10/07/2026
My hands are blurry in this photo and you probably didn't notice until I said it, because your eyes went straight to my face, right where the frame told them to go.
That is framing, the power to shape what people see and do.
In his book Framing: The Social Art of Influence, Mikael Klintman defines framing as "the automatic or strategic process of selecting, shaping, interpreting, and organizing a part of our complex reality into a bounded construction that may affect both our own and others' understanding and actions."
He opens the book with the story of a woman in Amsterdam in 1980, kneeling on a busy street with a sheet of plywood that had a bicycle cut out of it.
She and a few activists painted bikes onto the road every couple of meters.
There was no bike lane on that street, and back then everyone assumed city streets were meant for cars.
When you read what she did with his definition in mind, you can see why it worked so well.
She was strategic and selected one street, putting all her attention on the stretch of road in front of her.
The plywood shaped the idea into something people could see, and painting the bikes one after another in a straight line organized them into a lane.
That lane is a bounded construction, which means something you build with clear edges, so people know what belongs inside the frame and what stays outside.
The paint also did the interpreting for her, anyone walking by could look at those little bikes on the asphalt and understand that this space now belonged to cyclists.
That framing worked, and it changed how people understood the street and how they used it.
Activists like her painted lanes all over the country, often at night and sometimes getting arrested for it.
As the newspapers picked up the story, politicians started paying attention, and the Netherlands built the cycling network the rest of the world now copies.
The people on that street were moved by a picture of what their road could be, painted right where they walked every day.
So think about your next meeting, where you need people to see something they can't see yet, and ask yourself what your street is and where you're going to paint the lane.
