BlueScreenOfDeath

Industrial Design + The Digital Object.

Much like the industrial revolution, the new digital revolution of late has radically changed our world of objects, taking the field of industrial design beyond its traditional focus on aesthetics and function. The introduction of the digital object (being the new physical objects which help to engage us with the realm of digital technology. These objects are generally personal computers, cell phones and other digital gadgetry.) into industrial design and other digital design related disciplines has introduced many crucial new focal points in the design process, having a profound effect on the design of the object. Factors such as the interface, communication and miniaturization play a progressively stronger role upon the design of the object in contemporary product design.

In some ways however, through the introduction of the digital object, objects are losing their traditional focus upon aesthetics and function all together.

The miniaturization and digitalisation of the components that make up products allows us to abandon the physical parameters that made up these objects in the first place. Previously, an object’s form was heavily derived by the required technical components that came together to attain the objects purpose. The product took these components and housed them in what was more or less a package. This package was usually made of moulded plastics with ribs and other features on the interior and exterior to help contain the technical components of the object and hold the package together. Previously, the size of the technical components would have had an influence upon the exterior of this package through their size and mechanical requirements. Now, with the miniaturization of these technical components, they have far less or even in some cases no influence upon the exterior of the package. Now that the package has no influence from the inside out, objects become almost two dimensional in their lack of depth and understanding. Through the digitalisation and as a result, the miniaturization of the technical components in the package, the dominance of the component’s physical parameters has obviously decreased. This offers a greater freedom of form for the object now since it no longer needs to conform to the strict parameters set out by it’s large, heavy mechanical components of the past. Debatably, the loss of these larger, heavier components in some cases has caused many digital objects to loose their previous unique identities.

The idea of function is also lost as a key player in design through the introduction of the digital object, or at least distorted from its original meaning:

“The first aim of all modern objects is manipulatability (‘manipulatible’ being virtually synonymous with ‘functional’). But just what is the nature of the ‘hand which thus determines the forms of these objects? Certainly no longer the prehensible organ that focuses effort: rather, nothing more than the abstract sign of manipulability, to which buttons, handles and so on are all the better suited in that operation concerned no longer calls for manual labour and, indeed, takes place elsewhere. Here we rediscover (though now on the morphological plane) the myth of naturalness of which we spoke above: the human body delegates no more than the signs of its presence to objects whose functioning, in any case, is independent from now on. At the very most it delegates its ‘extremities’, while objects for their part, are ‘contoured’ in accordance with an abstract morphological meaning. There is a collusion of forms here, which no longer refers to man save by way of allusion. It is in this sense only that the object’s form ‘weds’ the hand, that Airbborne’s armchair (of which more later) ‘weds’ the shape of your body: one form adapts to another. The traditional object or tool, by contrast, was not in any way ‘wedded’ to human forms; what it was wedded was the human physical effort and human gestures – indeed, Today the human body would seem to be present only as the abstract justification for the finished form of the functional object. Functionality is thus no longer the imposition of a real task, but simply the adaptation of one form to another (as of handle to hand) and the consequent supersession or omission of the actual process of work.” (Baudrillard, the System of Objects, pg52-53)

Functionalization now separates itself from the idea of rationality. Design of the electronic object is guided more design by emotion than rational thought, but still manages to maintain its functional attitude.

“This radical change in the landscape of consumption is due to the digital revolution. In the design of micro-electronic black boxes, the form can no longer be determined by the function. Rational form criteria no longer exist. At this point, we can therefore provide the first interim result: Emotional Design suppresses form in the sense of `form follows function’. We no longer believe that form follows function but we develop a more flexible and more discriminating concept: design is the entity of the difference between form and function. The design of the immaterial can no longer be developed `materially’.” – The meaning of surface.” (Bolz, The Meaning of Surface.)

Function in the digital object is no longer about defining its form in order to produce optimal results in its own personal operation, separated from the whole family of digital objects. This is due to the fact that through digital miniaturisation, mechanical and electric principles are not what governs the way in which the digital object is operated by its user. Functionalization now enters a new unprecedented territory. The digital object is designed to blend smoothly into its species, forced to be operated in a similar manner to that of other digital objects, this generally being a screen, button interface. This homogenisation of the general system of digital objects helps to give the user an understanding of the electronic object – a depthless, two-dimensional understanding separated from the concrete material reality of the digital object. An almost paradoxical situation exists where the most seemingly concrete aspect of the digital object becomes its screen and interface and its most alien aspect of the digital object becomes the material, which it is made up from.

“- As early as 1888 the Kodak company used as an advertisement: You press the button – we do the rest! Since then taking photographs has meant nothing more than `clicking’. You look through the viewfinder and press the button – that is how easy it is. Only a few specialists actually know what is happening in this apparatus.

- We have 25 driving lessons and then we can drive a car. Yet, the car remains a black box; what is happening under the car bonnet is a mystery to most of us. And if the car suddenly stops on the motorway, we call the automobile club.
- The personal computer, which we reluctantly purchased a few years ago, is a mysterious box, which we should better leave closed. To be opened only by an expert! Is often to be read on the back of electronic equipment. We merely press the power on button and then follow the software instructions. Only freaks dare to enter the inside of the black box armed with screwdriver and soldering iron.” (Bolz, The Meaning of Surface.)

This homogenisation of the digital object into a predictable two dimensional user interface seems to have partly emerged as a reaction to the modernist formal ideologies which glorified the industrial revolution and the factory, we are now immersed in the digital revolution, hence the design strategies surrounding modernist design no longer have such a significant influence upon design. For example, Louis Sullivan’s famous “Form Ever Follows Function” now seems to lack useful application, “Form Ever Follows Function” however, always displayed the problem it shows when applied to product design, however when applied to the design of the electronic object the problem becomes amplified: “Form Follows Function” is too objective, with not enough relation to the subject. The adoption of “Form Ever Follows Function” by the Bauhaus in the early 20th helped to produce many well functioning objects, however many of these objects were functionalised and refined to such a degree that they became unusable and incomprehensible to humans. When modernist functionalisation combines with the technical complexity of the digital object, the results, (which may of course help in the production of an honest representation of the digital object) end up as meaningless and unusable to the user. The digital object may very well be a machine as the industrial object was, but this machine is not one of physical effort or power, but one of physically embedded knowledge and intelligence, which does not find its optimal representation through the appropriate arrangement of form. The digital machine must be viewed as subjective (due to its association with the processing of knowledge and information), compared to the pure objectivity of the industrial machine, glorified for its honesty and neutrality in the face of an aesthetically lost world.

“The decisive mutations of the objects and of the environment in the modern era-have come from an irreversible tendency towards three things: an ever greater formal and operational abstraction of elements and functions and their homogenisation in a single virtual process of functionalization; the displacement of bodily movements and efforts into electric or electronic commands, and the miniaturization, in time and space, of processes whose real scene (though it is no longer a scene) is that of infinesmal memory and the screen with which they are equipped” (Baudrillard, Ecstasy Of Communication pg128-129.)

Rather than have the digital object operate on a modernist “Form Ever Follows Function” basis, even though it was modernist principles, which brought about the digital object. The digital object seems to be more closely related to post-modern ideas, it is essentially a consumer product with little room given for experimentation compared to non-digital objects such as furniture or architecture. The digital object relies heavily upon the use of signs in order to define itself. The digital object often uses precedents and the re-adoption of styles in its design through how the digital object uses previous digital or non-digital objects to help define its form and mode of operation, being its interface. For example, the personal computer takes much of its form and interface from the typewriter in order to make the digital object understandable to its users, the cell phone takes much of its form and interface from the original non-digital phone. Even though both of these objects function internally very differently from their precedents and even have different functions for their user compared to their precedents, their sign, or even the fact that they possess a sign is what helps to put them above their contradictions (contradiction being common in post-modern works) and into context. This allows us to associate them with the processing of information.

There seems to be a great influence from the non-digital objects, which these digital objects originally emerged from. In essence, the digital object is being made understandable through a juxtaposition of non-digital objects, which share similar qualities. This need to define a form for objects, even when they are seemingly immaterial is possibly a downfall in the design of the digital object. If the digital object is represented as a tool, like earlier non-digital objects then we run into the problem that we are signifying the digital object to be a tool, an object with more or less well known possibilities in its use and limitations that are relatively accessible to the user to use to his advantage. This rendering of the digital object is in reality false, as the possibilities and limitations of the digital object are unknown and always changing, and contrary to the general rendering of the digital object, the possibilities of the digital object are not as easily accessible as it seems.

“The dominant mode of utilizing computers in architecture today is that of computerization; entities or processes that are already conceptualised in the designer’s mind are entered, manipulated, or stored in a computer system. In contrast, computation or computing, as a computer-based design tool, is generally limited. The problem with this situation is that designers do not take advantage of the computational power of the computer. Instead, some venture into manipulations or criticisms of computer models as if they were products of computation. While research and development of software involves extensive computational techniques, mouse-based manipulations of three-dimensional computer models are not necessarily acts of computation.” (Terzidis, Expressive Form, pg67)

It seems possible to imagine digital objects of the future with are not objects at all, but in fact post-objects, the design of products would have no physical presence upon the material world at all, or even cease to exist. The abandonment of the material in the design of physical objects seems to go a lot better with modernist ideologies relating to the representation of objects. Discussions of Ubiquitous computing relate heavily to this.

In conclusion, the way in which we design the digital object still needs a lot of refinement and redefinition. One main problem which seems to retard this process of refinement and redefinition in the digital object is the fact that the digital object (compared to designed objects such as architecture or furniture) has much less room for cultural re-interpretation or experimentation, this is mainly due to the fact that the digital object has much heavier ties to the marketplace and product design, allowing little room for error, which is a possible product of re-interpretation of experimentation.

“The First Transistor, is a test-rig for a key electronic component created by inventors who work at the level of both electrons and matter. They organise matter as interacting volumes of electrons, and they offer a possibility for reconciling the scales that separate the worlds of electrons and space. But once these prototype elements have been subjected to the extreme rationalization required by mass production, they become reduced to abstract ultra-miniaturized electronic components. Their modernist poetry, based on truth to materials, is lost.” (Dunne, Hertzian Tales, pg6)

The solution seems to be that more theoretical research needs to be made into the electronic object on the academic level. This research should not necessarily result in the production of a hypothetical product or be in the form of pathetic digital media for digital media sake but should attempt to redefine the idea of the digital object as a product. The main problem however with digital research is generally the high monetary costs and the availability of information surrounding digital experimentation. However, with the help of publicly available digital resources such as open source software, the cost and privacy of digital design is beginning to revert from the restricted private operations of corporations and becoming available for the individual to tinker with, inviting powerful re-interpretation of the digital object. Just as has been re-interpreted through the 20th century, the way that we define the digital object will hopefully become more defined by the consumer.

Bibliography.

Literature
Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Objects.” Pages 52-53. Published by Verso, 2006.
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstacy Of Communication.” Reading from: Hal Foster, Post-Modern. London; Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985. First published as The Anti-Aesthetic, 1983. Pages 128-129.
Kostas, Terzidis “Expressive Form: a conceptual approach to computational design” Page 67. Spoon Press 2003, London.
Dunne, Anthony, “Hertzian Tales” Page 7. MIT press 2005.

Websites
Bolz, Nobert. “The Meaning of Surface.” http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors1/transcripts/bolz/bolz2.html Viewed 8th June 2008.