I survey the wreckage on my bedside table. A dead Fitbit, which became too needy, flashing away and demanding way too much from the relationship. How is anyone supposed not to lose the weird little charger, anyway? There is a Sonos speaker – recently acquired – again part of my fantasy of making my life “better”. The speaker is connected to the wireless and one phone, but it won’t connect to my computer. No one else has been able to make it work, either. When a man from Vodafone called and offered me a free tablet, I thought that might help (a new thing to make another thing work), but it involved sorting out two different sim cards. All these devices, then, require more personal information from me than I have given to people with whom I have had children.
Obviously, I could be more tech-savvy, but then I might as well learn how to mend my washing machine. The fact is that my memory is getting full and I choose to fill the rest of it with something other than reading manuals.
As designers insist on touchscreens and minimal designs – just one tiny hidden switch! – they become the opposite of user-friendly. As my friend said the other day, we basically need more knobs, with clear instructions about what they do.
In some parallel world, AI is happening, synths walks among us, and everyone can see our every mood. In reality, no one can make their printer work. Most devices have way more functions than we will ever use. Some of us are personally affronted by being told all our passwords are “weak”.
Some of this is about overload and some is about using poor, but competing, designs. Everywhere we are offered incompatible systems, so these products breed with each other, producing all the peripherals: cables, chargers, batteries. There is a point where you have to ask: “Is this thing making my life easier or more complicated?” Do you need an app to tell you that you have not had the right kind of sleep? Do you need to know the exact temperature of your freezer? Do you need different music in every room? Do you want your leisure time fully automated?
We got rid of physical products such as CDs and videos in exchange for the efficiency of streaming. But nostalgia may be driving the early adopters back to materiality, the enchantment of the needle on the vinyl, the romance of the mix tape, the ping of a typewriter, the actual printed page. There is something else, too: a reaction to the glut of shiny machines that promise to work all by themselves, but never really do.
[Source:-The Guardian]