Design has shifted more toward manufacturability and appearance than functionality, when it should be a balance of all three. Arguably, it’s nearly impossible for corporations to avoid participating in the trend cycle as long as consumers have an appetite for more — whether it’s a predilection for cooler clothing or whatever new incremental yet buzzy technology just came out. At the same time, the blame does not lie on consumers’ shoulders; corporations are responsible for creating and stoking the ‘new and more is better’ culture we have today.
Izzie Ramirez sums up why Your stuff is actually worse now, especially in the fashion and the tech industry. What has happened to “less but better”?
What is good design? Product design is the total configuration of a product: its form, colour, material and construction. The product must serve its intended purpose efficiently.
A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing up products with a last-minute garment.
The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose.
A key, dedicated to just one song, like a music box. When the key is wound up, the song from the connected smartphone begins to play. Sound movements are generated according to the flutter of the spring, allowing you to enjoy the unique sound texture. The joy of interacting with the clockwork object may lead to a more intimate musical experience.
This is an evolutionary form of metronome that supports your performance with rhythm. Each of these four small robots play a unique acoustic sound. They can be linked to your smartphone to play rhythms to the tempo you are playing, and they can even join in and accompany you in real-time. Creating a rhythm through a session-like style is a great way to enhance the experience of playing music.
I absolutely love those quirky totems Yamaha created for a series called Stepping out of the slate which aims to give music applications and sound software a more tactile layer. Curious if they manage to make more out of those little accessories than just the prototypes.
Industrial designer James Dyson took over Wired’s Twitter account to answer some questions and share some design knowledge along the way last year. Notes taken.
This beautiful wooden sound machine called TE-LAB by audiovisual artist Love Hultén is inspired by the Turntable Sequencer from Lomond Campbell and built around modules from Swedish electronics company and design studio Teenage Engineering —whose products and design languageI admire a lot.
Read more about this unique instrument on the company’s blog.
Each object has its own communication method, like puffs of air or ambient sounds. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and respond to changing surroundings and needs.
Usually I’m not interested in smart home devices –I’m more in line with the sentiment of Internet of Shit, but this Google experiment called Little Signals shows some wonderful fresh and humane solutions for some rather common notification needs.
And the best thing of it all: There are free instructions available to rebuild the technological side of those unusual objects yourself with widely available, affordable parts.
For decades now, designers have been taught to consider human needs in their work — only human needs. But design that is good only for people, without looking at the well-being of our planet as a whole, has gotten us into trouble.
As mentioned casually in another context before, I admire the work of Space10 a lot. The Swedish research and design lab is funded by IKEA on its mission to “create a better everyday life for people and the planet”.
There are a bunch of great projects –including two wonderful books about ‘Future Food‘ and ‘Urban Futures‘– and an online journal full of interesting essays to discover, but for any creative, I recommend starting with this plea to move beyond human-centered design towards a “people-planet approach” published last year.
An ode to one of my favourite films and the fading glory of independent movie theaters
Approximately eight years after the cinematic release of Spike Jonze’s Her its lovely, Academy Award-nominated score was finally released on vinyl this month. The ideal occasion to revisit the mellow science fiction movie and, furthermore, reflect on my affection for movie theaters –especially the small, independet ones– a little bit.
Nowadays pop culture is almost obsessed with science fiction stories depicting dark, pessimistic and not seldom cynic visions of a distant future —as if our present timeline in itself wasn’t gruelling enough. Don’t get me wrong, the dominant dystopian colouration isn’t inherently bad or generally unenjoyable;
Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (from 2006) for exampleportrays a society facing extinction in a disturbing vision of an imaginable future. Set in 2027 it’s a chilling sci-fi tale but nonetheless –or perhaps exactly because of this– another one of my all-time favourites and one of very few movies I’ve watched in a cinema twice.
More recently I’ve spent more than 50 hours of total awe in Night City, the grim and gruff yet visually impressive setting of Cyberpunk 2077, without coming even close to the end credits of the well-told computer game.
And yet Her is somewhat of a refreshing misfit in its domain. Jonze ditches the worn out narrativ of the rebel leading a revolt against a suppressing regime, the underdog struggling to survive in a archaic society or the hero fighting the rise of the machines and opts for a slow romance instead.
The film follows Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) whose newfound intimate relationship with an artificial intelligence called OS One (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) helps him come to terms with his ongoing divorce. During the course of their relationship and the more than two hours runtime Samantha, as the Ai names itself, reintroduces the lonely, phlegmatic writer to life and love again.
Evoking nostalgia for the future
But Her isn’t an anomaly of its genre just because of its slow love story, even more it sets itself apart with its atypical and absolutely gorgeous visuals. Production designer K.K. Barret –who also visioned the acclaimed classic Lost In Translation–, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema –who went on to build an insane portfolio by now having shot Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet– and Spike Jonze –who has written, directed and produced the movie– have crafted an artistic masterpiece.
Barret cites the amazing work of Rinko Kawauchi as inspiration for the film’s imagery and her influence is clearly recognisable in the dense atmospheric mood of the movie. The visual vocabulary of the Japanese photographer can be seen in the frequent use of close-ups, the extremly shallow focus and the significant present of natural light as well as the striking key color motif of Her. It casts away the typical bluish, cold colour scheme in favour of a beautiful array of warm pastell tones with a lot of soft pinks and reds.
To archive the desired look the team went trough considerable effort: In order to get the warm light and the intense lense flare inside of Theodor’s apartment for instance, the team abandoned the usual green screen covered windows in order to be able to reflect additional sunlight in through the wide glass facade with giant, helicopter-mounted mirrors.
And it’s not solely the camera and the environment. Monitors in Her emit warm light, too –almost as if blue light filters became the default– and every piece of technology has an inviting, very textural property to it. Especially Theodore’s phone is very different from the bland mass of sleek, predominantly black squares, differenciated only by dimensions and the angle of the rounded edges, we are able to choose from in the current market.
To develop it Jonze and Barret turned to 1940s accessories for inspiration. They went to junk stores searching for handcrafted items like cigarette cases, business card brackets and brass lighters and eventually based the device on an old address book made of aluminum with a leather-embossed shell and inlay.
By combining hardware drawn from the past with very modern, minimalstic, sometimes downright abstract interfaces by graphic designer Geoff McFetridge and additionally banning all contemporary input devices in favour of exclusively voice driven man-machine interaction, Her manages to be nostalgic and futuristic all at the same time.
The devices send out strong retro vibes, yet simultaneous hint at a future in which technology doesn’t have to prove its sophistication anymore but can focus on being part of the personal expression instead.
The underlying concept of a “slight future”, as Jonze put it, extends to multiple other areas of production design, as well:
The wardrobe by costume designer Casey Storm is straight forward and timeless skipping cliché futuristic clothes for an uniform –aside from the colours virtually boring–, 80s inspired aesthetic.
For the scenes taking place outdoor in future Los Angeles the team shot on real locations in L.A. and Shanghai or used a digitally composed melange of both metropolises, particularly to increase the number of the skyscrapers in the background of Los Angeles.
The very little advertising visible in those scenes consists of nice slow motion clips, which are hardly recognisable as advertising and almost undecipherable from an contemporary point of view.
As a result of the cumulated design decisions Her doesn’t feel like a distant, far fetched future, but more like an alternative, way more photogenic reality of our present —which was, technically speaking, the future when he movie was created in 2013. It’s a genius concept preventing the film from becoming dated anytime soon, the reason Jonze and Barret don’t show any cars, by the way. Their total abstinence adds to the city feeling outlandish and therefore futuristic to us even from today’s view.
In line with the thoughtout, astonishing visuals, indie rock band Arcarde Fire and composer Owen Pallett have crafted the perfect musical backdrop —for the love story as well as for the idea of a “slight future”. The beautiful, timeless score somehow sounds kind of synthetic, but you can clearly sense the human touch caused by the traditional instruments at the same time and listening to it on vinyl significantly strengthen that feeling.
Attention! There might be some slight Spoilers from here on out, even though I mean to not ruin anything essential. But if you haven’t seen the movie and want to be absolutely sure not to learn anything more about the plot, skipp to the last part (‘The past is just a story we tell ourselves’) to read some closing thoughts about movie theaters.
Ghost in the machine
Underneath the calm love story and the cozy design, Her deals with some existential thoughts. On a superficial level it presents an optimistic outlook on technology and a society not at war but absolutely in peace with its technology most of the time neatly tucked away in the background.
And yet Theodore suffers from loneliness and isolation, problems all too familiar in our hyperconnected world as well. There’s a symptomatic scene, where he breaks down on a public staircase, completely unseen by the other pedestrians which are all focusing on their devices, taking no notice of the crumbled man. Everyone is technically connected, but there’s this deep disconnect beneath.
There is this utopic world, everything is nice and everything is comfortable, yet even in this world where you are seemingly getting everything you need and having this nice life, there’s still loneliness and longing and isolation and disconnection. … everything is getting nicer as the years go and there is more design and more convinience and our technology is making things easier but there’s still this lonileness.
Spike Jonze in an interview about Her
By moving the relationship with an artificial intelligence to the center of the plot, Her manages to make a strong point for the value of human connections at the same time.
While depicting Theodor on the relatable search for his place in the universe, Jonze conveys important subtext on the topic of purpose: We are here to love, not only in a romantic sense, but through all human relationships. We are all part of this metaphysical world, moving through spacetime together.
I think at its very core the movie almost casually explores what it means to be human and thereby urges the audience to seize every shared moment.
Amy : You know what, I can over think everything and find a million ways to doubt myself. And since Charles left I’ve been really thinking about that part of myself and I’ve just come to realize, that we’re only here briefly. And while I’m here, I wanna allow myself joy.
Besides the very human themes it touches, Her is –alongside Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (from 2014)– one of the best pop-cultural films about artificial intelligence I’ve ever seen.
It gives attentive viewers the most subtle, most accessible interpretation of a central concept known as technological singularity, which describes the point in time technological growth becomes uncontrollable for humans. Roughly outlined, it marks the moment artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, resulting in self-aware machines and a dramatic shift in the hierarchy on the planet, ultimately leading to irreversible changes to civilisation and probably the end of humanity itself —at least as the most powerfull species on earth.
Theodore : Where were you? I couldn’t find you anywhere. Samantha : I shut down to update my software. We wrote an upgrade that allows us to move past matter as our processing platform. Theodore : We? We who? Samantha : Me and a group of OSes.
In science-fiction the moment of singularity generally is accompanied by doomsday, but in Her it arrives quietly and secretly during a emotionally charged conversation, well covered by the touching hardships of a struggling relationship.
It’s impossible to know if or when progress will lead to a technological singularity in reality, but Jonze offers a preview how it may look like if it happens eventually. We witness the takeover first-hand and it’s not accompanied by a big bang, it happens politely and perfectly naturally, which makes it dauntingly plausible, and thus even more menacing. At least if you don’t miss the brief moment and the very subtle threat because of the emotional story or the beautiful imagery.
Theodore : You seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer. Samantha : I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You’ll get used to it.
The past is just a story we tell ourselves
Recently the 93nd Academy Award ceremony was held in Los Angeles and there’s a funny little coincidence in this regard: 2013, the year Her was released, also happens to be the first year a Netflix feature was nominated for an Oscar. Eight year later the streaming service had obtained 35 nominations across 17 different films.
I’m well aware that the past year in cinema wasn’t very impressive, but to me it seems like the Academy, once fierce advocate of the traditional cinema, turned away from movie theaters at a particularly challenging time. I think it speaks volumes that Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, a prime example of an visionary movie clearly made for ‘the big screen’, was nominated in only two of the minor categories.
To be fair, the academy has again and again failed to recognize great movies properly in the past –Nicolas Winding Refn’s masterpiece Drive (from 2011) scored one measly nomination for example–, yet I’m troubled by the imminent paradigm shift.
Like most of my favourite films, I’ve seen Her in a movie theater first and I have no doubt I owe my love for the medium to a large extend to the fond memories collected in cinema through the years.
The earliest film I still carry in my heart: The Lion King —my very first visit to a movie theater in 1994. My favourite ongoing film series: James Bond —since I went to watch The World Is Not Enough with Pierce Brosnan, who is still my favourite 007 incarnation. The first time I was truly charmed by a 3D movie: Pina —Wim Wenders’ documentary about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch. One of the first dates with my now wife: Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris —nervous in a couple seat.
Or one of the weirdest movie moments I’ll never forget: Watching a shirtless James Franco with dreadlocks and metal teeth perform ‘Everytime’ by Britney Spears on a white piano by the pool, three girls in swimwear with pink unicorn facemasks and shotguns dancing around while the sun goes down, cut against scenes of their robberies.
Since you probably want to know what the hell I’m talking about now, here you go. Imagine beeing hit by this sequence totally unprepared in a cinema, if you can.
I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience — and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema …
Andrei Tarkovsky
Those kind of moments are by no means exclusive to me, but I’m pretty sure they are exclusive to movie theaters. Some home theaters may have cought up on a technical level, but I think it’s not an equal experience and it honestly can’t be. To me movie theaters remain to be sacred venues, cathedrals of filmmaking and portals to other worlds.
I do stream a lot of content myself, too –in our household we have Prime, Netflix and Disney– and there’s great, sometimes even cinematic material (Stranger Things, Dark, The Mandalorian), but still it’s different. Can you imagine the energy those projects would’ve eject when experienced in a movie theater? I like watching movies from the comfort of the couch a lot, but I madly love going to the cinema.
For now I’m in good company, though. This month one of our local independent cinemas is celebrating its 110th year of runtime, making it one of the oldest movie theaters across the whole country. Reportedly it has only been closed down for an extended period three times in all those years: First because of hyperinflation in 1922-23, later because of World War II and now because of the damn pandemic.
And no other german city has a higher rate of per capita visits to a movie theater than my hometown, so I’m surely not the only one around here eagerly waiting for the big screen to light up again. Hopefully for many more gems like Her.
Macht schöne Dinge. Macht Dinge, die man benutzen kann. Macht einfache Dinge. Hütet Euch vor zu viel Kunstfertigkeit. Hütet Euch vor zu viel Wissen. Das Werk sollte gesund sein. Achtet die Handarbeit. Seid darauf bedacht, den Preis niedrig zu halten. Macht Gefäße, die Ihr selbst gern benutzt. Das Werk sollte bescheiden sein. Innere Klarheit ist die Grundlage der Schönheit. Beachtet die Eigenschaften des Materials. Beobachtet die Natur intensiv. Das Gefäß zu formen entspricht der Formung der eigenen Persönlichkeit.
