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The Dawn of a Modern Mechanical Era
I wrote a paper for my ethics class recently where I transferred Aristotle's "virtue of the mean" to designed objects. I wrote that in order to design "good" things, you must identify its essential purpose, then embody it in the form - any excess or deficiency of function / form pulls the object away from "virtue" and further from goodness.
You make some great points. Perhaps that's a reason for an increasing demand for devices that have a sensory experience, a meticulousness even, attached to their inherent affordance (vinyl, drip coffee, printmaking, film photography, etc.). This sensory relationship establishes a form of ritual, a physical connection, that takes us away from our very digital lives. I wonder what forms of tactile innovation will re-ignite some tools' physicality?
Will toddlers that are born with an iPad by their side will create new affordances that complement the primitive ones? May swipe, drag and drop per se be added to the "primitive" library? I loved your article Nick! Keep em coming.
It's true that every generation creates it's own lexicon of interactions, but it seems logical that interactions generated by the cast-iron laws of physics will be a permanent fixture of human existence.
Agree. And what i discovered many times - we miss physical interactions. I think, when we try to imagine world with touchscreens everywhere it would be depressive, because touchscreen is just a flat loose surface. But when you have button - button give you power how to push it, when to push it, it is something you always now - this button will work for century. Maybe it is temporary, don't know.
Great article
Nick...are you sure you are working for the right firm?
I liked reading this article. It made me imagine sitting at the desk of Deiter Rams in the early goings after WW2 had ended and the dust had settled in Germany and at Braun. 'Cleaning up the mess' was his raison d'etre back then.
The 'mess' is different today. A product's service history is in some cases, more important than its function. We expect and design products to be the 'film projector' that tells the story of the product and all of its bruised knees, rejections and marriage proposals through out its service life. This information is supposedly important to designing better experiences in the future.
The invasive growth of the discipline of psychology in the corporate process is to blame I am afraid (i.e. affordances). Instead of designing electric shock treatments to understand a human being's behaviors, we now design consumer electronics that record behavior in order to better understand human psychology. This data is then used to assign financial value on Wall Street. Rather than taking the human spirit to places that never thought imaginable, we are now fixated on monitoring and recording each nanometer/second in order to understand incrementally how A was a result of B.
Nick, you are old enough to have these nostalgic tactile memories trigger your sense of skepticism, but it is those that are much younger who have no neural network built to appreciate these tactile, audio and emotional affordances that you mention. They would like very much to not have to touch anything in order to get the answer they are Googling or direct a torrent file's cryptographic hash algorithm.
The monolith is measuring all of us 24/7 through increasingly faceless geometric blocks of material. Some people have the capacity to care about this and some just wish it would do it faster. I would say your example of object fetish just does a better job of cloaking this activity, rather than setting the user free to enjoy the scenery...
But people like to sport, to ride a longboards in hot days near beach, etc. I believe that there are "physical emotions" which we will miss. Im 24 y/o, i can feel it sometimes.
Excellent article Nick. I like your suggestion to write a product's purpose on the wall and keep going back to it. Something that many designers could benefit from.
Projects, like toddlers, have a tendency to lose focus and wander. That said, this can sometimes be a positive attribute...