Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
Published: February 12, 2011
Just as the average human carries around the remnants of a prehistoric tail and a useless appendix, the tools we use also bear marks of the evolutionary process from which they arose.
Jennifer Daniel
Digital cameras produce a reassuringly retro but artificial shutter snap when you push the button to take a photograph; cellphones have keyboards with layouts originally meant to keep typewriters from jamming; and blue jeans have pockets that are a throwback to a time when watches dangled from chains.
Add to that list Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, which will now supplement its “location numbers” with page numbers that correspond to physical books. The change, announced last week, does have a practical purpose — especially for book clubs, whose digital readers presumably will no longer have trouble looking up the same page as analog readers.
But there is also a sense of absurdity here. E-books, by definition, do not have pages. Depending on which size font someone uses, she may have to advance the screen many times before “turning a page.” Then there are the questions of how to approach books with many physical editions, or texts that exist only in digital space.
But decisions like Amazon’s are not based on practicality alone.
“The location numbers on a Kindle are rational, and they make sense for the medium — but they don’t correspond to the emotional expectations of what a book is,” said Adam Greenfield, managing director of Urbanscale, a New York-based urban design practice, and author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.”
Designers in all fields are regularly confronted with versions of this choice: whether to incorporate cues to keep people grounded in what has come before, or scrap convention completely. In transportation, for instance, the power of steam engines was initially described in relation to that of horses, a practice that has continued to the present day. Automobile designers have incorporated visual cues suggesting carriages; for example, adding nonfunctional spokes on wheels. Today, electric cars, which can operate with unsettling silence, are being designed to make more noise, largely for safety reasons.
Such design is also common in the digital world. The basic interface for personal computers was designed as a desktop with a series of folders and a trash can in the corner because it allowed users to work in the way they were used to doing in the physical world.
But referencing the past can serve to dampen the imagination of designers working on disruptive products, said Bill Moggridge, the director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the author of “Designing Interactions,” a history of digital design.
“The tendency is to use a form of conservatism,” he said. “You just make it look like what was there before. But if you want to create something truly innovative, the utility of that starts to fade.”
This tension is palpable in many efforts to create new digital media experiences. The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s publication designed specifically for tablet computers, incorporates video and interactivity into what is essentially a newspaper. At the same time, it is designed to show up on a reader’s digital doorstep once a day, a concept that seems as old-fashioned as pocket watches when compared with Web sites that are updated continually.
Apple, probably the best symbol of the march into a new digital era, also encourages designers to incorporate analog references in its devices. On the iPad, users enter appointments into a calendar that is encased in an on-screen leather ledger, scrawl notes on what looks like a legal pad and advance through digital books by swiping their fingers across the screen, prompting an animation that actually looks like a page being turned.
Such superfluous references to the past are known as skeuomorphs (from the Greek words for tool and form), and Apple’s fondness for them on the iPad has provoked criticism from some designers.
“It drives a lot of designers batty because it is so skeuomorphically heavy,” said Craig Mod, a designer for Flipboard, a magazine for the iPad.
Amazon, by contrast, has faithfully recreated the experience of book reading by building on its innovations with the Kindle, said Mr. Mod. Because the screen is not backlit, and the battery can last for a month, and it is small and light enough to get lost in a pile of papers, the Kindle does seem like a fresh take on the idea of a paperback book, he said.
Of course, there are tradeoffs. Shopping for books in the device’s store consists of scrolling through listings of titles, an experience that feels more akin to searching a database than browsing in a bookstore. But if this means that Amazon’s customers are less likely to judge e-books by their covers, at least some readers would consider that to be true progress.
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