even in a completely different culture. But how could this be? Aesthetic considerations are merely an emotional response. That couldn’t possibly affect cognitive processing. Could it?

Yes, it can. In fact, additional studies^[44] have shown exactly that: positive emotions are essential to learning and creative thinking. Being “happy” broadens your thought processes and brings more of the brain’s hardware online.

Even corporate logos can affect your cognition. One study at Duke University^[45] showed that brief exposure to the Apple logo made people more creative. Once you’re primed with a stereotypical image of some sort, your behavior becomes influenced according to those behaviors you associate with the stereotype. In this case, the Apple logo, which many associate with nonconformity, innovation, and creativity, influences you to be creative and innovate.

The converse has been well-established. When you are fearful or angry—filled with negative emotions—your brain starts shutting down extra resources in preparation for the inevitable fight or flight (we’ll look at that side of the reaction in ​Pressure Kills Cognition​). For that matter, things in the environment that are obviously broken can create havoc as well. We’ve seen the Broken Windows theory (see The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master [HT00]) in action for years. Known problems (such as bugs in code, bad process in an organization, poor interfaces, or lame management) that are left uncorrected have a debilitating, viral effect that ends up causing even more damage.

Aesthetics make a difference, whether it’s in a user interface, the layout of your code and comments, the choices of variable names, the arrangement of your desktop, or whatever.

But we’re slipping into some ill-defined waters here; what makes something “attractive” or not? How do you design something to be beautiful? What does that even mean?

One of the foremost building architects of the twentieth century, Louis Kahn, offers a useful explanation of the relationship between beauty and design: “Design is not making beauty; beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”

Kahn explains that beauty emerges from selection. That is, art comes not so much from the act of creation itself but rather from selecting among a near infinite supply of choices.

Beauty emerges from selection.

The musician has a near-infinite palette combining different instruments, rhythms, scale modes, tempo, and the hard-to-define but easy-to-sense “groove.” The painter starts with some 24 million distinguishable colors to choose from. The writer has the full breadth of the Oxford English Dictionary (all 20 volumes; some 300,000 main entries) from which to select the perfect word.

Creativity comes from the selection and assembly of just the right components in just the right presentation to create the work. And selection—knowing what to select and in what context—comes from pattern matching, and that’s a topic to which we’ll keep returning.