Tech could be lovelier
Some invention ideas
I like to sketch everyday gadgets and imagine how amazing they could be if someone could pour as much love as they want into making them something special.
To me there’s a strong resemblance between pocket watches from back in the day and phones. Both are always by their owner’s side. But there’s a huge difference in how we treat them. People had their pocket watches repaired at clock makers. It was a treasured item, personalized with engravings and often passed on to the kids.
We’ve lost this sentimentality to most objects in our lives.
Now there’s an over-abundance of gadgets and objects around us, but I think this lack of care comes from somewhere else, not just from the excess of stuff. Modern objects are made with a throw-away mentality, there’s not much room for designers and engineers to pour their souls into an object, they need to hold back their creativity to make sure there’s room to improve until the next version.
If the creators of the gadgets aren’t allowed to care deeply about what they make, then it’s hard to make us care about what they have made. The product designer Oki Sato said,
“Designers often forget that the word ‘fun’ is part of the word ‘function’.”
Some FUNctional Gadgets
These are some objects I’ve had in my life that all exceeded my expectations of what those types of objects usually do. It’s hard to not imagine the designers having fun while making these things because it’s more than a bucket list of the standard features. They’re gadgets with a spark.
Plattan 2
It's a wireless headset. But with a nice touch; you can use the empty cable socket to connect to a device (in case you run out of battery) or connect a friend’s headset to share what you're listening to. This allows you to share moments that is usually lonely when you tune out the sound of the rest of the world with your headset.
It also has a neat little joystick to pause and skip what I’m listening to, it makes me feel like I have telekinesis.
Nintendo DSi
It didn’t care that it was supposed to be a game console, the REAL point of a game console is to have fun. It allowed you to PLAY for real with the camera, record sounds and distort them or make notes or drawings with the touch screen. Flipnote Studio, a small and easy animation tool combined all these features very nicely.
It was like a sketchbook with the capacity of every medium.
The Serif
A TV that is designed to blend in with the furniture of a room. You can place stuff on top of it as if it was a shelf.
It’s easy to replace an object when they just feel like any other thing. Despite the fact that the bluetooth connection can be dodgy, I find the Plattan 2 headset quite lovable. I hesitate to replace it because it gives me the ability to share my music with a friend.
Maybe pocket watches was kept around for so long because they were handmade. As opposed to mass produced smartphones. But I do think they gained some sentimental value as well.
The missed opportunity with the TV
We would benefit from making things feel irreplaceable. Televisions are a great example, because most of them are only made with thought of the display itself, not what the whole object is like, we don’t give a crap about anything else than price, durability and image quality.
It’s almost impossible to find one that actually has appeal, which is a shame for something that costs hundreds or thousands.
Televisions should be thought of as modern fireplaces. Something you go to at the end of the day to share stories and to make new memories.
It can act as a synthesizer or collaborative music instrument to join in on spontaneous jam sessions in the home.
A projector feature to drastically set the appropriate ambiance in the room, sometimes you just have the TV on in the background as a crackling fire, instead of random commercials.
Combines your news, entertainment and social media feeds in a smart way to act as a hub. It's somewhere in-between classic TV channels, which throw kind-of random stuff at you and the very manual manner of browsing Netflix.
A fireplace stands idly and wastes energy, which we shouldn’t let TV’s do. But I wonder if we are actually using them wrong, to use one you usually have to actively choose something to watch and then you get sucked into binging a series, while you might just have wanted some noise and motion to fill the emptiness of the box you live in. I love it when my partner watches something, it makes a great ambiance.
Just like pocket watches, TV’s could be family heirloom that pass on through generations.
It’s a treasure chest of your family's history as well as a guestbook that is inherited for centuries. You can record conversations and listen to recordings of old relatives.
You can time-lock a message that becomes an event for your relatives in the future. They will be excited as they see the event creep closer on the calendar.
This wouldn’t be a TV to factory reset and sell or recycle. It would be passed on in the family and eventually become part of a museum. We need to figure out how each piece of technology could be designed to encourage a personal attachment.
I wish companies designed gadgets to make them feel more like trusty old friends.
Some people doing it right
To end this blog post I would like to point to some people who are having fun with their design and inspire me.
The Playdate embodies the pocket-watch mentality as well as any game console possibly could. It was surely not designed with the intention of being replaced (unless they make another version with a backlit screen, that’s the only point of an upgrade I can see).
Everything by Teenage Engineering is fun-tastic.
The designer Oki Sato who I mentioned earlier in the article stated Doraemon as one of his main influences as a designer. I found this refreshing to hear in a world where things are just made to be minimalistic and stylish. Here’s a great Youtube video on him.
Maywa Denki is a band who make music with fun technology.
Just a lovely concept for a computer mouse which run away from you when you’re done with work for the day.
An interactive lamp, related to “the internet of things” project by Google.
A weather system, also comes from the idea of “the internet of things”.
That’s all on the subject for now!
If you know any similar things I would love to hear about them. Don’t hesitate to send me a link or two by email (indianajonas42@gmail.com) or over on twitter.
Thank you for reading!
