designed to disappear
“In the end, its gonna be a box”
I often get the pleasure of working with 3D CAD surfacing experts, and I recall at one point we were discussing future projects to do together and I had to admit everything I was working on was “really just a box at this point.” We had a great discussion after that about how reductive tech design was getting - why it was that way, and whether we will have jobs anymore in a few years. Contrary to a lot of folks outside of ID who criticize tech for this reductive approach, I find it quite encouraging. The mechanisms driving simplified forms, humble gestures and contextually (and environmentally) relevant materials were evident to me and well worth defending.
Weeks later when I was asked to speak at IDC 2022, I took stock of what I would be up there to represent - an Industrial Designer working on cutting edge technology for Meta - and settled on this phenomena of designing things to “disappear” as a good topic to focus on. Should we feel good or bad about reducing tech objects to practically nothing? Are designers really kidding themselves that their carefully crafted little boxes actually blend into anything? Why not design tech to announce itself? Where is it all headed, and what’s next after that? All great stuff to ponder as the sweat started to gather on my brow and the deadline approached.
I settled on a narrative that that breaks down “disappearing” (in the context of tech design) into 3 stages. The first stage is where I’ve spent my entire career: as a steward for the future, crafting new offerings and evolving and improving them for human beings to adopt and learn from. The second stage is the nirvana where tech goes when it dies, after it has reached global ubiquity and usefulness. And the third stage is how it can often be reborn and take new forms.
I tried to pull examples from my design story where I could - and maybe pull in a little meta-ness for folks to chew on. Click the play link above to hear the live presentation, or read the notes below (or both! since the notes below have a little different take than the talk).
Often I see people ascribe non-descript tech objects as “invisible” - but these monoliths are so conspicous really.
Stage 1.
technology is born ugly, exclusive and complex
Compared to objects that have had thousands of years to evolve, technology has decades (at least) of evolution to do before it can be a part of everyday life
My design hero, Bill Buxton is famous for his “long nose of innovation” theory. It states that any breakthrough mainstream technology was invented at least 15 years before. It is partly a provocation - to cast a more critical eye on those tech icons who credited with the invention of world-changing technologies (like Jobs or Elon Musk maybe). The key inventions that powered great products like the iphone and the electric car were, in fact, invented and developed by others decades before those products came on the scene.
In both cases, though, I think we can credit these individuals for understanding what had to be done to make these inventions and technologies accessible and useful to more people. For Jobs, I think it was his personal sensitivity to UX and ability to empower design enough to achieve the highest levels of it. In Musk’s case, it may have more to do with his strategic eye for manufacturing and management of the resources required to make batteries at a reasonable cost and scale. In these two instances, there was a breakthrough. A moment of genius, or a turning point, whatever you call it, which led to the birth of great industries.
My first section of the talk attempts to allude to this. Technology is destined to erase its idiosyncrasies and, in a sense, disappear into itself. To become accessible and useful to as many people as possible. It is always stepping on its own feet, and the role of design is to clean all of the clumsiness and rid it of it’s unloved bits. The role of design, when tech is young, before it is fully formed and in everyone’s pocket, on everyone’s wrist, or in every home, is to simplify it and break it down to it’s most useful form. While Buxton’s theory may or may not be a provocation to separate inventors from industrialists, I think it’s also a love letter to technology - an acknowledgement that tech is often so young in our era - and there are lots of loveable technologies out there waiting to be tended to by a designer or an engineer and be transformed by that stewardship into something really great and ready to change the world.
For me, in a practical sense, it is about identifying what is more important than the object you are making. WHAT is the thing designed to disappear into? Stick with that on a gut level, without every sacrificing the craft, intention and beauty of the object itself, and the path to simplicity and elegance will be taken care of.
Stage 2.
When technology grows up, it is no longer technology
When technology grows up, it get’s its own noun
My long-time mentor, former colleague and friend Nick Oakley shared this concept with me years ago during the days when he and I toiled together in the beige-carpeted halls of Intel: “When technology grows up, you don’t call it technology anymore. You call it Soap. It gets its own noun.”
He is absolutely right, and this probably needs to get shouted from the rooftops of every design school on the globe. If you are working on VR, or AR, or bone-conductive audio devices, or SmartScreens, any old thing that takes a few adjectives and disclaimers to describe, you are likely (just like me and most of the most talented designers I know) like the little dutch boy with his finger in the dike, plugging holes and patching rough spots while polishing others as much as possible (I call this striving for perfection) prior to the next product launch. It feels like hanging from a cliff by your fingertips. These things are new, and powerful, and exciting, and already very useful in many ways, and it’s an absolute honor to work on them…but they are far from perfect and will need many years for the surrounding technologies, manufacturing methods, developers and cultural shifts to take place that would make these technologies finally and forever a part of every day life. Our job as tech designers is to get them as good as they can be NOW. This year. But there is always the next one and the next one that must be better. Once those cycles stop being giant leaps and start being little blips, when there is nothing left to remove and it works as elegantly, extensibly and efficiently as any person can make it work, if the tech has survived and have been welcomed into daily life, these tech things get their own noun and hundreds of companies will make their own versions of them. A century after that, if this seed of technology still exists at all, it will only be cosmetic differences that will distinguish your design from the others.
Stage 3.
new tech makes old tech obsolete and gives rise to new tech
This is no shocker - and it’s actually one of the most classic arguments against new tech when it is introduced. “If everyone starts using that thing, then no one will use this thing…and that would be a shame.” In fact, the argument is so old that even Aristotle mused thousands of years ago that educating common folks to read the written word would prevent them from using their own brains and coming up with their own ideas.
Most of the time these naysayers are wrong, sometimes they are right. Most of the time the adoption of the new thing gives birth to the next new thing and the universe grows a little bit. Look at all of the original thoughts those common folk came up with and wrote down over the centuries, Aristotle.
In our case, we’ve seen many products that used to employ industrial designers get sucked into the vortex of iOS and become products for interaction designers to develop. So much so, in fact, that the term Product Designer became a digital thing, and this upsets ID folks endlessly. But even this seismic revolution has disruption written in it’s future.
I finished my talk with this provocation: after decades of global investment and evolution which has been turning 3D objects into 2D apps (Stealing food from the mouths of Industrial Designers, according to some folks), the world is starting to shift toward the creation of new 3D experiences built inside an embodied internet (aka metaverse). Who better to lead this evolution than ID? What are the implications? What are the tools? What are you waiting for?