Sorting through our things and throwing away what isn’t needed is a long series of decisions based on our values. The process is almost always a bit painful at first. Overcoming resistance isn’t easy, and I often find myself performing these tasks for myself, certainly, but also for many clients in both the physical and digital worlds.
Getting used to “throwing things out” sharpens our decision-making skills. By keeping useless things, we waste the opportunity to develop these skills. Wouldn’t that be a real shame?
Decluttering is the art of selecting and eliminating everything that is superfluous. Everywhere. In the space we live in, but also in the way we communicate.
Imagine a blank page or an empty screen: every single element added to that page or screen creates a cognitive load for your audience—in other words, it requires significant brain energy to process. For this reason, we must carefully examine all the visual elements we include in our communications.
In general, you need to identify everything that doesn’t add informative value, or doesn’t add enough to justify its presence, and remove it.
Identifying and eliminating this clutter is the key to getting the message across loud and clear.
Cognitive load
You have surely already experienced the weight of cognitive load. Perhaps in a conference room while the speaker was flipping through projected slides and stopped on one that seemed excessively demanding and complicated.
Or even when you were reading a document or a newspaper and a chart caught your attention just long enough to make you think: “This looks interesting, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to get out of it,” and rather than wasting more time deciphering it, you moved on.
In both cases, it is an excessive or seemingly unmotivated cognitive load to deal with.
The human brain has a limited amount of this mental processing power. As storytellers, we want to be smart about how we use our audience’s brainpower.
The previous examples, however, indicate a dysfunctional cognitive load: processing that takes up mental resources but doesn’t help the audience truly understand the information. This is a situation we absolutely want to avoid!
One of the most relevant elements when dealing with visual communication is the effort perceived by our audience and how much our interlocutors think they have to “work” to get the information we want to communicate.
In general, we must focus on minimizing the perceived cognitive load, and this is exactly where decluttering comes into play.
Clutter
One of the culprits that can contribute to creating an excessive or unmotivated cognitive load is clutter. These are visual elements that take up space but do not increase the understanding of the message.
There is a simple reason why we should aim to reduce clutter: because it makes our communications appear more complicated than necessary and can create a sub-optimal, or worse, uncomfortable experience for our audience.
In these cases, we risk people deciding not to take the time necessary to understand what we are communicating, and at that point, we have lost our ability to communicate with them.
A visual journey through Bach’s Art of Fugue: from complexity to synthesis
I’ve always been a champion of flights of fancy, and today, while thinking about complexity and order in vision and space, it occurred to me to involve the sense of hearing as well. An example of order within complexity is certainly the music of Bach, a sphere containing infinite interconnected forms. Bach is extremely aware of space, and his music has the ability to relocate and distribute itself effortlessly in any place.
In this regard, I recently happened to experiment with the use of pure geometric shapes to visualize some rhetorical figures used in the composition of each piece of Bach’s Art of Fugue. According to the vision of pianist Stefano Greco, this work was built using 12 rhetorical figures cited by Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia Universalis of 1650.
The goal of the visualizations was to represent the main theme for each composition (red dot) and how Bach develops it (lines). In this process, decluttering was fundamental to remove every superfluous form and give an immediate sense of the music’s development.
For the curious, the project J.S Bach | The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst Der Fuga, BWV 1080) | Stefano Greco piano can be heard and viewed here:
https://apple.co/3rhZkwM Apple Music
https://spoti.fi/3EHbhPK Spotify
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