2026
Essay

Oh, what doesn’t being suspended in the lower stratosphere do to our body and mind? Among other things, it quiets the ‘busy’ part of the consciousness by trapping it in an awfully unproductive environment and brings out the ‘inefficient thoughts’ to the surface. In my case, this is one of the few best settings for writing. So here I am, along with my dearest friend, the sky, and in my hands I hold an Air France safety card. Wordless. Immaculate. And entirely incomprehensible.

Now, to the subject.

Today we can observe an interesting and equally frightful phenomenon, which seems to indicate that any given explanation, a tad more complex than an Ikea instruction sheet, horrifies the majority of our fellow humans.

A paragraph puts one’s peace at risk, and two pages are, surely, a provocation for the bigger part of the remaining brave populace.

Words – oh, what a demanding, unfriendly, elitist tool you’ve become.

How we treat information transfer in the 2020s is a peculiar topic in and of itself, considering the vast scope of possible subjects involved in this crime against human cognitive development. To boot, this has reared its ugly head in my work and in daily conversations more often than I’d like. Thus I’d like to introduce two examples that sit before my eyes right now: a recent altercation with a client, and this entirely wordless Air France safety card that I am currently glaring at in utter disbelief.

Where am I coming from with this? Or, better, where shall we begin?

The fact that attention spans of the general population have plummeted in recent years is a sad, but nonetheless a given, fact. It is also true that this has had a significant impact on our culture and behaviour – in society and academia alike, despite all the coming and passing trends of performative intellectualism. Thus, information has to come already digested, ready to be swallowed, easy to comprehend and in no way can it – may gods forgive us – obstruct the productivity of either invented job descriptions or the evening doom scrolling. This is the underlying motive, one of the reasons, why the 21st century can be easily called our return to the proverbial Lascaux cave – the era where images are the language.

Now, none of us woke up on the 1st of January 2000 and realised this sudden change. Many complex historical events, elements and characters have played a role in the build up of this matter. Already in ‘92, this issue was sensed in the air, when W.J.T.Mitchell identified this as ‘pictorial turn’ – a cultural reorientation towards images as the default carrier of meaning. And the trouble is, that once an image becomes the default, text starts to feel like a failure of design rather than a tool with its own strengths and weaknesses.

A ‘failure of design’ I say, and remember all the conversations with different clients and colleagues over the years past. Communication between humans is such a complex web of misunderstandings, alignments and more, that perhaps even this article means nothing and is a futile waste of my time on this flight. Some believe in texts, some believe in images, and in this black and white worldview very few people sacrifice themselves to the nuances in between. So, is there a point in this text? Am I simply being categorical and… wrong?

Perhaps. But still, I don’t like the smell of it all.

As I write this passage, I look again at the safety card in front of me: clean illustrations, simplified bodies, sequential gestures, zero language. No “if”. No “unless”. No “in this case”. Just look at the picture and know what to do.

In an emergency.

And yes, I understand why pictograms exist. We live in multilingual spaces. People panic. Clarity matters. But the broader movement is hard to ignore: the assumption that reading itself is too much to ask. Needless to say, I am currently calm and yet still – I have more questions about things and actions depicted on this card, then I have clear directions. But you know what one of my clients would say? ‘Images are easier to understand’. And they would probably struggle to survive an emergency situation with such an instruction on their hands.

I was faced with this same issue last year, during my work on an urban signage project that I won’t name for confidentiality reasons. ‘For context’ as I like to say, the scope of the project was large: heritage zones, architectural constraints, municipal requirements, consultants, departments, committees. The work itself wasn’t the issue. The human factor, however, was special.

One short example from it has been particularly telling. Part of the deliverables was a document for shop owners; clear instructions for how to mount and implement signage depending on where they were and what their façade allowed. Material compliance. Brand implementation. Heritage awareness. Architectural logic. Typography. Colour. Scale. Not poetry nor theory – but a necessary precise guidance so people could do the job without endless back-and-forth. A file, a simple tool for people who do not hold degrees in design and architecture.

Thus, a sequential, clear document was produced. With the basic assumption that the reader is an adult running a business.

And then came the call: nearly all text was to be removed. Everything was to be explained exclusively through visuals.

“They have to look at an image and know what to do without reading.”

Need I really spell out how problematic that is?

A regulatory document is not an infographic. It has conditions and exceptions. It has edge cases. It has consequences. Images are brilliant at showing proportion, placement, contrast, but what they are not brilliant at – is expressing conditional logic. They flatten nuance into suggestion and pave a wide clear road to misinterpretation.

If we must, let’s consider a historical reminder of how hard people have worked to make pictorial systems legible, look at Otto Neurath’s Isotype. It was built as a method of visual education, but even Neurath framed it as a “helping language”, not a replacement for a verbal one. That distinction matters, as the problem isn’t pictograms – it’s pictograms as an ideology.

And further evidence bears this out. While discussing this topic, a friend and colleague of mine recommended me a separate chapter from the published proceedings of the 1987 conference Urbano visuale / Oltre l’identità del ‘pubblico’, written in the context of a 1986 FAO consultancy mission to Cape Verde, and I find its conclusions striking in the context of the argument I’m making here. The author was sent to study the feasibility of a graphic production centre for agricultural communication, working with a largely illiterate rural population. The assumption going in was straightforward: if people can’t read, you communicate through images. What he found – was rather more uncomfortable but also predictable to anthropologists: coming from different cultural/social contexts, people misread perspectives from which understanding of language is expected. They didn’t recognise sequential time across a three-panel strip, interpreted a cross-section of soil as abstraction, and objects drawn in standard pictographic conventions – the kind we consider self-evident – were simply not recognised. Which, again, supports the impossibility of a universal pictorial communication, in the context of varying cultural and societal environments. This is why the belief that images are universally legible is empirically wrong. Visual literacy is learned and is also cultural. Sometimes, in certain circumstances, it is absent even. This is a great example of how image doesn’t bypass the need for a shared language, but puts a bandaid on a gunshot wound.

Which brings me back to the project I mentioned earlier. What unsettled me most was the paternalism underneath that request and others like it. The quiet belief that asking a shop owner to read a few pages of structured guidance is unreasonable, that clarity means deleting language rather than refining it, that adults must be protected from paragraphs. Like children.

The concept implied is as old as you would like to push it, my personal favourite reference to it is in Dostoyevsky’s writings. But anti-intellectualism is a word first introduced by Hofstadter who albeit wrote about it in a different context. The basic premise is nonetheless recognisable – a suspicion of intellect, a disdain for complexity, an urge to treat thinking as pretension. In design, it often arrives wearing a friendly cap that says ‘user-friendly’.


And of course this doesn’t stay inside design. Nicholas Carr’s argument in The Shallows is essentially that the internet’s incentives nudge us towards skimming, rapid task-switching, and fragmented attention – habits that make sustained reading feel harder over time. Maryanne Wolf, then, makes a related point from the neuroscience side: deep reading isn’t just a cosy hobby, it’s a learned cognitive mode tied to critical thinking, reflection, and empathy – and it can atrophy if we stop practising it.

So when a client says ‘they must know without reading’, I don’t just hear a project note, I hear an individual cultural preference hardening into a worldview: remove the requirement to think, remove friction and depth.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for verbosity. I’m not romanticising badly written documents. And yes, people skim and some people struggle. I build stupid-proofing into projects where it’s genuinely needed, which is just a responsible practice. But there is a difference between accommodating reality and institutionalising the lowest possible expectation of the human brain.

Likewise, the problem isn’t images. I love images. I work with images. The problem is the belief that images are sufficient for everything – that a glance can replace understanding, that recognition can replace comprehension and that text is a design failure.

Nobody reads, we say.

But perhaps we’ve simply stopped expecting them to – and then we act surprised when they don’t. (although some people have no problem consuming 500 pages of fairy smut, so length isn’t the issue here, no pun intended)

And that, quite so, is the more disturbing conclusion. Not that people can’t read. Not that images are evil. But that somewhere along the way, an assumption became a policy, a policy became a culture, and a culture became a built environment – one where the paragraph is a design flaw and the sentence is an imposition.

We didn’t arrive here through malice. We arrived here through convenience and natural lazyness, dressed up as empathy.

And I think about that safety card still sitting ‘in the seat pocket in front of you’. Clean. Confident. Wordless. Telling you exactly what to do – right up until the moment the situation becomes complicated. Until the “unless”. Until the “except when”. Until reality, as it tends to do, refuses to be a diagram.

That’s where images leave you. Prepared for the expected emergency. The one that looks exactly like the picture.

As for the rest, apparently, you’re on your own.


Image to the left: Images from Johann Zahn’s Oculus Artificialis (1685)