Sitting on my coffee table is an Etch-a-Sketch, a new version of a classic toy I remember from fifty-five years ago. It has a pretty red plastic frame, a gray screen, and two knobs you use to draw lines, quite primitively. Wikipedia says it was first available in 1960 and describes its use as follows: “Twisting the knobs moves a stylus that displaces aluminum powder on the back of the screen, leaving a solid line. The knobs create lineographic images. The left control moves the stylus horizontally, and the right one moves it verticallyâ€. There follows one of the great “found†sentences of my life: “ The ‘black’ line merely exposes the darkness inside the toyâ€. (My all time great found sentence was from a 1980’s manual for a hand-held computer: “The key without a legend has no functionâ€.)
The Etch-a-Sketch is a very pleasing object with tremendous mana. Wikipedia defines mana as “power, effectiveness, prestige†achieving a supernatural level, or almost. I share my home with only three other objects of equivalent power, an ice scream scoop and an oak rocking chair which date back to my childhood, and a vide poche my mother bought thirty-seven years ago.
A quality which does not decrease the mana, and which in fact may well add to it, is that all four objects are perfectly designed to accomplish a trivial purpose. You can make much better drawings with a pencil and pad than with an Etch-a-Sketch. You can’t do anything with an ice cream scoop you couldn’t with a large spoon. There is nothing fundamental or critical about being able to rock in a chair. If I didn’t have a vide poche, I would place my keys and change directly on the dresser surface. The beauty of these objects is how completely the design produces the use, and not the importance of the use itself.
The Etch-a-Sketch today is a completely archaic object. Its form predicts the computer tablet,and you can now draw much better and more sophisticated pictures on one of those. There is no particular reason for the Etch-a-Sketch to continue to exist and be popular in the age of computer chips. I attribute its longevity to its mana.The Etch-a-Sketch, like the other three objects, is pleasing because its form dictates its use. You can get started using one immediately without consulting a manual or attending a training session.
My mother bought the vide poche in Paris while visiting me there in 1978. She left it in with me to bring home later and soon, I was emptying my pockets, keys and change, onto it every night when I came home, yet I had no idea it was called a “vide poche†(pocket emptier). Its form compelled its use.
One of the ten most important books I ever read was Donald Norman’s Psychology of Everyday Things. Norman postulates that really well-designed objects inform you how to use them. His book contains memorable illustrations of bad objects. For example, a door designed to be pulled open has a flat plate as a handle, which commands you to place a palm on it and push. The funniest and scariest illustration in the book is of a nuclear power plant control panel, in which two similar looking levers have been placed side by side. One does something like turn on the air conditioning, and the other something like dumping the nuclear core. The workers have placed dissimilar looking beer kegs over the levers so they can tell them apart.
When I saw my first Mac computer, I played with it for half an hour and got absolutely nowhere, as some training was required to use its meta-iconic, supposedly intuitive interface. Another distressing object was the 21-speed bicycle I bought in my forties. I had grown up with three-speeds. The first time I rode the new bike, I popped the chain right off. The bike allowed me to harm it simply by setting the controls. I am reminded of an urban legend from twenty years ago that you could fry the CPU of some laptop computers simply by pressing several keys simultaneously. If an object has buttons or levers, you should not be able to break it simply by manipulating them. There is nothing you can do to the knobs of an Etch-a-Sketch which will cause any damage.
Donald Norman would agree that arcane expertise should not be required to use an every-day object. The better the design, the less there would be a requirement to take a class about it. Human incompetence is often involved in bad design, but so is vanity. In the corporate world, I became aware of two theories of software development: one in which the user can be up and running in five minutes, and the other in which the developer has built himself in as a critical function; you can’t get any results if you don’t hire him to manage the system, intercede with it for you.
For some owners, the 21-speed bicycle may illustrate another kind of vanity, an object of status and prestige, an expensive, exclusive machine to be operated while wearing designer clothing. If I ever get another bike, it will be a 3-speed or even a no-speed, really all I need to get exercise.
All this is really a long introduction to a rant about my Samsung Galaxy S4 cell phone running the Droid operating system and connected to the Verizon service. This phone is a truly malevolent object. The battery dies in just three hours or so, and a new software upgrade has apparently vastly slowed down the charging time. My phone also appears to have a corroded charging port, and frequently does not recognize the charger. When I visited the store, I was told that Verizon does not replace the charging port (a $20 part) and was advised to go to a non-Verizon store. I asked if I could buy a new battery. No. Did the store have a device where I could rapidly charge my phone? No. I was offered a new phone for a $150 upgrade fee. “We sold you an object that is breaking down prematurely, and that we refuse to repair or maintain, and we bungled the software upgrade. The best way to solve your problems is to pay us for a new one!â€
Even when the phone is working properly, it is designed as much to serve its designer’s purposes as mine. Google, which despite its “Do no evil†slogan is a consummately dangerous company, has designed the Droid OS to keep track of me, to understand my location, shopping, preferences. Things are always happening on the phone I didn’t request and which I don’t understand, of which the most sinister is a little icon which shows up occasionally of an eye. This apparently is associated with some facial recognition software which I never installed.
It has many other problems. Sometimes it overheats while being used normally, and then shuts itself off. It even has an error message explaining what just happened, which displays when you turn it back on. Couldn’t the effort to create this message have been devoted instead to solving the underlying problem? This is reminiscent of the damaged starship computer in Dark Star, which could always tell you something terrible was happening, but never avert it. But that was comedy. The apps on the phone sometimes crash for no apparent reason, icons disappear and have to be reinstalled, and the phone calls people or launches programs on its own. Twice the phone itself started Messenger and sent a thumbs-up icon to bewildered contacts of mine.
The final indignity has been a loss of the Verizon signal in places where I never had a problem before. I frequently can’t get a 4G signal on the phone, so no Internet, and sometimes can’t even make or receive a phone call.
I have no idea who manufactured the Etch-A-Sketch fifty-five years ago or today. And I have no clue who made my ice cream scoop or rocking chair or of the name of the metal worker who fashioned the vide poche. The mana of such objects is actually entwined with the anonymity of their makers. The only reason for me to know the name of a company, let alone the name of its CEO, is if its product explodes or poisons people, or if the company has evil designs on me. Microsoft, though its influence has faded, has always been a player in my life, as has Google, for both these reasons. (I had an employee in the ‘90’s who was a classic Libertarian with a variation: he thought the only valid purpose of government was to break up Microsoft.)
I have used the toaster analogy before but here it is: my toaster has no microchips. If I want light toast, I set it to “2†on the dial and I get the same toast texture every time. If I want golden toast, I set it to “4â€. It is a completely predictable and therefore reliable device. If my toaster ran Windows 8 or the Droid OS, it would burn the toast on “2†sometimes, or just shut down entirely and refuse to do anything. Companies like Samsung, Google and Microsoft are actually selling us alpha versions of technology products, and then offering to upgrade us to what we hope will be a beta.
We have come far down in the world of designed objects. The Etch-a-Sketch, rocking chair, ice cream scoop and vide poche are brilliant because simple. They exist only to accomplish their purpose and have no hidden agendas. They don’t spy on me. And they are so perfectly designed that their use is completely frustration free. We have been sold a completely false proposition, that the complexity of computer technology requires us to accept crappy devices carrying out ambiguous agendas.