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Why video calls are bad for brainstorming

• technovader 5y ago
  Video calls shut my brain down Honestly there's very little good about video calls. I would prefer In-Person ideally, but if that is not possible, it is always more productive to just use slack or email. Or just a short audio call.
  • billti 5y ago
    I think part of the problem is that video calls make it super-easy to context switch and do something else the minute the meeting becomes uninteresting (e.g. a topic that doesn't apply to you, or just a very dry discussion). Once your attention wanders elsewhere, its hard to reengage meaningfully. I love working from home more these days, but those days I do go into the office I find that meetings are way more engaging and productive. Being face-to-face with folks it's just much harder to disengage and focus attention elsewhere.
    • fartcannon 5y ago
      In one on ones, or small groups, maybe, but most of my meetings are just board rooms full of glassy eyed people, staring, trying not to look like they're going to fall asleep, caching JUST enough of what's being said to respond without looking entirely stupid if called on by the only person who actually cares about the meeting: the person running it. Most meetings can (and in my opinion should) be emails or chat messages. My rule is that I only go to meetings where there is a demonstration of some kind that cant be sent in an email, or cake.
    • BlargMcLarg 5y ago
      Starting at 4:10, from the video: "People think there is more social connection.. ..but we found the exact opposite. So we found in the virtual condition, people are looking significantly more at their partner, almost double." If anything, the video suggests video calls are problematic because individuals focus too much on being presentable and looking at their conference partners, rather than putting their focus on the actual activity. Quite the opposite of tuning out deliberately (even if this is still possible).
      • slowmovintarget 5y ago
        Which is why turning off self-view can make for a huge difference.
    • technovader 5y ago
      for me the biggest problem is how the flow of natural conversation is broken in video calls. 1 person gets to talk as long as they dont get interrupted or leave a long enough gap for other folks to speak up. its like talking but with a 5 second latency. so what ends up happening is people dont like to be rude, so they dont speak up unless theres a long gap of silence. but gaps dont happen because usually 1-2 people hoard the discussion, you know the type who never pause between sentences and drone on and on. in real life those people would be sidelined because people look away and have side conversations. but in a virtual meeting these people hijack every conversation for the entire hour
      • chc 5y ago
        Absolutely. Sometimes with coworkers I'm relatively close to, we'll have those side conversations in a Slack chat...but then that's just making the argument for Slack.
      • doubled112 5y ago
        I constantly accidentally interrupt in video calls. I had a hard time with long distance on phones as a kid too. Not sure if I'm the problem or the tech.
      • justinlloyd 5y ago
        Then that is a failure of the person running the meeting. You, as an individual, can also deploy several redirection techniques to shut those people down in either virtual meetings or in-person meetings. Tacit approval is either given by non-verbal acknowledgement (looking at them), vocalized agreement, e.g. "uhuh", "yeah", "and then what happened?", or by silence. I have an internal count that I do when someone starts talking and I become conscious of the interlocutor: "Hey, I need to interject, you raise a valid point about X but I have a question around it, <name of other participant>, what do you think of <completely unrelated subject>?" And you repeat the "Hey, I need to interject,hey, I have a question, Hey, I need to interject" until the other person stops long enough. Some days, you just have to be firm and get into the conversation. You can also just butt in with "Hey, that's interesting but it sounds like we are lost in the technical weeds, could we please take this offline or move it to a different meeting?" If the person running the meeting doesn't pick up on that, they shouldn't be running the meeting. I also like to drop in "Hey, I have to cut this short, I've got another meeting I need to run too, can we move this along?" People are very unaware when talking on the phone or in a video meeting. Like literally they become deaf. After three or four attempts of interjecting in a very short period of time of just 15 seconds or so, if the person isn't listening, I've just started talking directly to the meeting running directly over them and saying "we need to move on. Can you mute him?" It might be considered rude, but it's what everyone is thinking.
    • greymalik 5y ago
      > video calls make it super-easy to context switch and do something else the minute the meeting becomes uninteresting I’d argue that it’s no different from in-person unless you ban laptops and cell phones from the meeting.
      • WJW 4y ago
        Even when no laptops or phones are present, people who are not interested in the current topic will find a way to zone out. Especially in longer meetings with more than 4-5 people it is an illusion to have everybody engaged all the time.
    • BeetleB 4y ago
      > I think part of the problem is that video calls make it super-easy to context switch and do something else the minute the meeting becomes uninteresting (e.g. a topic that doesn't apply to you, or just a very dry discussion). Once your attention wanders elsewhere, its hard to reengage meaningfully. This is as true in in-person meetings where people are allowed to bring in their laptops. It was a common problem pre-pandemic, and I'd often criticize meeting organizers for having a poor meeting format (e.g. team meeting every week or two weeks with unclear agendas, or having agenda items where each item only involves 1-3 people, but since it's a different set of 1-3 people for each agenda item, everyone is forced to be present for the whole meeting, etc).
  • robonerd 4y ago
    I miss landline telephones. For whatever reason, the audio clarity of video conferencing still has not touched the quality we used to get out of old fashioned analogue over copper.
    • gregmac 4y ago
      Clearly false. Analog voice service is limited to 300–3,300 Hz, and being analog, subject to line noise/static/etc. About the only constant with it was that people would hold handsets up to their heads that were purpose-built, and reliably had a decent minimal level of quality. With IP-based conferencing, you get as good as the worst link. A lot of people use built-in microphones on their laptops in a noisy room, and so the audio sounds like garbage. The people with consistently high quality have gaming-style headsets (or really, any >$100 headset). There's a couple people I talk with that have (inexpensive) studio-style microphones on boom arms, and they sound phenomenal. Of course it could be you. If you're listening using garbage headphones or the built-in speakers in your laptop, it doesn't really matter how great other people's microphones are. You're clearly misremembering the quality of analog phone lines; at their worst they're better than a bad IP-based service, but at their best they are blown out of the water by people that put even a modicum of effort into their setup.
      • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
        Jitter and buffer bloat are huge issues with VoIP. People that deploy audio VoIP solutions often terminate VoIP at the nearest router to the WAN they can and use DECT to serve wireless VoIP phones because of how bad WiFi can be for jitter. It's not as simple as your setup and codecs.
    • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Some of it might be nostalgia, but some of it is definitely latency and jitter. Even into the 90s there was only so much latency on a phone call and most phone lines tried their hardest to _act_ circuit-switched. The average video caller is on WiFi, so there's packet buffering at the AP (which can be quite large since most people are running meh quality consumer routers at home), again at the router, then however many hops until the RTP endpoint. Jitter can be quite large. That doesn't even get into the scourge that is modern NAT and the possibility of TURN relays along the way. One quick "hack" is to do your conferencing on a box connected to your router via Ethernet (or through switches). It can help bad connection paths but it's not a panacea. Another is if you have a slow internet connection, try to get a router with QoS and apply that to prioritize your VoIP packets. Unfortunately other than cellular standards, there's no good way way to easily get a low latency, low jitter connection as most packet switching is optimized around throughput. Personally we use Zoom at work and I know the Zoom edge has low jitter to me so if anyone needs to VC me at work, they should get "as good as it gets". For my personal VC needs I ended up using Matrix and hosting a TURN server in a DC that peers directly with my ISP. Folks in my area can call me on it through WebRTC and get latency on the 3-6ms range.
  • r00fus 4y ago
    I hardly use video on my meetings. I tend to use screenshare and voice only except in circumstances where a higher fidelity is required. I find working together on a document keeps attendees focused (along with a few tips/tricks like polling individuals, aligning current discussion with others' previously stated ideas and writing what people say as verbatim as possible)
• pstuart 5y ago
  Audio delay makes natural conversation unnatural.
  • whateveracct 5y ago
    But I had plenty of natural conversations in Ventrilo..made a lot of close friends.
    • vorpalhex 5y ago
      Gaming voice products figured out the delay problem long ago (eg if you scream "flank" your team needs to respond ASAP). Video conference products are woefully behind.
      • bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
        I think gaming voice chat usually has a keyboard trigger. They solve echo cancellation by assuming microphones are usually off! Modern video conference software assumes users aren't using headphones, so they need sophisticated echo cancellation. Now, whether the delay is a side effect of noise cancellation, or one of the mechanisms is not clear to me.
        • xboxnolifes 5y ago
          Gaming voice chat (discord/teamspeak/other, not in-game) solved it way better than just push-to-talk. Voice activity detection, adjustable voice gate thresholds (open and close), echo cancellation, background noise removal, individual person volume settings, adjustable application attenuation. From my perspective, Zoom's one and only benefit is how easy it is to share a link and get into a video chat. Everything else about it is painful to use.
      • benoliver999 4y ago
        I'm always blown away by how good mumble sounds despite being a relatively old program. It's like someone is there with you.
• stunt 5y ago
  What bothers me the most about video conferencing software is when people talk over each other and you can only hear one of them properly. This is not a problem in multiplayer video games with voice chat because I think they somehow manage it with multiple simultaneous audio sources. I'm surprised that Zoom has not done that yet. Just do what video games do.
  • ludwigvan 5y ago
    I believe Zoom has that. You need to enable original audio. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Using-and-preserving-original-sound-in-a-meeting https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Using... I think the catch is that people need to be on headphones for echo prevention, which might be the case for most of the gamers.
    • hoosieree 5y ago
      I hadn't even thought to tinker with this, because the auto-volume stuff is not that annoying... but now that I know it's there I'll try it out, so thanks for posting this!
  • digitallyfree 5y ago
    The reason for this is because the conferencing system typically has an automixer setup which turns up the active speaker and turns down everyone else. That's why it's impossible to say have a group of people sing a song together on Zoom (ignoring latency) because the automixer will switch between different singers erattically as opposed to hearing them all at the same time. In typical videoconference setting with one person speaking at a time this feature typically makes sense. This kind of mixing won't work well in a game for obvious reasons, so the audio is sent direct. However, the game uses direction and distance based audio to make the sound more natural. E.g. if the player to your right speaks, the signal you hear will be panned to the right. Humans are great at identifying different voices coming from different directions - you can try this yourself by loading up some voices into a DAW and seeing the difference in intelligibility having them panned out vs mono. Note that this tech may work well in a VR meeting room or something but it won't in a regular monural video call. Also the user will need a proper stereo setup (headphones or speakers a reasonable distance apart) for this to work.
• alunchbox 5y ago
  Unsure about others experience but from an engineering perspective using tooling like exalidraw or miro we're able to brainstorm much more effectively than just a single whiteboard along with being able to have everyone contribute. What I find often is that there's TOO many people in a meeting that aren't needed for the brainstorming sessions and essentially don't contribute to the meeting.
  • rapnie 5y ago
    And Mural. Would love to see good free software alternatives of these collaborative tools though.
  • juancn 4y ago
    Add an iPad with an Apple Pencil to the mix and you get a pretty good substitute for a whiteboard.
• thaway2839 5y ago
  One of the greatest challenges I'm facing running team meetings virtually is getting input from the less extroverted team members. When we had a meeting in a physical room, if I noticed someone hadn't said much, I could go "Hey John, any thoughts on this idea?", and it would largely be appreciated by John because it gave him an opportunity to speak in a room filled with other folks who were much better at getting their 2 cents in. However, doing the same thing on a video or voice call feels completely different. It feels like I'm calling out the person who has been quiet, and comes across as a psychologically negative experience both for me and for John.
  • zabil 5y ago
    Have you tried using break out rooms? We've tried grouping people to small groups (even as small as 2) and then regrouping to discuss further. It's not perfect, but does increase participation.
  • ajmurmann 5y ago
    On small to medium groups going "around the room" and asking everyone if they have anything to add can work without calling out one specific person. Of course not for every meeting type and situation.
  • Graffur 5y ago
    It's also a negative experience in person. Lots of people like to listen, internalize and think rather than just speaking.
    • thaway2839 4y ago
      Yes, those people usually speak out before the end of the meeting. That's not whom I'm talking about. And it's very easy to tell the difference between someone who is thinking and waiting to speak, and someone who is trying to get a word out but is unable to because they are more introverted or less confident than most of the other people in the room.
• thenerdhead 5y ago
  We need to rid this idea that the tool is the problem. Look at the experiment they are doing. The room is so boring and controlled. It's like putting an animal in a cage and expecting them to behave the same as they would in the wild. They are also sourcing random students/people off the street. Not those who may thrive in a remote fashion. The most creative / brainstormed ideas come from when you're having fun with brilliant people. The best ideas for products I've ever had were in a restaurant, a bar, or at a fun event/party. Even as a remote employee, I also have similar ideas when playing games or catching up informally with co-workers online. I think we need to challenge this type of research given it's removing so many different senses that who would even try to be creative if your soul has already left the room before you began experiments? There's a reason why big tech companies have very colorful and vibrant offices. Would creativity increase as new ways of video calls become mainstream? i.e. metaverse, world of workcraft, etc.
  • leakbang 5y ago
    I share your viewpoint. I think having conversations in a fun environment like a lite videogame or a fun virtual hub would be the best thing for team building and creativity.
  • gee_totes 5y ago
    This is a big reason I got into Lego Serious Play
  • z2h-a6n 5y ago
    > We need to rid this idea that the tool is the problem. Do you have any scientific evidence (preferrably peer-reviewed) that the tool is not the problem? If not, it would seem to me to be a reasonable thing to study. > Look at the experiment they are doing. The room is so boring and controlled. If I am reading the paper correctly, the rooms being used by remote and in-person participants were identical. While they may be boring, the point was to control for the effect of the room, not to study it. It sounds like you are wishing for a different study.
    • thenerdhead 5y ago
• t-3 5y ago
  I haven't done many video calls, but from watching a lot of presentations using the tech, it's the inappropriate inclusion of faces everywhere that is a problem. Humans naturally gravitate to faces and movement, which makes paying attention difficult when you always have a few moving faces onscreen. Screensharing good, video bad.
  • carlmr 5y ago
    But at the same time it's not enough face, you don't see the non-verbal cues of the presenter properly. I also find the bad audio quality and delays annoying enough that it becomes unpleasant enough to be downright irritating. Not a good setup for communication.
    • XorNot 4y ago
      It's interesting to note that in the common big presentation format in person, the presenters face is almost invisible, whereas the main thing we can see is their posture and gesturing, with a tiny bit of facial expression.
      • carlmr 4y ago
        True, but I think a big part of it is that we do see the whole picture. And we do see everything without delay and without 5Hz refresh rates, that you often have in video chat.
• throw82473751 5y ago
  Brainstorming meetings are usually a fail anyway, resulting in the lowest common denominator solution chosen, or the one of the loudest/strongest persons in the room. Much more superior is tasking the right person (or duo/trio) with thinking through it and proposing one solution or alternatives with trafeoffs. "Brainstorming meetings" so often for people who want to spread responsibility for bad decisions without admitting they have no clue even beyond the problem :(
  • tootie 5y ago
    Brainstorming asynchronously on a shared doc of some sort (google doc, miro board, even slides) is way better. Kick off with a meeting to set some parameters and answer questions, then let everyone enter ideas at their leisure for a week and regroup to dicuss.
    • aeternum 5y ago
      The most effective seems to be to do the first round independently, IE each person come with their 2-3 best ideas before collaboration. Otherwise there's a strong tendency to just +1 existing ideas rather than think independently.
    • jesterpm 5y ago
      I was going to say this exactly. We've started doing this recently and it's worked really well. We'll start off with a topic and give everyone, say, 15 minutes to write ideas in the doc on their own. Then take the next 15 minutes to read digest what everyone else wrote, and then rest of the time to discuss as a group. It's great because it gives everyone a chance to think through the topic and share their perspective, but also you can quickly see the common themes.
  • Negitivefrags 5y ago
    The same logic applies to literally any meeting for any purpose. A meeting should only ever be between two or three people. Any more and it's just a waste of time.
  • wildrhythms 5y ago
• evocatus 5y ago
  Global collaboration on software has existed for years before videoconferencing. All video calls are good for is exposing latent unconscious biases in your colleagues.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    > All video calls are good for is exposing latent unconscious biases in your colleagues. Why do video calls expose that in particular?
    • evocatus 4y ago
      You must be white.
• hernantz 5y ago
  I have the idea that brainstorming on a meeting is a waste of time. It is better to do it async. On a shared doc where people can comment and improve over a short period of time (like a week or so). Then, and only then, you can have a round of presentations or debates.
  • benji-york 4y ago
    There is some support for the idea that brainstorming as a group is less effective than individually: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB0a54ePU2PEQsILQnwWgY9KU/edit#slide=id.g45afb83f6_095 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB...
    • splistud 4y ago
  • compressedgas 4y ago
    https://matthewstrom.com/writing/stop-brainstorming/ https://matthewstrom.com/writing/stop-brainstorming/
  • s0rce 4y ago
    I hugely prefer this for a lot of stuff and wish it could happen more often, sadly when tried usually people just don't end up contributing unless you trap then in a room (real or virtual).
• dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Dude, Miro makes online meetings waaay better for brainstorming. Just divide people up into small groups then come together as a group. It works so well. Takes a bit of culture, but it is highly effective for us.
• proc0 5y ago
  > We assessed idea selection quality using two different measures: (1) the ‘creativity score’ of the pair’s selected idea23 and (2) the ‘decision error score’—the difference in creativity score between the top scoring idea and the selected idea—where smaller values reflect a better decision Eh, I don't think creativity is so easily measured and also what they're calling creativity is incredibly narrow. As someone who went to art school, constraints are a huge part of being creative... when you ask a lot of artist what the "right" tool for their craft is, the answer is often "any tool you have will do"... being creative IS about doing more with less, and if you need to be face to face to do a proper brainstorming, perhaps you are not as creative as someone who can.
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  So tired of this stuff and I think it's getting worse, the amount of mumbles and ummmms I have to sit through before people get to the point is absolutely insufferable. At times I'd rather just not work with remote people than have to deal with them anymore.
• foxfired 4y ago
  One difference between in person and video calls interaction is, a video call is a performance. This is better explained in Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman, but let me attempt. Imagine a TV show where a political candidate is asked a question, and instead of answering, he remains silent. The camera pans on him and zooms in. 3.5 seconds later, we switch to a close up from the camera on the left. The guest is still silent. 3.5 seconds later, the camera switches to the host who is also starting to look confused. A whole 11 seconds has gone by and the guest is still silent, his eyes looking up. Right before the host is about to halt things and go on a commercial break, the guest breaks his silence with a single word. "No". Even without knowing what the actual question was, you know this candidate is not going to win the race. It was a bad performance. But what if I tell you, he was asked a difficult question that he hadn't thought of before, and he took all of 15 seconds to consider it before giving a sound answer? That's the problem with video, any time spent thinking on screen can be perceived as incompetence. 3.5 seconds is the average length of a shot on TV. And it makes silence look awfully long. Brainstorming requires doing some silent thinking. In my previous job, I used to spend hours in a conference room with my colleague after we had plotted our plan on the whiteboard. Then, we would just sit down and look at the board in silence for long period of times. With the occasional "what if... no never mind." When covid hit, we tried to do that via zoom. Didn't work. Silence does not work well on camera.
  • Jedd 4y ago
    I concur - dead air in person is much more palatable, especially if multiple people are engaged on the same (mental) task at the same time. The description you're giving there, of the performance, is one where only one person is doing that, so it's not 100% analogous - though in the context of TFA it certainly is (ie. 'group brainstorming'). Tangentially but related, John Ralston Saul had this to say (complain about?) on the subject of immediacy in the face of questions: "ANSWERS [are] A mechanism for avoiding questions. "This might be called obsessional avoidance or a manic syndrome. It is based on the belief that the possession of an education — particularly if it leads to professional or expert status and, above all, if it involves some responsibility or power carries with it an obligation to provide the answer to every question posed in your area of knowledge. This has become much more than the opiate of the rational élites. It may be the West’s most serious addiction. "Time is of the essence in this process. An inability to provide the answer immediately is a professional fault. The availability of unlimited facts can produce an equally unlimited number of absolute answers in most areas. Memory is not highly regarded. Right answers which turn out to be wrong are simply replaced by a new formula. The result of these sequential truths is an assertive or declarative society which admires neither reflection nor doubt and has difficulty with the idea that to most questions there are many answers, none of them absolute and few of them satisfactory except in a limited way."
• da39a3ee 4y ago
  The paper relies on an extremely questionable premise: that creative ideas are generated in groups. If, on the other hand, we were to assume that creative ideas are generated mostly during solitary work, then differences between video- and in-person group situations are not actually important.
• protomyth 4y ago
  I'm starting to wonder about setups for remote meetings and if that is a big part of the problem. Like most colleges, we were thrown in the deep end with distance learning. We've done distance learning in a single classroom that is well equipped for twenty years, but never from a teacher's home. For one class, a bead-work class, we used a camera attached to a flexible gooseneck and a switcher from Blackmagic Design[1] to go between normal camera and the bead camera. It worked well and got me thinking about how we do our home setups. I think the laptop webcam with a small screen is the real problem. It just isn't the best placement. I watched my nephew and niece do remote classes on a Chromebook and that really seemed uncomfortable. It feels like your looking at a room through a porthole. I am starting to think that hardware needs to be improved, and the whiteboard needs to become an actual surface in your office with remote updating. Multiple cameras is a winner and a big screen to view the video call seems to work really well. I get the feeling that if I ever go back out into the mainstream workforce doing remote work, I will invest in a home production setup with multiple cameras and a switcher with overhead (documents) and camera pointed at a whiteboard. 1) https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/atemmini https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/atemmini
  • pastaguy1 4y ago
    I can't believe the shared whiteboard idea hadnt crossed my mind. I wonder if it's possible that it can be approximated with Google draw and Wacom tablets
    • mdorazio 4y ago
      Shared whiteboards have been a thing for a long time in the corporate world. These days you don’t even really need a specialized device - Teams, for example, has the functionality built in so all you need is a large screen (although input without a touchscreen kind of sucks)
      • extra88 4y ago
        It’s basically unusable without a touchscreen but really you need a stylus on the touchscreen to write notes, draw shapes, etc. Even then, if the screen is 12 inches diagonal or less, it can be really cramped and hard to manage the board content, especially when it’s a collaborative board.
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  Face-to-face meetings are bad for brainstorming, too. Brainstorming is bad for brainstorming.
• awsrocks 4y ago
• jp42 4y ago
  I have not done much of a brainstorming over video call, however debugging session over call is very productive in my experience. 2-3 people is what worked best most of the time.
• thesz 4y ago
  Why brainstorming is bad for, well, creating new ideas: https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-o... I think if I need ideas, I need to ask people to think them through independently. The "video conference brainstorming" or "in-person brainstorming" is there just to make people "participate" - to create a theatre of "work" instead of doing actual creative work.
  • madlabuk 4y ago
    Very much agree with this. But, I recently came across brainwriting (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/using-brainwriting-for-rapid-idea-generation/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/12/using-brainwriting-...) and have been using the technique successfully for leading remote workshops. One of the things I really like is that it creates a space where lots of different personality types can contribute, rather than just ceding direction to the most confident and/or loudest voices in the room. (SCAMPER is another nice technique, although it typically requires a bit more of an explainer.)
    • thesz 4y ago
      Very cool! This is what I would prefer doing instead of brainstorming. This technique is also can be done offline, which is great.
  • johnnyanmac 4y ago
    "I think if I need ideas, I need to ask people to think them through independently" depends on the idea and the nature of the work. For highly technical solutions with a non-trvial problem, you don't brainstorm answers. You brainstorm approaches*. If you're trying to answer the question on the spot you won't get a chance to hit the subteties and edge cases. Figure out some entry points and then send people out into the weeds. But for higher level concepts like an artwork idea or what to eat tonight, brainstorming works fine. Or at least, as fine as social dynamics will allow in the situation. The problems highlighted are absolutely correct, but they aren't unique to brainstorming and will affect any other forms of communication or productivity in general. *I think in general this is why people grow weary of brainstorming. In grade school they treat it like you are finding an answer to a question that you could probably figure out alone. And in later work life, the worst brainstorming sessions are just the ceremonial ones where you know seniority is going to rule anyways.
• TheGigaChad 4y ago
• xtiansimon 4y ago
  I don’t know what type of ‘creativity’ they’re speaking of, but every artist I’ve ever met knows what to do with a frame. Hint hint