In 2003, the data visualization expert Edward Tufte traced that year’s Columbia disaster—in which seven astronauts died when their shuttle disintegrated—to a piece of software. It was PowerPoint, he argued, that prevented people at NASA from understanding the gravity of the risks facing the shuttle. PowerPoint all but forced “breaking up narratives and data into … minimal fragments,” “a preoccupation with format not content,” and “a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch.” Serious dangers got buried at the bottom of a multilevel hierarchy of bullet points under a bigger, sunnier title. If only the information had been delivered in a proper technical report, Tufte implied, the astronauts might still be alive.
Twenty years later, there’s a new office tool keeping us from fully expressing and processing important information: the digital whiteboard. These boards are vast canvases on which you can add and drag around virtually limitless quantities of text, images, tables, diagrams, emoji, and shapes. In their typical state, they are mostly covered with sticky notes on which people have written a word or three. What the words signify in context can quickly become hard to remember, but that’s OK. Like books used as decorations, they get their value from the fact that they signify something.
Digital whiteboards owe their aesthetic and its underpinning logic to design thinking, an ideology that has gathered steam in all kinds of institutions over the past two decades. Design thinking is like self-help for organizations looking to make changes. Its codified steps—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test—promise radical transformation. In the brainstorming sessions that have come to define it, people use Post-its to scribble ideas and stick them to a common surface where everyone can see and rearrange them. This practice is supposed to make meetings more collaborative, priming participants to consider a variety of options before converging on the best one. But as the MIT Technology Review described the experience of a former Google designer in a recent article about growing criticisms of design thinking, “for all the excitement and Post-its they generated,” the sessions he led “didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”
Instead, images of such sessions became products themselves. Photographs of Post-its affixed to whiteboards appeared everywhere—presentations, articles, case studies—as signals that innovation had occurred. After spending five weeks as a partici
