Presentation Zen [35]
If you are going to get up in front of a lot of people and say that the design of your strategy matters and that the design of your integrated software matters, then at the very least the visuals you use—right here and right now, at this moment in time with this particular audience—also need to be the result of thoughtful design, not hurried decoration.
Kanso, Shizen, Shibumi
Zen itself is not concerned with judging this design to be “good” or that design to be “bad.” Still, we can look to some of the concepts in the Zen aesthetic to help us improve our own visuals with an eye toward simplicity.
Kanso (Simplicity)
A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept, beauty and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer, and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, “Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.” When you examine your visuals, then, can you say that you are getting the maximum impact with a minimum of graphic elements, for example? When you take a look at Jobs’s slides and Gates’s slides, how do they compare for kanso?
Shizen (Naturalness)
The aesthetic concept of naturalness or shizen “prohibits the use of elaborate designs and over refinement,” according to Dr. Kawana. Restraint is a beautiful thing. Talented jazz musicians, for example, know never to overplay but instead to be forever mindful of the other musicians and find their own space within the music and within the moment they are sharing. Graphic designers show restraint by including only what is necessary to communicate the particular message for the particular audience. Restraint is hard. Complication and elaboration are easy… and are common. The suggestive mode of expression is a key Zen aesthetic. Dr. Kawana, commenting on the design of traditional Japanese gardens, says: “The designer must adhere to the concept of miegakure since Japanese believe that in expressing the whole the interest of the viewer is lost.”
Shibumi (Elegance)
Shibumi is a principle that can be applied to many aspects of life. Concerning visual communication and graphic design, shibumi represents elegant simplicity and articulate brevity, an understated elegance. In Wabi-Sabi Style, (Gibbs Smith Publishers), authors James and Sandra Crowley comment on the Japanese deep appreciation of beauty in this sense:
“Their (Japanese) conceptualization relegates elaborate ornamentation and vivid color usage to the bottom of the taste levels… excess requires no real thought or creativity. The highest level of taste moves beyond the usage of brilliant colors and heavy ornamentation to a simple and subdued refinement that is the beauty of shibumi, which represents the ultimate in good taste through conscious reserve. This is the original ‘less is more’ concept. Less color—subdued and elegant usage of color, less clutter…”
In the world of slide presentations, you do not always need to visually spell everything out. You do not need to pound every detail into the head of each member of your audience either visually or verbally. Instead, the combination of your words, along with the visual images you project, should motivate the viewer and arouse his imagination, helping him to empathize with your idea and visualize your idea far beyond what is visible in the ephemeral PowerPoint slide before him. The Zen aesthetic values include (but are not limited to):
• Simplicity
• Subtlety
• Elegance
• Suggestive rather than the descriptive or obvious
• Naturalness (i.e., nothing artificial or forced),
• Empty space (or negative space)
• Stillness, Tranquility
• Eliminating the nonessential
All of these principles can be applied to slide design, Web design, and so on.
Wabi-Sabi Simplicity
I first learned of wabi-sabi while studying sado (Japanese tea ceremony) many years ago in the Shimokita Hanto of Aomori, a rural part of northern Japan—a perfect place to experience traditional Japanese values and concepts. While studying sado, I began to appreciate the