The Quiet Power of Small Details: Lessons from ‘The Art of Noticing’

This page has interactive footnotes: Hover over pink words to get a little more information. Like this!

On a recent afternoon browsing the shelves of The Strand bookstore in the East Village, I picked up Rob Walker’s “The Art of Noticing” on a whim. What began as a casual purchase evolved into a more serious contemplation on how we perceive our world as humans, as consumers, and even as marketers.

Paying more attention to the world around us can improve our well-being and our relationships. It can help us grow to appreciate the wonder in our surroundings—the subtle or even fleeting details that can help us become better thinkers, learners, and communicators.

But in becoming deeper observers—in breaking from routine thinking—we do ultimately need to grapple with uncomfortable questions about our social structures. To truly notice is to recognize both the vibrance of things as well as their blemishes. That’s something I’d like to dig into, grounded in “The Art of Noticing” but weaving in other notes on theory.

The Discomfort of Observation

“Google Maps and its competitors are designed to ease your passage through the world,” Walker writes, “to guide you turn by turn, step by step, from wherever you are to wherever you say you want to be. As somebody from Google once put it: ‘No human ever has to feel lost again’” (112).

This promise of perpetual orientation may seem like pure benefit, but Walker invites us to consider what we sacrifice for this convenience. There are practical reasons to want to avoid getting lost, certainly—but perhaps our aversion runs deeper. Perhaps it’s because on some level we also understand that when we become lost, we are likelier to encounter spaces that challenge our sense of order and purpose: abandoned buildings, forgotten corners, places in transition or decline. What does it mean to explore a crumbling environment, like a closed hospital or a shuttered business—especially when almost every other sort of architecture we encounter is actively maintained, preserved, and promoted?

In our navigation-optimized world, we’re rarely guided to these uncomfortable reminders of transience and decay, despite their overwhelming presence. Why? These spaces speak to impermanence, to the fragility of human endeavors, and maybe even to our own mortality in ways we often avoid head-on.

In a culture committed to cognitive dissonance like this, noticing what’s actually there—the details we’re often directed away from—thus becomes a radical act.

Noticing As Resistance

I’d like to chew on a quick hypothetical offered by Walker in his book. As an example he asks us to consider what we are asking people to do when the college campus—one of the most sanctified places on the planet, though in theory also a place for creating better ‘noticers’ in the world—features a protest. He paints a picture for our mind’s eye, asking us to imagine what we and others are asked (forced?) to feel and think about if someone were to place a bright pink placard—writ full of negative but verifiable facts—against the austere gray of a stone statue of a revered historical figure who engaged in morally troubling acts.

This is a hard question, and Walker doesn’t tease out how there are so many different kinds of people on a college campus that it’s almost impossible to predict what the presence of this intervention would do to the worldview of someone who encountered it. The someone could be a student, a professor, a visiting relative, an applicant high schooler, a citizen from the local town, a worker, even a diplomat—and that's to say nothing of the outlandishly higher-than-normal intersectional diversity found on your average college campus compared to just about anywhere except downtown in a major city.

But in theory we can say that, in that moment, what the placard—or more precisely, the person who put it there—is asking observers to do is hold two contradictory truths simultaneously: the celebrated legacy and the documented harm, the institutional reverence and the historical violence. It’s a demand for intellectual and moral reconciliation. Which is uncomfortable, and radical, and noticing.

This is not just a random hypothetical. I’ve witnessed similar interventions at my alma mater Dartmouth, an institution “originally conceived as a missionary school for Native Americans” that sits “on the ancestral and unceded homelands of the Abenaki people, the People of the Dawn Land.” Dartmouth now educates precisely the kind of inquisitive minds who feel ethically bound to interrogate this complex legacy, confronting the institution’s origins through powerful acts of noticing and naming. The juxtaposition forces a cognitive dissonance that many would prefer to avoid, a reckoning with history that can be deeply unsettling.

The Wonder of Infrathin

Not that it’s always bad stuff we need to reckon with. Obviously, there’s good for us to experience, too! The physical world we interact with using our (more than five) senses vibrates with subtle things—ineffabilities, precious qualia—that we detect barely but profoundly, that we can extract joy and satisfaction from if we are observant. Plastic arts master Marcel Duchamp coined a word to describe these things we notice without noticing, sense beyond sensing: infrathin.

The tendrils of infrathin (or “inframince,” in Duchamp’s French) are everywhere. It’s the warmth of a recently vacated seat; the slight transparency of paper when held up to the light; the condensation that forms and quickly disappears when breathing on a polished surface.

At work it’s the swoosh sound of an email being sent. At not-work—in nature—it’s the sounds made by water as it interacts with the environment: “From burbles to whooshes to clatters with stones, the sounds can vary from gentle to nearly violent,” writes Susan Olcott, director for Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, for her column Intertidal. “In the moments of quiet, a careful observer can notice that [water] isn’t really quiet at all.”

These moments exist at the edge of perception—whisper-thin but meaningful. They matter because they enrich our experience of the world, orienting and informing us about our surroundings in ways we rarely acknowledge. Duchamp’s infrathin creates a complex web of little things we love, which grounds us in reality by ironically evoking some of the biggest feelings.

Infrathin in the Marketplace

These little-but-big experiences—if I may riff a bit (these are my own opinions and not those of the author)—are what marketers seek to capture and commodify. We understand that purchasing decisions are driven not just by rational considerations but also by the subtle moments of special sensation that products can unlock. Companies therefore work with great precision to commercialize and even engineer those moments.

That je-ne-sais-qualia could be the distinctive “pop-hiss” we hear when opening a Coca-Cola bottle, which occurs naturally thanks to carbonation but Coke has made a huge part of its brand identity. It might be the exact shade of Tiffany Blue that signals luxury even from a distance; the specific keyboard click feedback on Apple devices, calibrated to feel premium and responsive. The shimmering wrapped boxes under the Christmas tree, often more mesmerizing than the gifts they contain.

Audially, it could be the unique sound signature of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which the company once tried to trademark. Or the ethereal boot sequence of the original PlayStation, which Sony so well understood had etched itself into the neural pathways of a generation (Millennials) that it briefly made the PlayStation 5, nearly three decades later, use it too.

The Paradox of Marketing

The tension, however, is that marketing exists in a paradoxical relationship with infrathin: both cultivating wonder and subverting it.

Consider the cigarette, a provocative product whose cultural dominance has faded with time. The natural desire people have to look cool and fit in certainly contributed to its rise to prominence in the mid-century West. But its appeal as a cultural artifact also likely endured because of something more nuanced: marketing that helped consumers to feel-think about the product more than think-think; helped them to connect smoking with the joyful ephemera of detected infrathin.

A cigarette offers multiple moments for Duchamp’s special stuff: the soft crackle of tobacco as it first ignites; the color shift of smoke as it ages in the air, going from dense white to transparent blue-gray; the tactile sensation of paper against lips, which differs from brand to brand. Perhaps even the out-of-body imagination of oneself as the protagonist in a film noir scene—cupping a precious flame against the wind, the cigarette’s glow puncturing the darkness with a diamond of orange light.

These sensations combine for a powerful experience, even though (like the smoke itself) they are here and gone. But the history of marketing for this product, I think, undermined those very sensations through artifice: what I’m going to call “anti-infrathin.”

Anti-Infrathin: The Floating Signifier

To use a famous example, it was brand-craft at its most darkly artistic for Lucky Strike to celebrate the fact its cigarettes had “toasted” leaves. Why? Reality was almost all cigarettes toasted their leaves, and the Lucky Strike “process did not differ widely from [the] methods of other manufacturers.” This made “the meaning of the message elastic”—possible to mean anything it needed to mean in a given ad spot. Sometimes the toasting meant better taste; other times, less throat irritation. Surely, many inferred the toasting must’ve meant the product was somehow healthier or more pure or more carefully and specially prepared.

While this ambiguity was strategic (smart, even) from a marketing standpoint, in semiotics it represents what Claude Lévi-Strauss termed a “floating signifier”—a concept later expanded by Roland Barthes to describe elements in modern myth-making that gain utility precisely because their meaning can shift with context. These floating signifiers, particularly potent in advertising (and politics), open the door for manipulation and lack of accountability by institutions with the power to influence culture.

That’s not to detract from the skill involved in building a campaign so influential it would become a plot point in the acclaimed Mad Men several generations later. A creative team did its job: observed a mundane fact, inhabited the mind of its market, perceived the potential of the ordinary to become special, and then planted that specialness in the collective soil.

The issue is while this is impressive, it reveals a contradiction at the heart of certain kinds of marketing. If “It’s toasted!” can mean everything, does it mean anything at all? When nicotine addiction takes hold, isn’t it possible that the subtle sensory pleasures that can make a thing special and full of infrathin (the crackling tobacco, the shifting color of smoke) fall away—becoming routine biological necessities rather than moments of wonder or discovery? And isn’t the very notion of special experience threatened by mass-production—which seeks to standardize the consumed experience?

Noticing in a Mediated World

Walker’s “The Art of Noticing” ultimately invites us to consider a profound question: What does it mean to truly see the world around us? In an age of constant digital mediation—where algorithms guide our attention and marketing shapes our perceptions—genuine noticing becomes both more difficult and more essential.

The concept of infrathin reminds us that life’s richness often exists in the smallest details—the warmth of a recently vacated seat, the distinctive sound of water meeting stone, the fleeting condensation of breath on glass. These barely perceptible moments ground us in reality and connect us to something larger than ourselves. They are, in many ways, the texture of authentic human experience.

Yet as we’ve seen, the very industries tasked with capturing our attention often operate in that delicate space between revealing and concealing—highlighting certain infrathin moments while obscuring others. The brand strategist who celebrates the “toasted” tobacco leaves with floating signifiers performs a sleight of hand with our perception, directing our gaze toward manufactured wonder and away from uncomfortable realities.

Perhaps this is why radical noticing—the kind that refuses selective attention—can feel so disruptive. It asks us to hold contradictions: the celebrated legacy alongside documented harm, the sensory pleasure alongside manipulation, the comfort of navigation alongside the value of occasionally getting lost. True noticing requires us to embrace cognitive dissonance rather than avoid it.

As we move through an increasingly curated world, Walker’s work suggests that reclaiming our attention might be one of the most meaningful acts of resistance available to us. By cultivating a practice of deep observation—one that appreciates beauty while remaining alert to what lies beneath—we develop not just a richer experience of our surroundings but a more honest relationship with reality itself.

The art of noticing, then, is not merely an aesthetic practice but an ethical stance: a commitment to seeing the world as it is, in all its wonder and contradiction, rather than as others would have us perceive it.

For consumers, it invites us to become architects of our own attention in a landscape increasingly designed to direct it elsewhere. For marketers, this presents both a challenge and opportunity—to craft messages that enhance rather than manipulate genuine experience, and to build brands that withstand comprehensive attention rather than requiring selective noticing.

■

FLUIDTH.INK