In 2003, the knowledge visualization professional Edward Tufte traced that 12 months’s Columbia catastrophe—by which seven astronauts died when their shuttle disintegrated—to a chunk of software program. It was PowerPoint, he argued, that prevented folks at NASA from understanding the gravity of the dangers dealing with the shuttle. PowerPoint all however 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 risks obtained buried on the backside of a multilevel hierarchy of bullet factors beneath an even bigger, sunnier title. If solely the knowledge had been delivered in a correct technical report, Tufte implied, the astronauts would possibly nonetheless be alive.

Twenty years later, there’s a brand new workplace software conserving us from absolutely expressing and processing necessary info: the digital whiteboard. These boards are huge canvases on which you’ll add and drag round just about limitless portions of textual content, photographs, tables, diagrams, emoji, and shapes. In their typical state, they’re principally lined with sticky notes on which individuals have written a phrase or three. What the phrases signify in context can rapidly change into arduous to recollect, however that’s OK. Like books used as decorations, they get their worth from the truth that they signify one thing.

Digital whiteboards owe their aesthetic and its underpinning logic to design pondering, an ideology that has gathered steam in every kind of establishments over the previous 20 years. Design pondering is like self-help for organizations trying to make adjustments. Its codified steps—empathize, outline, ideate, prototype, take a look at—promise radical transformation. In the brainstorming classes which have come to outline it, folks use Post-its to scribble concepts and stick them to a standard floor the place everybody can see and rearrange them. This observe is meant to make conferences extra collaborative, priming members to think about quite a lot of choices earlier than converging on the most effective one. But because the MIT Technology Review described the expertise of a former Google designer in a latest article about rising criticisms of design pondering, “for all the excitement and Post-its they generated,” the classes he led “didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”

Instead, photographs of such classes turned merchandise themselves. Photographs of Post-its affixed to whiteboards appeared everywhere—displays, articles, case research—as alerts that innovation had occurred. After spending 5 weeks as a participant-observer at a Post-it–laden “innovation workshop” in 2014, the anthropologist Eitan Wilf concluded that Post-its had change into key to reproducing the “conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like.” He additional noticed that the fragmented concepts folks wrote on them had a fuzzy relationship to the workshop’s objective of bettering a web site.

By the time Wilf was making these observations in a Midtown Manhattan workplace constructing, sticky notes had already expanded their vary into the ether. The first digital whiteboards have been bodily objects, typically utilized in faculties, whose screens you may contact along with your arms or a stylus. Beginning across the late aughts, a succession of firms made on-line variations. While some are designed for training, many are organized round “online sticky note collaboration,” as one of many first of those firms described its product. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when folks may now not brainstorm in particular person, digital whiteboard use grew rapidly. Miro went from having 5 million customers in spring 2020 to 50 million in spring 2023, together with staff at 99 of the Fortune 100. Microsoft relaunched its Whiteboard in 2021. A 12 months later, Adobe introduced plans to purchase Figma for $20 billion, partly to acquire the corporate’s whiteboard, FigJam. And Apple introduced its Freeform app, which now comes commonplace on iPhones and Macs.

These boards—typically gentle grey and overlaid with a delicate grid—are helpful for visible or spatial duties, like arranging photographs or making a diagram. But whereas they’re typically marketed for “visual collaboration,” it’s writing—on sticky notes—that occupies a lot of their customers’ time. Online, sticky notes have shed the bodily limitations that destined them to short-term use earlier than winding up within the workplace trash. By giving them a spot to persist indefinitely, the digital whiteboard has turned Post-it collages into absolutely fledged paperwork. Whiteboards now supply numerous templates for the forms of written information supposed to durably convey complicated ideas. Many of those templates—corresponding to these you’ll find on Miro for a brief, a charter, a research repository, or meeting notes—make heavy use of sticky notes. Even people who don’t use them have a tendency to attract on their iconography, that includes colourful, text-sprinkled blocks.