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Why People Who Don't Know Anything About Industrial Design Think Smartphones Will Always Be "Thin Glass Rectangles"

By Rain Noe - February 20, 2013

in Materials | Tech | Object Culture

I've tried to remain silent on this topic, but there are only so many times I can hear people's ridiculous ignorance of industrial design before I've gotta pipe up. The general, misguided statement I see people making is Well, all smartphones now look like the iPhone. It's impossible to design it any further. Here's the latest assertion made along these lines:

[Apple vs.] Samsung and other hardware manufacturers over who owns the rounded corner has only served to reinforce why hardware design is steadily becoming homogenous. There are only so many things you can do with a thin glass rectangle....

...As hardware evolves itself into invisibility we're well on our way to a time when the only thing that differentiates how something feels will be its software.

Yeah, I disagree. Statements like this show a real lack of imagination, along the lines of Henry Ellsworth—U.S. Commissioner of Patents in the 1840s—saying "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." That statement, by the way, is often twisted sideways and misattributed to future Commissioner Charles H. Duell supposedly having said "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

This statement that "There are only so many things you can do with a thin glass rectangle" isn't meaningful, because the person who made it is locked into the idea of thin glass rectangles and cannot conceive that the technology will change. One of the stories recounted to us in design school was of a wire manufacturer that made a fortune during the telephone boom of the 20th Century. They grew complacent, saying, "Well, people will always need telephones, and telephones need wires, so we'll always make good money." They could not conceive of the advent of the cell phone, and as the shift began, the company's fortunes waned. (They were saved, interestingly enough, by shifting into another emerging technology where fine wiring was needed: The manufacturing of meshes for airbags.)

There's been talk of Apple developing curved glass, and if that comes to pass, the form factor of phones will change. If further developments materialize and the phone is something flexible that can be rolled up, the form factor will change again. If holography becomes affordable, we'll see yet another change. But to me, the notion that "hardware [will evolve] itself into invisibility" is absurd.

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MB

12 years ago

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Nokia has been using curved glass in their smartphone designs since 2011 - an example of why Nokia has developed and again revolutionized phones, and by far has better designed phones than Apple.
If we look past our own ignorance, we will realized that in many other ways Apple is behind in their smartphone ID.
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cw

12 years ago

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in many ways the pane of glass form factor is dismal: hard to hold / slippery, and requires various, often times ugly, covers and accessories that do a marginal job of enhancing and customizing the consumer experience.
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walker

12 years ago

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@Mark, wrist watches have disappear. My watch is in my pocket and it's called a cell phone. Watches of today are not truly a piece of technology, they exist mainly as a type of jewelry. One of the most successful kickstarter projects (in terms of raising money) was the watch that displays texts. This watch can be seen as a way to make your phone disappear into a watch, much like how the star trek communicators disappeared into a lapel pin.
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emanster Provolone

12 years ago

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Hardware will indeed very likely disappear behind the eye and into the brain as our thinking brain merges into the web. It WILL be all about the software, and while we have a few more small rectangles to make before then, there really is only so much you can do with them. Holography will be great, flexible screens maybe not so much. But in the end, the phone will disappear, the screen will overlay the retina, the virtual world will merge with the physical perception of our world and everything in between will become a blur.
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steve

12 years ago

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I agree with most of this. Nokia already proved that design can far transcend the boring slab of an iPhone.

As far as curved glass goes, its already here. The Lumia 920 has it and its not exactly what you think it is. I believe you meant flexible screens which apple has nothing to do with.
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Kaggy

12 years ago

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So Apple is "first" again /s
The idea of just looking at what Apple does is tunnel vision.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/12/lg-reveals-5-5-inch-optimus-g-pro-design-with-curved-glass/

I'm just waiting for someone to develop a seamless phone.

No speaker holes, bone conducting.
Wireless charging, no usb port.
Some form of touch or grip waking so power and volume buttons are all capacitive.
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Mark H

12 years ago

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Just take a look at wrist watches. That's one piece of hardware that that's had enough time to evolve itself into invisibility. Certainly it is/was ubiquitous, but instead of turning invisible, there are so many designs- and not many of them are trying to hide themselves.

Look at the Kickstarter "World's Thinnest Watch" project. There's no need for the display to be as big as it is. They could have made it almost invisible- certainly make it stand out less. But they realized that people would not have sponsored it as enthusiastically.
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Dumbledog

12 years ago

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"hardware [will evolve] itself into invisibility" Moore's law states otherwise
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Noah

12 years ago

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Thank you so much for posting this. The design of phones becoming decks of cards with screens, and more recently paperbacks with screens, has saddened me greatly. I look forward to what is to come and how form factors can be pushed with curved glass and flexible screens.
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Tim Fox

12 years ago

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Technology will not evolve into invisibility but it can involve ubiquity.
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bob

12 years ago

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I agree with skywalker- eventuallyit would be awesome if we were more cyborg and all these devices become invisible built - ins or body mods. branding will need to evolve too, unless a more sophisticated economic system is implemented
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Walker

12 years ago

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When your phone is something inserted just behind your eye, it will be invisible. If we looks at the communicators of star trek its easy to see that a near invisibility is something that has long been desired. The form will change wildly, but i believe invisibility is the ultimate direction for some hardware, phones especially. Not invisibility via becoming so innocuous and bland that they are indistinguishable from each other, but by actually becoming invisible.
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waSdesigner

12 years ago

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this is a result less of people's ignorance of Industrial Design (most designers are ignorent of this as well..) and more a result of thier ignorance of existance. most people are prisoners of their own (limited) perspective, and inability to empethise with any other point of view. that leads to declarative statments, first internally and then expressed outwords. to paraphrase douglas adams, Humans, mostly harmless...
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