[Maya Posch] wrote up an insightful, and maybe a bit controversial, piece on the state of consumer goods design: The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. Her basic thesis is that the “form follows function” aesthetic has gone too far, and all of the functionally equivalent devices in our life now all look exactly the same. Take the cellphone, for example. They are all slabs of screen, with a tiny bezel if any. They are non-objects, meant to disappear, instead of showcases for cool industrial design.
Of course this is an extreme example, and the comments section went wild on this one. Why? Because we all want the things we build to be beautiful and functional, and that has always been in conflict. So even if you agree with [Maya] on the suppression of designed form in consumer goods, you have to admit that it’s not universal. For instance, none of our houses look alike, even though the purpose is exactly the same. (Ironically, architecture is the source of the form follows function fetish.) Cars are somewhere in between, and maybe the cellphone is the other end of the spectrum from architecture. There is plenty of room for form and function in this world.
But consider the smartphone case – the thing you’ve got around your phone right now. In a world where people have the ultimate homogeneous device in their pocket, one for which slimness is a prime selling point, nearly everyone has added a few millimeters of thickness to theirs, aftermarket, in the form of a decorative case. It’s ironically this horrendous sameness of every cell phone that makes us want to ornament them, even if that means sacrificing on the thickness specs.
Is this the same impetus that gave us the cyberdeck movement? The custom mechanical keyboard? All kinds of sweet hacks on consumer goods? The need to make things your own and personal is pretty much universal, and maybe even a better example of what we want out of nice design: a device that speaks to you directly because it represents your work.
Granted, buying a phone case isn’t necessarily creative in the same way as hacking a phone is, but it at least lets you exercise a bit of your own design impulse. And it frees the designers from having to make a super-personal choice like this for you. How about a “nothing” design that affords easy personalized ornamentation? Has the slab smartphone solved the form-versus-function fight after all?
I really miss landscape keyboard phones. I keep trying to find a modern N900 replacement.
Daily drove an original fxtec pro1 for 5 years and it was nice to have the keyboard, and Sailfish provided linux, but Sailfish’s lack of native apps + the requirement of Volte meant I had to go back to android.
9ish months ago I switched to a Furi Labs FLX1 which is frankly amazing to basically have a full linux device, with the debian repos AND volte AND android container in my pocket. But no keyboard
Maybe you could adapt something like this design to your phone:
https://liliputing.com/this-3d-printed-case-turns-an-old-phone-into-a-slider-with-a-qwerty-keyboard-and-touchpad/
Yeah I saw that a while ago. Bluetooth though :(
That is great! But I used to have an HTC Desire Z – still one of the best designed phones I’ve had, with a great keyboard which, despite me using it as a fidget, so I must have opened it a million times, didn’t fail in the 3 or so years I used it, even when I dropped it and the screen was toast (which I could replace myself!)
I don’t even have a case on my current CompactMini smartphone, because despite it being marketed as such, it’s very close to phablet territory and thus would be too wide and tall with one.
And let’s not forget how the godawful phablets have become the norm.
And all the idiots saying ” just use X, Y or Z to compensate” all clearly don’t understand the crux of the problem being that smartphones have gotten big in the wrong ways.
It’s literally a institutional issue.
Pretty sure you are in the minority and the majority wants giant phablets because that’s what people buy?
The bigger issue is why people go for giant screens, namely that they spend their life on their phones.
The more I unplug from my phone the bigger and sillier it seems
hard to say what the majority wants when their choices are so constrained. i used to bother to shop for a small phone before buying a large one, and now i don’t even bother, i just buy a large phone because i know the small phone market is so limited. but i want a small phone. i think. i haven’t used one in so long, i can’t be sure.
how many people are in my boat? hard to tell. probably not a majority but we’re surely a significant fraction of big phone buyers.
Bigger phones are easier to fumble and drop, and thus easier to break. It’s hard to tell whether people buy bigger phones because they prefer them, or because they have to replace them more often.
I’ve got an Oukitel WP21 Ultra. It is almost big enough to hide behind and would probably stop a bullet. Its 64M camera is crap, and firmware upgrades practically non-existent. Why do I put up with this bilge?
Because the battery is nigh on 10Ah, it packs a TB, it’s built like a ceramic outdoor sanitary unit, and has an excellent FLIR built in which I use for fault-finding all the time. Even powers my soldering iron.
As a phone phone, I way prefer my old HTC 21 Pro. But for functionality that suits my life, the WP21 wins.
I have an iPhone 12 mini – and some days I think it’s too big. I understand why someone would want a big phone, but I’m not one of them and apparently I’m in the minority. I cannot express how perfectly sized the original iPhone was.
But a lot of people use their phones as their primary device. And that drives the desire for a larger screen (along with the desire for a longer battery life.)
This reminds me of the UK olympics team management, who decided to issue 900 identical red bags to all their team (sporters and staff) in the 2016 Rio Olympics. It alledgedly took them four hours to get out of the airport, with a lot of that time spent in athletes finding which of 900 identical bags was theirs: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/rio-2016-team-gb-s-decision-to-issue-900-identical-kit-bags-leads-to-chaos-at-baggage-claims-on-return-from-olympics-a7208666.html
i know people do buy vanity cases, and personal choices definitely influence which case to buy. but among my social circle, we buy cases because we want our phones to survive. cases reduce damage from drops and (maybe) from water, and also reduce the rate of drops because they aren’t as slippery as a lot of fad phone designs.
if i was trying to express my personality, i’d rather have a naked phone. but i’d drop it and it’d bust.
exactly, cases aren’t about personal design, they are about protecting an expensive asset.
I still miss phones getting smaller and smaller – I’d prefer a small phone rather than a general purpose tablet which also does phone calls (which current phones have become)…
See, that’s why I’m still here.
I came for the hacks but stayed for the people with the ability to objectively discuss a topic – despite having different opinions. A rare skill these days.