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Posted by core jr | 5 Mar 2007
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Comments (3)
Not Created Equal: A Long, (Loving) Plastics Primer, by Carl Alviani
...Just as building a brick house and then painting it to look like wood is absurd, so too with many consumer goods; especially those, like point-and-shoot cameras, that are guaranteed to eventually be caught out. Given the thousands of alternative ways to allow plastics their own unique aesthetic, and the inexorable forces pushing consumers towards their acceptance, designers are running out of excuses for playing dumb.
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Comments
"Nobody thinks of the iPod as a piece of plastic..."
Nobody? I think of the iPod's case plastic as an extremely poor choice of materials. It's pretty-shiny at the expense of function. Look at the whole industry of skins that exists to protect these overly-delicate iPods from becoming scratched and battered. The iPod case is the opposite of real-world design. Unless you treat an iPod with its soft plastic front and shiny, fingerprint-highlighting chrome case with kid gloves, you quickly get a shabby looking player with poor display legibility. The use of plastic is "honest" but it's inappropriate considering the product's actual use. iPods are all about the initial opentheboxgasm. Only device fetishists are anal enough to skin, sleeve, and pamper an iPod and keep it blemish-free.
I'll take the relative durability of a metallized plastic pocket camera over the scratch-me glossy iPod plastic any day.
great article. Thanks for sharing this. I learned a lot and enjoyed a view inside the world of materials design. It seems every day a new material is coming up with. Seems like a great time to be a designer.
An added camera body tale. I took a then ancient Nikon F to China in 1993. Great Camera. My dad's parting words were "if you get in any kind of trouble, hit 'em with your camera."