I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as makers tried to figure out what would work best. It's easy to wax nostalgic for all the various flip phones/slide-out phones/"twist" phones, etc., but the fact is the "glass slab" really ended up working best - it has a lot fewer components to wear, and the lack of physical controls means that apps have lots of freedom to make full use of the screen. The glass slab design won out over all the others.
If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot.
The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...
With cell phones it is also about moving the physical device out of your consciousness so you can better utilize the actual application. And because each app does a different and unknown thing, you can’t design your hardware around your software.
However, with cars I think that doesn’t hold. Cars don't need to disappears into the background. Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV. They are all the same and they are all equally ugly. Sacrificing a bit of aerodynamics for any level of personality would be a welcome shakeup.
> Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV
Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
Same. I just bought pretty much the cheapest used EV I could find that looked alright to me and had enough range. Happy as a clam.
I'm not interested in wasting tens of thousands of dollars on slightly more comfortable seats and stuff like that. I could, it just doesn't seem worth it. I'd rather have the money for other things.
Maybe next time I'll buy a slightly more premium car like a Volvo EC30 or something like that, if I can find a nice used one for a decent price. I don't see any reason to buy new cars. In my market a 4 year old car (still under warranty) is literally less than half the price of a new one. I don't think the warranty is worth that much.
To add to this: I see anonymity becoming more desired by the general population as surveillance and threat of law enforcement, car thieves, and road rage amplifies.
Blending in feels much safer these days. Much like herd animal behavior.
I'm mixed on touch screen vs physical controls happening. A Tesla has physical controls for shifting, turning, cruise control, current media and I guess you can include accelerate and brake. That said, I want all cars to be the same. I want them to have Android Audio, Apple CarPlay. I do not want custom apps in each car. I just want to connect my phone in and have it do all the things unrelated to operating the car itself.
So at least in some ways, I want them more the same, not less. I live in an area where Waymo is common so I see self driving cars all the time. In other words, unlike people not in an area like this, I have actual experience with them working and working well. As soon as they are available for purchase I will buy one. Ideally one with no controls. No steering wheel, no accelerator, no brake peddle, no turn signal. At which point, I suspect, like phones, they may get even more alike. All that stuff is un-needed in a level 5 self-driving car
I'm sure someone is going to respond such stuff will be needed for emergencies or whatever. I think that middle stage will only last 5-10 years and then they'll take out the manual controls. They took out manual controls from elevators 70 years ago. They're taking out almost all controls now. IIRC Toyota already has such vehicles. I know Honda showed of designs years ago. They're a platform that carries a box. The box can be a cargo box, a food truck box, a 12 person passenger box, more comfy 6 person box. No driver's seat.
Elevators still have manual controls, if you open a secret panel with a key, and turn another key to change the operating mode. See Deviant Ollam's talks.
Most people don't really care about cars. It's a tool that gets you places and carries your stuff. Ideally for the lowest cost. People care a lot more about safety ratings, fuel efficiency, and resale value than they to about unconventional design.
This seems intuitively obvious, new car buyers overwhelmingly put design way down the list of priorities.
I think it was the same in the 50s and 60s, just that the then car manufacturers hadn’t figured out how to compete in the other more important aspects as effectively.
I do have the cash, but I'm happy with my Opel Corsa-E that I bought used for mostly money I had sitting in my checking account.
It has heated seats, heated steering wheel, AC, backing camera/sensors, uses electricity which means it costs practically nothing to drive, doesn't make noise, isn't hard to get going in an uphill, and probably about 100 other advantages.
Funny, I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or sincere because I can’t tell the difference between that car and a Mustang or a Charger from the same decade.
In any case, the '67 and '68 Mustangs are the best looking of the Mustang line, and the '68 Dodge Charger is to die for.
If you cannot tell the difference, may I suggest you spend a wonderful evening watching "Bullitt".
When I was in high school, a friend of mine bought a '67 Mustang for $200, so of course he offered me a ride. I had never ridden in one before. I barely had the door closed when he stomped on the gas. What can I say, it was a transformative experience! I soon acquired one for myself. Converted it to a 4-speed, hopped up the engine, and had a grand time with it for years until a garbage truck turned it into an accordion.
I still miss that car.
But I did wind up replacing it with a 72 Dodge Challenger, which is close to being a Cuda. I spent a lot of money on its engine in the machine shop. I enjoy every second driving it, and giving friends rides in it.
Like me before I got the ride in the Mustang, you gotta get a ride in one before you dis it.
One part of what's driving cars to all look the same is mandated fuel-efficiency targets, which make aerodynamics a primary design factor that overrides nearly all others. Sacrificing any amount of aerodynamics is unlikely to happen under that regulatory environment.
I think that's why cars like the PT Cruiser had decent sales and positive views, despite being an absolute piece of trash mechanically. I mean I thought it was ugly as hell, but it didn't look exactly like every other car which was nice.
I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it.
Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded.
And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile.
Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.
> It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
That actually started way sooner than in the 60s. For a good starting point see the 1910 essay Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos, but even that was a bit after the cultural change already started, though before it was widely applied.
Brilliant, I have always felt that one of the major problems with machine learning, consequently LLMs, is the boring average based loss functions that under-represent the unique and the rare. It seems our collective civilization is using a similar function and heading in the same direction of optimizing for the average.
The world is rapidly homogenising. You see it with “air space” interior design - coffee shops have the same aesthetic in every major city in the world. You see it in local fashions. You see it as a tourist - travel anywhere in the world and the chances are you’ll find the same kind of shop selling the same kind of trinket. Made in China with a subtly different graphic on it to represent the country you’re in.
This has been happening ever since trade routes were established across Eurasia (Silk Road) or the Americas were discovered. It only keeps accelerating as movement and trade becomes easier.
If pockets of humanity could isolate themselves from the rest, we could get diversity growing again, that one sentinel island might be our only hope.
I think you are confusing optimal design for the design that makes them the most money by appealing to the maximum amount of people. It’s why all of our cars are now black, white, or silver/gray. Don’t you dare waste a bit of money on red paint someone might not want! So everything around us turns into gray goo that takes no chances at all so it can make the most money. Then it becomes a worse and worse feedback loop.
Cars all look the same now because, due to fuel economy regulations, they are all designed in a wind tunnel to minimize drag. Also, regulations cover all kinds of things, mainly to reduce injury to pedestrians.
You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.
It's easy to romanticize a past where electronics were designed to be statements in your home or office, but I think that the reduction of glamour is more so a dialogue on the utility of these devices in a modern world.
Previously, personal computers in the home were something of a novelty that didn't necessarily have a ton of value or that value was still being discovered. And now we see that the content that is displayed on the digital screen is most of the value, and so akin to many Hollywood sci-fi takes, where the screen becomes just a piece of glass, modern technology is moving in that direction.
The device itself is not the point, but the content that the device enables access to is.
I think at least in part the unwillingness to explore that is making our society shades of gray and shapes of blocks "to maximize value" and "protect resale value" etc is just a result of widespread reduction in purchasing power.
Part of me agrees with the design takeaways here, and part of me admittedly prefers when my devices are as slim and unobtrusive as possible (no amount of lost desk space is worth the aesthetics of a zany computer monitor for me), but either way I'm always a little wary of these "remember the good old days of tech?" comparisons. Sometimes it feels like they're creating a false dichotomy where yesterday's devices were more pleasant to look at because they weren't tainted by corporate greed, and that today's devices are somehow uglier because all companies care about now is profit.
But these have always been mass-produced consumer devices. Even if you prefer the aesthetics of the original iMac to today's iMac, and even to the extent that corporate greed has arguably gotten worse, your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
This seems like a very strange comment. I don't think the materials and design of today's macs are any more profitable than the old ones. They used to make macs out of plastic, now they use much more premium materials. They look less fun, more high quality, and more professional. That has nothing to do with greed or profit margins, it's just what people actually want now.
I think you and I are probably in agreement there :) I would also wager, although obviously it's hard to say without hard data, that today's Macs are roughly as profitable as yesterday's Macs, and that today's design choices are at least partly a reflection of evolving materials, changing tastes, etc.
The thing I'm referring to is an attitude I've seen in TFA and elsewhere, although in the TFA it seems somewhat implied, where people conflate their preference or nostalgia for old products with a belief that the market behind those older products was any less cold and detached than the market for today's products. I don't know if I'm articulating it well, and there's additional context that's hard to surface here, but it's like this idea of "culture and design today suck because they're dictated by a handful of corporations; things were better <x> years ago when we had a different flavor of culture and design dictated by the same handful of corporations!"
IDK. It just gives me a yucky feeling when a presumably anti-conformist, maybe even anti-capitalist rejection of modern design goes on to, in the same breath, prop up the Sony Walkman(TM) as a rich cultural artifact from a better era. The antidote to our corporate overlords shouldn't be a time machine to revive an earlier version of those same corporate overlords.
I suspect it’s less a nostalgia for a less corporate time, and more of a nostalgia for an earlier stage of the product lifecycle. Pretty much every technology follows a similar path - after an initial version proves the market there’s an explosion of manufacturers and designs all trying something new before eventually the product becomes mature and settles on a single design.
The nostalgia is for a time when a new product could genuinely surprise you.
As much as I like to reminisce about the good old days, I'm not sure the thesis is entirely true. In the 1990s, home computers were more conspicuous, but we didn't really have such a variety of designs. Almost every PC-compatible computer looked the same: a beige plastic monolith. Most corded phones looked the same, most TVs looked the same, most film cameras looked the same, etc.
Now that we look at the designs from 20-30 years ago, they stand out simply because they're outdated. In another 20-30 years, someone will write an article about the beauty of "glass slab" phones of the 2020s.
We also tend to cherry-pick outliers. You can find some beautiful designs in every decade, but they're not necessarily representative of everyday life. There's a modern-day company making portable cassette players that look like this:
The Frutiger Aero aesthetic was a colourful blip in a sea of beige, and was a brief signifier of wealth and status - a watery and glassy spin-off of 80s Memphis.
Aside from that, the trend in tech always been functional geometric modernism - predominantly black, white, grey, and beige, with occasional very controlled splash colours, predominantly straight lines, rectangles, circles, and simple curves, predominantly an implied or explicit grid.
It doesn't matter if you're looking at cars, synths, computers, offices, or cafes - it's all the same design language. Organic elements in spaces are limited to wood panelling (for status, as always) and verrrry occasionally some tame plants or trees.
There are no organic or chaotic elements in mainstream industrial design. Everything is very carefully controlled, sometimes literally down to the last micron.
As a hardware founder, who takes great pride in our industrial design and how we've made the thinnest, and most sleek EEG ever, we wanted the device to basically disappear. Nobody wants to wear an EEG headband, it isn't what they are buying. They are buying the neurostimulation that provides better sleep.
On the other hand, our industrial engineer wanted our headband to look just like a headband. It would be completely enclosed in fabric.
I wanted it to be appealing visually, not look "weird" but also, remind the user that there was magic inside. This is one of the reasons we left a bit of the electronics poking out the back and that element has a bit of ornamentation to it. (https://affectablesleep.com).
I have a folding phone. It isn't devoid of design. The design makes it function.
I think the article is confusing ornamentation with industrial design.
My laptop (Asus something) has a ceramic something finish with some etching on it. That's ornamentation. It's feel. Same with the speaker grill holes, they have some design to them.
Is it dull? It certainly isn't ground breaking. But it's pleasing, and it gets out of the way. But how much ornamentation do I want?
Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.
The TV example in the post doesn't really explain that we needed to have these plastic gray cases for TVs with speakers and buttons. But why was that a better look than just a screen?
To my eyes, those old TVs are ugly. But I remember when Sony brought out an interface where the channel showed up on the screen and had faded away after displaying the number, and I was blown away at how beautiful the interface was.
Additionally, my Kindle Scribe is a pretty boring slab, but I've tried buying nice pens to go with it. I don't think the Lamy (which I currently have) is a beautiful design, but it is better than the pen that comes with the device, which is devoid of any emotion.
As we move to glasses interfaces, I think we'll see a new heyday of electronics design.
> Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.
Everyone up and down the socioeconomic ladder in the US uses Apple devices, and you can buy them at Walmart and Costco for less than $1,000. If someone is assuming “status” from seeing an Apple product, that seems to be a mistake by the observer.
There is also alot of insecurity on the other side that is oddly enough projected on Apple users: “They must be using that as a status symbol or they are trying to look creative!” It’s always been like that really, Apple tends to fire up its own opposition. In reality Apple stuff are just workhorses now, and many of us just have an aversion to PCs that fall apart after a few months, or phones that kind of work but not really well, or tablets that double as space heaters…Apple is just the safe choice these days, the choice of cowards like me.
$1000 is more than the monthly wage of many people around the world, including many in USA (where the minimum daily wage has stagnated for decades).
e.g., in most Asian and African countries, Apple is considered as a luxury brand.
Of course, the Apple fanboys will be quick to compare it to Samsung and other companies who also sell $1000+ premium phones.
But all those companies also sell budget phones that are very affordable. It's only Apple that refuses to sell budget phones. In fact, even Apple's cheapest phones (SE models) are unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
So yeah, when most people look at Apple products, they do assume their buyer to be "prestige status" (one who prefers luxury good/product).
It is also why Apple refuses to bundle chargers and cables (or at least, it tried to do so, until EU forced it to bundle them; but Apple does such cheapskate shenanigans in the other continents, where pro-consumer watchdogs/laws are lax), because it knows its fans will buy whatever it sells at whatever price points it sells even if basic accessories are not bundled. Unfortunately, Samsung and other companies are also following suit on such evil (anti-consumer) tactics.
Apple is also notorious for making it very hard for customers/third-parties to repair its products. This is why EU had to enforce its Right to Repair law on Apple stringently, and EU also forced Apple to give USB Type-C charging port (instead of Lighting port) on its devices which other manufacturers were doing so since years.
TLDR: Companies can act evil only if we let them get away with their evil ways.
> It is also why Apple refuses to bundle chargers and cables (or at least, it tried to do so, until EU forced it to bundle them; but Apple does such cheapskate shenanigans in the other continents, where pro-consumer watchdogs/laws are lax)
You got this backwards, the EU is who has been pushing for the un-bundling of chargers. That was the whole reason for their push towards universal USB/USB-C adoption - so you could buy a new phone and keep using your old cable and charger, for environmental reasons.
This is also quite explicit in the EU law - it literally requires sellers to offer buying a device without the charger if you don't need one
> Directive (EU) 2022/2380, Article 3a
> Where an economic operator offers to consumers and other end-users the possibility to acquire the radio
equipment referred to in Article 3(4) together with a charging device, the economic operator shall also offer the
consumers and other end-users the possibility of acquiring that radio equipment without any charging device.
The only country that requires Apple to bundle a charger is Brazil.
>But all those companies also sell budget phones that are very affordable. It's only Apple that refuses to sell budget phones. In fact, even Apple's cheapest phones (SE models) are unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
90% of everything most Americans buy is unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
If I live in America (or a similarly developed country), then that definition of "prestige" is useless.
Optimizing a screen to a slab (really a sheet) is like optimizing a nail to head shank and point. That's the underlying primitive form factor. You can change the ratio of threads and drive types to differentiate, but you don't undermine the underlying design to make the tool worse without good reason. And there really aren't many good reasons outside reducing to more essential paper/portal like properties, i.e. foldables, and hopefully soon scrollable.
Dieter Rams' style of industrial design has just dominated influencing electronic product design. More expressive industrial design at large isn't dead. Even in the electronics adjacent spaces you have boutique companies making interesting industrial designs for things like synths or computer keyboards.
Though I think there's another perspective to entertain here that isn't just about the industrial design style of the phone or display. Instead, think about how many discrete products general computing devices have subsumed. The disappointment comes across to me less that a slab is consumer computers dominate form, it's that the slab has made the rest of environment more sparse and now a slab is the sole focus point.
It's like books - another device like smart phones, computer and tv that are mostly about the information they contain rather than the form of the product. Those have also been rectangular with the same form of pages and a binding at the end for hundreds of years because people want them to read, not to have some weird shape or binding mechanism.
Non information products still have a variety of design forms. People say cars are bland but a Mini, Ferrari F80, F150 pickup, Range Rover etc have pretty different forms.
The modern smartphone has become an indispensable tool of daily life, its familiar “slab” design refined to minimize cognitive load.
For something I handle hundreds of times a day, I want it to be unobtrusive — free from design gimmicks or unnecessary distractions.
In that sense, the “Cambrian Explosion” of early smartphone designs has undergone its own form of natural selection — a Cambrian decimation that left only the most functional forms to survive.
Unlike the author, I think featureless slab phones are an improvement, yet I'd like my phone to have several user-customizable buttons on one side (or maybe both?) in order to be able to call up some of the phone's functionality solely by touch. An on-screen app shouldn't always be the sole interface to a device, in my opinion.
My theory is that stuff like this converges on the most economic and market-accepted form factor over time. Look at airliners over the last half of the 20th century - you had all kinds of weird and interesting designs (727, CV990, L-1011, Concorde). Now you invariably have a tube with two engines hung off the wings. Yawn.
I think the slabness of form that inhabits current design is a great opportunity. I see it as way to embed sophisticated technology that a small firm could never develop on our own. I’m optimistic that very unique form factors catering too hyper specific tasks is right around the corner. I’m 1991 BSID graduate from the now defunct University of the Arts. I feel technology is finally achieving the promise of the 1990’s promise.
I eye the TE TP7 on my desk. I use it most days. Its design speaks to my millennial taste like candy. Sometimes I just hold it in my hand like I did with my Walkman or discmans of my youth. I admit some of the yarning is for nostalgia. Yet, surely task specific devices can offer better utility than single screen slabs in certain cases.
Teenage Engineering sells toys to rich people. Their products are all less functional than a budget laptop with some software. I love the TE design and products but it's pretty obvious why not everyone is doing this. They are selling a voice recorder that costs more than an entire iPhone which has a voice recorder app preinstalled.
A device which just provides a blank screen for the software to take over can perform the task of many single purpose gadgets, often even better. It just isn't as fun.
Well, the TE's audio recorder is very expensive, but comparing it to the iPhone's voice recorder is ridiculous, at least compare it to a semi-pro or pro field recorder.
As far as I can tell, the only thing the TE product does that your phone doesn’t is record from multiple external mics at once. Almost everything in the marketing page would work just as well on your phone though.
That's a big 'almost'. The number of channels you can record is a pretty important feature on a field recorder. What I mean is that it makes no sense comparing it to an iPhone. You could compare it to a pro field recorder, that's cheaper than an iPhone, and the features are more comparable.
Teenage Engineering's products for consumers are things like a big white cube that's a speaker and a round puck-like thing that's a remote. Their products with lots of buttons and knobs are for audio creators. Look at a mixing board.
For phones I prefer a bit more generic look. If I keep something for years then it can’t really be pink with polkadots just because that’s how i felt on day of purchase. Black rectangle works in that context
I view touch screens, keyboards and mice as the saddle points in the usability landscape. These kinds of decides don't change much because their designs have converged to an efficient form factor, from a usability perspective. That does not mean there is nothing better, perhaps these devices sit in a false saddle point, and perhaps there is something better that has not been invented yet.
There are lots of electronics that have a wider range of industrial design.
Even looking just at phones, Nothing is doing interesting things.
But looking more broadly, some categories that have interesting design work going on:
Synthesizers & other electronic music devices: Arturia (minifreak and microfreak) and Teenage Engineering are quite well known but there are lots of interesting smaller players
Headphones: Design has become quite a differentiator - things like the B&W PX8s and the Apple AirPod Max have their own interesting design languages
Coffee machines: Everything from interesting pod machine designs to things like Rocket Espresso machines all have distinct designs.
I think the trend of removing "artistic" elements from products has been continuing for literally centuries; e.g. if you look at industrial machinery, 18th and 19th century designs are extraordinarily ornate even compared to early 20th, which are themselves far more artistic than late 20th and 21st century machines.
You pay a premium for mid-century furniture. Even reproductions. Some furniture of that era never stopped production because the design keeps it in demand.
There will always be a market for bland IKEA/Target/whatever. But not everyone wants to sit on a log like a caveman.
Their take on monitors that aren't just the typical black plastic office-aesthetic slabs. I like what they've done with it, and personally would have been interested but this is 27" 4k and I can't downgrade from 5k (converted an old imac to work as an external display and I love it!)
> The peak here was arguably achieved during the 1990s and early 2000s
Interesting coincidence how the peak was achieved right when most of the audience would have been children or young adults, and therefore a time they're likely to be nostalgic for.
Talking about TVs the article goes all the way back to 2007, and not the console TVs which were actual wooden pieces of furniture with scope for artistry in the enclosure, not just "industrial design" or "Frutiger Aero" or some other buzzword.
So, I was curious because I have this pretty cool like vintage looking popcorn maker, and I was wondering, is industrial design really dead? So I searched Amazon for "vintage mp3 player" and found this, "MECHEN M30 HiFi MP3 Player"
So, like most things, It seems like Industrial Design is alive and well, just not from the big dominant players; and isn't that what you would expect? Wouldn't you expect you'd be celebrating smaller indy shops than the big monopolies?
But, for some reason these small shops have become so anonymized that they're out of our collective consciousness, and I think there's truth to this, the problem in a sense isn't that industrial design is dead, or there are no interesting electronics, but there are in fact too many players making interesting electronics, and there's no "middle class" anymore.
TV's and smartphones are an interesting place to start though, I'd generally say that TV's and Smart Phones have improved by just being a big screen. Cars seem to me like a better example, where it feels like even companies that used to pride themselves as being different (Volkswagen) now basically all cars look the same.
I wonder if this motivates the recent interest in "cyberdecks", computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs designed to resemble futuristic computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs, replete with offset displays, displays with unusual aspect ratios, nonstandard ergonomics and form factors, etc. The design of these devices is definitely intended to inject style and pizzazz into a field largely dominated by gray rectangular slabs.
Upon reading (or rather, listening to) Neuromancer again, I get the feeling that the original "cyberspace deck" envisioned by Gibson was a plain, rectilinear device not at all like the greeble-encrusted gadgets you find on r/cyberdeck. It's very sparsely described, but we do know it has a built-in keyboard, "trodes" for the brain-computer interface to serve as a display, and with all this talk of "ROM constructs" and "slotting in" it accepts software via cartridge. In short—it probably resembled a 1980s home computer, like a TI-99/4A or an Atari 800XL. Gibson's technological world in his early cyberpunk works is very much informed by a cursory examination of the tech of the day, combined with a lot of imagination and guesswork.
Modern cyberdecks draw much more inspiration from all the cyberpunk stuff that emerged afterNeuromancer: movies like Strange Days and The Matrix; video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shin Megami Tensei, and even Wipeout; and anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which provide glimpses into a world in which technology might have evolved, visually and ergonomically, in a different direction from what it did. I find this sort of technofetishism fascinating for its role as a sort of roleplay of an imaginative alternate universe where modern-era tech was still cool and fun. A specific subgenre of this is the Amiga enthusiast community, where people soup up old Amiga hardware with modern, very expensive FPGA-based addons (the nearest a solo hobbyist can get to modern "custom chips") in an effort to show what computing might be like had Commodore not failed.
I always through the aesthetic was meant to evoke the sense that this was a bespoke, personalized device - i.e. it has been modified and customized to work for exactly one user.
I don't think you can have a world where mass-market technology looks like that, because why would it? Engineers with time, resources and technology would do what they do now - design for manufacturability and mass-market appeal.
That's the thing. Most cyberdecks that I've seen weren't really designed to be used as daily drivers so much as to look cool and/or be fun to build. From an ergonomic standpoint, most people are pretty well served by a standard desktop or laptop form factor; those with special needs probably would not make the same choices to serve those needs as are made by cyberdeck builders. (I'm talking the tiny, off-center displays, knobs and toggle switches on the front panel, etc.) Of course the best, coolest builds are custom; that is a mode of expression by the builder. Kinda like the next level of case modding. But even then it's not just a custom-built computer, it's one with an aesthetic sense of "the street finds its own uses for things" in a crapsack futuristic environment like the ones Gibson wrote of.
There are some really cool devices that split the difference between cyberdecks and mass-market devices; the MNT Reform and DevTerm come to mind. Sweet-looking as they are, they don't veer too far from standard laptop ergonomics, the DevTerm choosing to emulate those of the popular Tandy 100 series of portable computers.
Dull electronics, because of the convenience factor. Nobody wants to carry a brick anymore, and instead of a huge CRT monitor, we can have 4-6 thin displays for the same weight. Also, no need to buy a Walkman or cassettes because streaming is convenient. This is the natural evolution of tech, serving humans to live more conveniently. Nostalgic? Yes. Desirable? No.
There are still weirdly shaped phones sold today (Unihertz, for example) and strange-looking music players for the home. They are not selling well because nobody wants them.
I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as makers tried to figure out what would work best. It's easy to wax nostalgic for all the various flip phones/slide-out phones/"twist" phones, etc., but the fact is the "glass slab" really ended up working best - it has a lot fewer components to wear, and the lack of physical controls means that apps have lots of freedom to make full use of the screen. The glass slab design won out over all the others.
If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot.
The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...
With cell phones it is also about moving the physical device out of your consciousness so you can better utilize the actual application. And because each app does a different and unknown thing, you can’t design your hardware around your software.
However, with cars I think that doesn’t hold. Cars don't need to disappears into the background. Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV. They are all the same and they are all equally ugly. Sacrificing a bit of aerodynamics for any level of personality would be a welcome shakeup.
> Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV
Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
When I was 20yo I thought cars are cool and having car that would stand out would be great.
Closing in on 40 I couldn’t care less. If it is safe, doesn’t break down, gets me to places I am happy.
I have my own ways to express myself as a person, car is definitely not the thing.
Same. I just bought pretty much the cheapest used EV I could find that looked alright to me and had enough range. Happy as a clam.
I'm not interested in wasting tens of thousands of dollars on slightly more comfortable seats and stuff like that. I could, it just doesn't seem worth it. I'd rather have the money for other things.
Maybe next time I'll buy a slightly more premium car like a Volvo EC30 or something like that, if I can find a nice used one for a decent price. I don't see any reason to buy new cars. In my market a 4 year old car (still under warranty) is literally less than half the price of a new one. I don't think the warranty is worth that much.
To add to this: I see anonymity becoming more desired by the general population as surveillance and threat of law enforcement, car thieves, and road rage amplifies.
Blending in feels much safer these days. Much like herd animal behavior.
I had a friend who had his local company logos all over the car.
After 2 or 3 years he had enough of „hey I saw you passing by can you do small thing for us while you’re around”.
I think he also went with as generic looking car as possible after that.
I'm mixed on touch screen vs physical controls happening. A Tesla has physical controls for shifting, turning, cruise control, current media and I guess you can include accelerate and brake. That said, I want all cars to be the same. I want them to have Android Audio, Apple CarPlay. I do not want custom apps in each car. I just want to connect my phone in and have it do all the things unrelated to operating the car itself.
So at least in some ways, I want them more the same, not less. I live in an area where Waymo is common so I see self driving cars all the time. In other words, unlike people not in an area like this, I have actual experience with them working and working well. As soon as they are available for purchase I will buy one. Ideally one with no controls. No steering wheel, no accelerator, no brake peddle, no turn signal. At which point, I suspect, like phones, they may get even more alike. All that stuff is un-needed in a level 5 self-driving car
I'm sure someone is going to respond such stuff will be needed for emergencies or whatever. I think that middle stage will only last 5-10 years and then they'll take out the manual controls. They took out manual controls from elevators 70 years ago. They're taking out almost all controls now. IIRC Toyota already has such vehicles. I know Honda showed of designs years ago. They're a platform that carries a box. The box can be a cargo box, a food truck box, a 12 person passenger box, more comfy 6 person box. No driver's seat.
You change gears on Teslas by swiping on the screens.
God, I have no idea if you're kidding or not.
Elevators still have manual controls, if you open a secret panel with a key, and turn another key to change the operating mode. See Deviant Ollam's talks.
Most people don't really care about cars. It's a tool that gets you places and carries your stuff. Ideally for the lowest cost. People care a lot more about safety ratings, fuel efficiency, and resale value than they to about unconventional design.
This seems intuitively obvious, new car buyers overwhelmingly put design way down the list of priorities.
I think it was the same in the 50s and 60s, just that the then car manufacturers hadn’t figured out how to compete in the other more important aspects as effectively.
I don't believe that. The pre-CAFE cars had soul. The new ones are all boring jellybeans.
Proof: look at a 1970 'Cuda. Tell me you wouldn't buy it in an instant if you had the cash!
https://www.classicautomall.com/vehicles/264/1970-plymouth-a...
Have fun with your jellybean! (Sorry)
I do have the cash, but I'm happy with my Opel Corsa-E that I bought used for mostly money I had sitting in my checking account.
It has heated seats, heated steering wheel, AC, backing camera/sensors, uses electricity which means it costs practically nothing to drive, doesn't make noise, isn't hard to get going in an uphill, and probably about 100 other advantages.
Funny, I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or sincere because I can’t tell the difference between that car and a Mustang or a Charger from the same decade.
I am sad for you.
In any case, the '67 and '68 Mustangs are the best looking of the Mustang line, and the '68 Dodge Charger is to die for.
If you cannot tell the difference, may I suggest you spend a wonderful evening watching "Bullitt".
When I was in high school, a friend of mine bought a '67 Mustang for $200, so of course he offered me a ride. I had never ridden in one before. I barely had the door closed when he stomped on the gas. What can I say, it was a transformative experience! I soon acquired one for myself. Converted it to a 4-speed, hopped up the engine, and had a grand time with it for years until a garbage truck turned it into an accordion.
I still miss that car.
But I did wind up replacing it with a 72 Dodge Challenger, which is close to being a Cuda. I spent a lot of money on its engine in the machine shop. I enjoy every second driving it, and giving friends rides in it.
Like me before I got the ride in the Mustang, you gotta get a ride in one before you dis it.
That’s hilariously ugly.
One part of what's driving cars to all look the same is mandated fuel-efficiency targets, which make aerodynamics a primary design factor that overrides nearly all others. Sacrificing any amount of aerodynamics is unlikely to happen under that regulatory environment.
This just isn't true.
It's very possible to make highly aerodynamic sedan, hatch and SUVs. Drag coefficients are available for most cars.
A bigger difference is detailing: things like mirrors make a huge difference.
In that case, estate cars would like a word with the current crop of SUVs
I think that's why cars like the PT Cruiser had decent sales and positive views, despite being an absolute piece of trash mechanically. I mean I thought it was ugly as hell, but it didn't look exactly like every other car which was nice.
So Cybertruck.
I was talking about car, not Home Depot refrigerator specials from 2010.
You just get burned alive when the computerised door handles stop working and the reinforced windows can't be broken.
The product demo showed how to handle the reinforced windows.
More like the Mazda cx5, Toyota rav4, and Honda crv. Those things are everywhere and then some.
People like them, and buy them. Not sure why the mystery.
I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it.
Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded.
And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile.
Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.
> It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
That actually started way sooner than in the 60s. For a good starting point see the 1910 essay Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos, but even that was a bit after the cultural change already started, though before it was widely applied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
I think it’s a mix of social media and risk aversion, this article touches on the broader discussion as it impacts many kinds of design
https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Brilliant, I have always felt that one of the major problems with machine learning, consequently LLMs, is the boring average based loss functions that under-represent the unique and the rare. It seems our collective civilization is using a similar function and heading in the same direction of optimizing for the average.
The world is rapidly homogenising. You see it with “air space” interior design - coffee shops have the same aesthetic in every major city in the world. You see it in local fashions. You see it as a tourist - travel anywhere in the world and the chances are you’ll find the same kind of shop selling the same kind of trinket. Made in China with a subtly different graphic on it to represent the country you’re in.
This has been happening ever since trade routes were established across Eurasia (Silk Road) or the Americas were discovered. It only keeps accelerating as movement and trade becomes easier.
If pockets of humanity could isolate themselves from the rest, we could get diversity growing again, that one sentinel island might be our only hope.
The general term for what you're describing here is a Dominant Design, and it has a lot of the characteristics of what you intuited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design
I think you are confusing optimal design for the design that makes them the most money by appealing to the maximum amount of people. It’s why all of our cars are now black, white, or silver/gray. Don’t you dare waste a bit of money on red paint someone might not want! So everything around us turns into gray goo that takes no chances at all so it can make the most money. Then it becomes a worse and worse feedback loop.
Cars all look the same now because, due to fuel economy regulations, they are all designed in a wind tunnel to minimize drag. Also, regulations cover all kinds of things, mainly to reduce injury to pedestrians.
You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.
> reduce injury to pedestrians
Strange then that everyone around me is driving some kind of high fronted armoured car
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with reducing injury to pedestrians and everything to do with reducing injury to occupants.
I think trucks are exempt from a lot of those rules.
> You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.
This seems like excessive hyperbole, I can reliably tell apart every marque on the road in my country by lights and grille shape.
So you can't tell from the side?
The current Ferrari lineup helpfully has a badge on the side. But even without that, something like the SF90 is pretty recognizable from the side:
https://www.gtrent.com/upload/images/modelli/ferrari/sf90_sp...
It's easy to romanticize a past where electronics were designed to be statements in your home or office, but I think that the reduction of glamour is more so a dialogue on the utility of these devices in a modern world.
Previously, personal computers in the home were something of a novelty that didn't necessarily have a ton of value or that value was still being discovered. And now we see that the content that is displayed on the digital screen is most of the value, and so akin to many Hollywood sci-fi takes, where the screen becomes just a piece of glass, modern technology is moving in that direction.
The device itself is not the point, but the content that the device enables access to is.
I think at least in part the unwillingness to explore that is making our society shades of gray and shapes of blocks "to maximize value" and "protect resale value" etc is just a result of widespread reduction in purchasing power.
Part of me agrees with the design takeaways here, and part of me admittedly prefers when my devices are as slim and unobtrusive as possible (no amount of lost desk space is worth the aesthetics of a zany computer monitor for me), but either way I'm always a little wary of these "remember the good old days of tech?" comparisons. Sometimes it feels like they're creating a false dichotomy where yesterday's devices were more pleasant to look at because they weren't tainted by corporate greed, and that today's devices are somehow uglier because all companies care about now is profit.
But these have always been mass-produced consumer devices. Even if you prefer the aesthetics of the original iMac to today's iMac, and even to the extent that corporate greed has arguably gotten worse, your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
This seems like a very strange comment. I don't think the materials and design of today's macs are any more profitable than the old ones. They used to make macs out of plastic, now they use much more premium materials. They look less fun, more high quality, and more professional. That has nothing to do with greed or profit margins, it's just what people actually want now.
I think you and I are probably in agreement there :) I would also wager, although obviously it's hard to say without hard data, that today's Macs are roughly as profitable as yesterday's Macs, and that today's design choices are at least partly a reflection of evolving materials, changing tastes, etc.
The thing I'm referring to is an attitude I've seen in TFA and elsewhere, although in the TFA it seems somewhat implied, where people conflate their preference or nostalgia for old products with a belief that the market behind those older products was any less cold and detached than the market for today's products. I don't know if I'm articulating it well, and there's additional context that's hard to surface here, but it's like this idea of "culture and design today suck because they're dictated by a handful of corporations; things were better <x> years ago when we had a different flavor of culture and design dictated by the same handful of corporations!"
IDK. It just gives me a yucky feeling when a presumably anti-conformist, maybe even anti-capitalist rejection of modern design goes on to, in the same breath, prop up the Sony Walkman(TM) as a rich cultural artifact from a better era. The antidote to our corporate overlords shouldn't be a time machine to revive an earlier version of those same corporate overlords.
I suspect it’s less a nostalgia for a less corporate time, and more of a nostalgia for an earlier stage of the product lifecycle. Pretty much every technology follows a similar path - after an initial version proves the market there’s an explosion of manufacturers and designs all trying something new before eventually the product becomes mature and settles on a single design.
The nostalgia is for a time when a new product could genuinely surprise you.
> your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
I don’t object to making companies a lot of money, so long as what I get is worthwhile.
As much as I like to reminisce about the good old days, I'm not sure the thesis is entirely true. In the 1990s, home computers were more conspicuous, but we didn't really have such a variety of designs. Almost every PC-compatible computer looked the same: a beige plastic monolith. Most corded phones looked the same, most TVs looked the same, most film cameras looked the same, etc.
Now that we look at the designs from 20-30 years ago, they stand out simply because they're outdated. In another 20-30 years, someone will write an article about the beauty of "glass slab" phones of the 2020s.
We also tend to cherry-pick outliers. You can find some beautiful designs in every decade, but they're not necessarily representative of everyday life. There's a modern-day company making portable cassette players that look like this:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MfFjHvcZjFzZLRPa4p7QZm-970...
Striking and prize-worthy, but not how we roll.
Counterpoint for the 2000s era https://www.google.com/search?q=frutiger+aero+pc+1990s+2000s...
The Frutiger Aero aesthetic was a colourful blip in a sea of beige, and was a brief signifier of wealth and status - a watery and glassy spin-off of 80s Memphis.
Aside from that, the trend in tech always been functional geometric modernism - predominantly black, white, grey, and beige, with occasional very controlled splash colours, predominantly straight lines, rectangles, circles, and simple curves, predominantly an implied or explicit grid.
It doesn't matter if you're looking at cars, synths, computers, offices, or cafes - it's all the same design language. Organic elements in spaces are limited to wood panelling (for status, as always) and verrrry occasionally some tame plants or trees.
There are no organic or chaotic elements in mainstream industrial design. Everything is very carefully controlled, sometimes literally down to the last micron.
Half of those are the same outlier iMac (note, from the 90s) as in the original article, and the rest are indeed grey boxes?
I'm really torn by this.
As a hardware founder, who takes great pride in our industrial design and how we've made the thinnest, and most sleek EEG ever, we wanted the device to basically disappear. Nobody wants to wear an EEG headband, it isn't what they are buying. They are buying the neurostimulation that provides better sleep.
On the other hand, our industrial engineer wanted our headband to look just like a headband. It would be completely enclosed in fabric.
I wanted it to be appealing visually, not look "weird" but also, remind the user that there was magic inside. This is one of the reasons we left a bit of the electronics poking out the back and that element has a bit of ornamentation to it. (https://affectablesleep.com).
I have a folding phone. It isn't devoid of design. The design makes it function.
I think the article is confusing ornamentation with industrial design.
My laptop (Asus something) has a ceramic something finish with some etching on it. That's ornamentation. It's feel. Same with the speaker grill holes, they have some design to them.
Is it dull? It certainly isn't ground breaking. But it's pleasing, and it gets out of the way. But how much ornamentation do I want?
Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.
The TV example in the post doesn't really explain that we needed to have these plastic gray cases for TVs with speakers and buttons. But why was that a better look than just a screen?
To my eyes, those old TVs are ugly. But I remember when Sony brought out an interface where the channel showed up on the screen and had faded away after displaying the number, and I was blown away at how beautiful the interface was.
Additionally, my Kindle Scribe is a pretty boring slab, but I've tried buying nice pens to go with it. I don't think the Lamy (which I currently have) is a beautiful design, but it is better than the pen that comes with the device, which is devoid of any emotion.
As we move to glasses interfaces, I think we'll see a new heyday of electronics design.
> Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.
Everyone up and down the socioeconomic ladder in the US uses Apple devices, and you can buy them at Walmart and Costco for less than $1,000. If someone is assuming “status” from seeing an Apple product, that seems to be a mistake by the observer.
I think you're making the assumption that socio-economic status is the only variable.
There is also the "I have Apple, I'm creative". "I have Apple, I'm cooler than Android".
I don't know if the blue/green bubble thing is about socioeconomic differences, or if it's just about "you're not as good as I am".
If you're so sure Apple doesn't have a status feature, then what's the whole green/blue bubble about?
There is also alot of insecurity on the other side that is oddly enough projected on Apple users: “They must be using that as a status symbol or they are trying to look creative!” It’s always been like that really, Apple tends to fire up its own opposition. In reality Apple stuff are just workhorses now, and many of us just have an aversion to PCs that fall apart after a few months, or phones that kind of work but not really well, or tablets that double as space heaters…Apple is just the safe choice these days, the choice of cowards like me.
They say it’s to distinguish SMS from iMessage as if anyone would possibly care.
I care, as iMessage offers better quality photos/videos than MMS.
Also, international MMS costs money, while iMessage is free regardless of location.
$1000 is more than the monthly wage of many people around the world, including many in USA (where the minimum daily wage has stagnated for decades).
e.g., in most Asian and African countries, Apple is considered as a luxury brand.
Of course, the Apple fanboys will be quick to compare it to Samsung and other companies who also sell $1000+ premium phones.
But all those companies also sell budget phones that are very affordable. It's only Apple that refuses to sell budget phones. In fact, even Apple's cheapest phones (SE models) are unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
So yeah, when most people look at Apple products, they do assume their buyer to be "prestige status" (one who prefers luxury good/product).
It is also why Apple refuses to bundle chargers and cables (or at least, it tried to do so, until EU forced it to bundle them; but Apple does such cheapskate shenanigans in the other continents, where pro-consumer watchdogs/laws are lax), because it knows its fans will buy whatever it sells at whatever price points it sells even if basic accessories are not bundled. Unfortunately, Samsung and other companies are also following suit on such evil (anti-consumer) tactics.
Apple is also notorious for making it very hard for customers/third-parties to repair its products. This is why EU had to enforce its Right to Repair law on Apple stringently, and EU also forced Apple to give USB Type-C charging port (instead of Lighting port) on its devices which other manufacturers were doing so since years.
TLDR: Companies can act evil only if we let them get away with their evil ways.
> It is also why Apple refuses to bundle chargers and cables (or at least, it tried to do so, until EU forced it to bundle them; but Apple does such cheapskate shenanigans in the other continents, where pro-consumer watchdogs/laws are lax)
You got this backwards, the EU is who has been pushing for the un-bundling of chargers. That was the whole reason for their push towards universal USB/USB-C adoption - so you could buy a new phone and keep using your old cable and charger, for environmental reasons.
This is also quite explicit in the EU law - it literally requires sellers to offer buying a device without the charger if you don't need one
> Directive (EU) 2022/2380, Article 3a
> Where an economic operator offers to consumers and other end-users the possibility to acquire the radio equipment referred to in Article 3(4) together with a charging device, the economic operator shall also offer the consumers and other end-users the possibility of acquiring that radio equipment without any charging device.
The only country that requires Apple to bundle a charger is Brazil.
>But all those companies also sell budget phones that are very affordable. It's only Apple that refuses to sell budget phones. In fact, even Apple's cheapest phones (SE models) are unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
90% of everything most Americans buy is unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
If I live in America (or a similarly developed country), then that definition of "prestige" is useless.
Less than $1000?! Non-Apple devices can be got for less than $200...
You can get an android phone for $30. It won't be an amazing high end phone obviously, but it'll work.
Optimizing a screen to a slab (really a sheet) is like optimizing a nail to head shank and point. That's the underlying primitive form factor. You can change the ratio of threads and drive types to differentiate, but you don't undermine the underlying design to make the tool worse without good reason. And there really aren't many good reasons outside reducing to more essential paper/portal like properties, i.e. foldables, and hopefully soon scrollable.
Dieter Rams' style of industrial design has just dominated influencing electronic product design. More expressive industrial design at large isn't dead. Even in the electronics adjacent spaces you have boutique companies making interesting industrial designs for things like synths or computer keyboards.
Though I think there's another perspective to entertain here that isn't just about the industrial design style of the phone or display. Instead, think about how many discrete products general computing devices have subsumed. The disappointment comes across to me less that a slab is consumer computers dominate form, it's that the slab has made the rest of environment more sparse and now a slab is the sole focus point.
It's like books - another device like smart phones, computer and tv that are mostly about the information they contain rather than the form of the product. Those have also been rectangular with the same form of pages and a binding at the end for hundreds of years because people want them to read, not to have some weird shape or binding mechanism.
Non information products still have a variety of design forms. People say cars are bland but a Mini, Ferrari F80, F150 pickup, Range Rover etc have pretty different forms.
The modern smartphone has become an indispensable tool of daily life, its familiar “slab” design refined to minimize cognitive load.
For something I handle hundreds of times a day, I want it to be unobtrusive — free from design gimmicks or unnecessary distractions.
In that sense, the “Cambrian Explosion” of early smartphone designs has undergone its own form of natural selection — a Cambrian decimation that left only the most functional forms to survive.
Unlike the author, I think featureless slab phones are an improvement, yet I'd like my phone to have several user-customizable buttons on one side (or maybe both?) in order to be able to call up some of the phone's functionality solely by touch. An on-screen app shouldn't always be the sole interface to a device, in my opinion.
My theory is that stuff like this converges on the most economic and market-accepted form factor over time. Look at airliners over the last half of the 20th century - you had all kinds of weird and interesting designs (727, CV990, L-1011, Concorde). Now you invariably have a tube with two engines hung off the wings. Yawn.
Hardware is now a blank canvas for the software to flourish. Not really a bad thing.
Plus there's still Teenage Engineering if you want things that look nice when powered off :)
I think the slabness of form that inhabits current design is a great opportunity. I see it as way to embed sophisticated technology that a small firm could never develop on our own. I’m optimistic that very unique form factors catering too hyper specific tasks is right around the corner. I’m 1991 BSID graduate from the now defunct University of the Arts. I feel technology is finally achieving the promise of the 1990’s promise.
I eye the TE TP7 on my desk. I use it most days. Its design speaks to my millennial taste like candy. Sometimes I just hold it in my hand like I did with my Walkman or discmans of my youth. I admit some of the yarning is for nostalgia. Yet, surely task specific devices can offer better utility than single screen slabs in certain cases.
Pales in comparison to the Nagra IV-S.
https://www.nagraaudio.com/product/nagra-iv-family/
There is no software to make the design beautiful if the device is on standby on a desk. It’s just a blank rectangle.
The real question is why don’t more mainstream electronics look as creative as teenage engineering?
The kind of designs that (e.g.) Sony was selling on the scale of millions in the early 2000s were incredibly unique and eye-catching.
Sony S2 Sports WM-FS566
Sony Sports Walkman D-SJ01 Portable CD Player
Just to name a couple.
Teenage Engineering sells toys to rich people. Their products are all less functional than a budget laptop with some software. I love the TE design and products but it's pretty obvious why not everyone is doing this. They are selling a voice recorder that costs more than an entire iPhone which has a voice recorder app preinstalled.
A device which just provides a blank screen for the software to take over can perform the task of many single purpose gadgets, often even better. It just isn't as fun.
Well, the TE's audio recorder is very expensive, but comparing it to the iPhone's voice recorder is ridiculous, at least compare it to a semi-pro or pro field recorder.
As far as I can tell, the only thing the TE product does that your phone doesn’t is record from multiple external mics at once. Almost everything in the marketing page would work just as well on your phone though.
That's a big 'almost'. The number of channels you can record is a pretty important feature on a field recorder. What I mean is that it makes no sense comparing it to an iPhone. You could compare it to a pro field recorder, that's cheaper than an iPhone, and the features are more comparable.
This is why companies like teenageengineering.com has a niche slice of the market. We need similar companies out there, albeit with much lower prices.
Teenage Engineering's products for consumers are things like a big white cube that's a speaker and a round puck-like thing that's a remote. Their products with lots of buttons and knobs are for audio creators. Look at a mixing board.
For phones I prefer a bit more generic look. If I keep something for years then it can’t really be pink with polkadots just because that’s how i felt on day of purchase. Black rectangle works in that context
I view touch screens, keyboards and mice as the saddle points in the usability landscape. These kinds of decides don't change much because their designs have converged to an efficient form factor, from a usability perspective. That does not mean there is nothing better, perhaps these devices sit in a false saddle point, and perhaps there is something better that has not been invented yet.
There are lots of electronics that have a wider range of industrial design.
Even looking just at phones, Nothing is doing interesting things.
But looking more broadly, some categories that have interesting design work going on:
Synthesizers & other electronic music devices: Arturia (minifreak and microfreak) and Teenage Engineering are quite well known but there are lots of interesting smaller players
Headphones: Design has become quite a differentiator - things like the B&W PX8s and the Apple AirPod Max have their own interesting design languages
Coffee machines: Everything from interesting pod machine designs to things like Rocket Espresso machines all have distinct designs.
There are some exceptions to that, like for example the Nothing Phone 3: https://www.wired.com/review/nothing-phone-3/ But yes, I’d like to see more diversity along those lines.
I think the trend of removing "artistic" elements from products has been continuing for literally centuries; e.g. if you look at industrial machinery, 18th and 19th century designs are extraordinarily ornate even compared to early 20th, which are themselves far more artistic than late 20th and 21st century machines.
Don't hold up for furniture, though.
You pay a premium for mid-century furniture. Even reproductions. Some furniture of that era never stopped production because the design keeps it in demand.
There will always be a market for bland IKEA/Target/whatever. But not everyone wants to sit on a log like a caveman.
Just today I came across Home Tech Co: https://www.hometechco.com/
Their take on monitors that aren't just the typical black plastic office-aesthetic slabs. I like what they've done with it, and personally would have been interested but this is 27" 4k and I can't downgrade from 5k (converted an old imac to work as an external display and I love it!)
I don't care about mobile phone design. I want just a rectangle with a screen. Like Star Trek's PADDs and LCARS.
I would have agreed with you until I saw the mate XT, now I want my phone-tablet-laptop. That's a future I'd enjoy.
> The peak here was arguably achieved during the 1990s and early 2000s
Interesting coincidence how the peak was achieved right when most of the audience would have been children or young adults, and therefore a time they're likely to be nostalgic for.
Talking about TVs the article goes all the way back to 2007, and not the console TVs which were actual wooden pieces of furniture with scope for artistry in the enclosure, not just "industrial design" or "Frutiger Aero" or some other buzzword.
So, I was curious because I have this pretty cool like vintage looking popcorn maker, and I was wondering, is industrial design really dead? So I searched Amazon for "vintage mp3 player" and found this, "MECHEN M30 HiFi MP3 Player"
https://a.co/d/hJyBsyw
So, like most things, It seems like Industrial Design is alive and well, just not from the big dominant players; and isn't that what you would expect? Wouldn't you expect you'd be celebrating smaller indy shops than the big monopolies?
But, for some reason these small shops have become so anonymized that they're out of our collective consciousness, and I think there's truth to this, the problem in a sense isn't that industrial design is dead, or there are no interesting electronics, but there are in fact too many players making interesting electronics, and there's no "middle class" anymore.
TV's and smartphones are an interesting place to start though, I'd generally say that TV's and Smart Phones have improved by just being a big screen. Cars seem to me like a better example, where it feels like even companies that used to pride themselves as being different (Volkswagen) now basically all cars look the same.
>MECHEN M30
I actually have that mp3 player, it's alright but you can't upload your own playlist files (granted I haven't looked into custom firmware yet).
No results for ctrl-f kitsch.
I wonder if this motivates the recent interest in "cyberdecks", computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs designed to resemble futuristic computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs, replete with offset displays, displays with unusual aspect ratios, nonstandard ergonomics and form factors, etc. The design of these devices is definitely intended to inject style and pizzazz into a field largely dominated by gray rectangular slabs.
Upon reading (or rather, listening to) Neuromancer again, I get the feeling that the original "cyberspace deck" envisioned by Gibson was a plain, rectilinear device not at all like the greeble-encrusted gadgets you find on r/cyberdeck. It's very sparsely described, but we do know it has a built-in keyboard, "trodes" for the brain-computer interface to serve as a display, and with all this talk of "ROM constructs" and "slotting in" it accepts software via cartridge. In short—it probably resembled a 1980s home computer, like a TI-99/4A or an Atari 800XL. Gibson's technological world in his early cyberpunk works is very much informed by a cursory examination of the tech of the day, combined with a lot of imagination and guesswork.
Modern cyberdecks draw much more inspiration from all the cyberpunk stuff that emerged after Neuromancer: movies like Strange Days and The Matrix; video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shin Megami Tensei, and even Wipeout; and anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which provide glimpses into a world in which technology might have evolved, visually and ergonomically, in a different direction from what it did. I find this sort of technofetishism fascinating for its role as a sort of roleplay of an imaginative alternate universe where modern-era tech was still cool and fun. A specific subgenre of this is the Amiga enthusiast community, where people soup up old Amiga hardware with modern, very expensive FPGA-based addons (the nearest a solo hobbyist can get to modern "custom chips") in an effort to show what computing might be like had Commodore not failed.
I always through the aesthetic was meant to evoke the sense that this was a bespoke, personalized device - i.e. it has been modified and customized to work for exactly one user.
I don't think you can have a world where mass-market technology looks like that, because why would it? Engineers with time, resources and technology would do what they do now - design for manufacturability and mass-market appeal.
That's the thing. Most cyberdecks that I've seen weren't really designed to be used as daily drivers so much as to look cool and/or be fun to build. From an ergonomic standpoint, most people are pretty well served by a standard desktop or laptop form factor; those with special needs probably would not make the same choices to serve those needs as are made by cyberdeck builders. (I'm talking the tiny, off-center displays, knobs and toggle switches on the front panel, etc.) Of course the best, coolest builds are custom; that is a mode of expression by the builder. Kinda like the next level of case modding. But even then it's not just a custom-built computer, it's one with an aesthetic sense of "the street finds its own uses for things" in a crapsack futuristic environment like the ones Gibson wrote of.
There are some really cool devices that split the difference between cyberdecks and mass-market devices; the MNT Reform and DevTerm come to mind. Sweet-looking as they are, they don't veer too far from standard laptop ergonomics, the DevTerm choosing to emulate those of the popular Tandy 100 series of portable computers.
Dull electronics, because of the convenience factor. Nobody wants to carry a brick anymore, and instead of a huge CRT monitor, we can have 4-6 thin displays for the same weight. Also, no need to buy a Walkman or cassettes because streaming is convenient. This is the natural evolution of tech, serving humans to live more conveniently. Nostalgic? Yes. Desirable? No.
There are still weirdly shaped phones sold today (Unihertz, for example) and strange-looking music players for the home. They are not selling well because nobody wants them.
I for one, like the commoditization of the mobile phones.
BS. Everyone is trying to make interesting designs - See Nothing and Teenage Engineering as just two examples.