soulless design

note: cross posted from https://thrizzle.nekoweb.org/garden/soulless_design_2

i wrote a couple days ago about some of the modern UI design trends that i hate, and now that i thought some more about it i realized what issues i have with hardware as well.

i. how things are now

as this person on reddit said:

It’s a trend with everything nowadays. Minimalism. Every phone is a big brick with the only identifiable feature being the number of cameras on the back.

this couldn’t be more true. phones are dead just rectangles now. no differences, no changes. look at the iphone 13 and 14 next to each other:

there are legitimately zero differences. and while apple is particularly egregious, samsung isn’t doing much better.

it’d be one thing if the design was genuinely the greatest possible form (i wouldn’t mind at all if nintendo kept releasing 3DS updates), but it really just isn’t, as evidenced by the resurgence of flip phones in the recent years like the z-flip (and samsung barely deserves credit for this, the design is still overly “modern”)

it’s not like phones are the only devices guilty of this either— the design trend of mp3 players before their untimely death also is a great example of how hardware design keeps shifting from cool to stupid.

the entire existence of the iPod Touch (i’m starting to see a villain here…) is my prime example of this: it’s genuinely just a small, more useless phone. prior iPods had a streamlined interface specifically designed for browsing music, and the scroll wheel provided a way to control just about everything in a way that really just made sense, while also possessing similarities to physical media formats. everything about the design of the iPod Touch stands in stark contrast to everything the other iPods actually did, at least when looking at it from the future.

ii. what we could have had

thinking more about what really counts as a soulful design, and i’ve realized that it boils down primarily to how closely they replicate not only the function of, but design of the analog device that they’re supposed to be replacing.

in my eyes, digital devices should be genuinely fun to use, and should either feel alive or have otherwise meaningful design

i think that a few device types really did have a perfect design at some point:

game consoles | (3)DS

while both the DS and 3DS are worth of this title, the 3DS is by far my personal favorite, so i’ll focus on that. i own a new 3DS xl, and some of my favorite things about it are:

size/form factor

small enough to fit in your pocket, but still with TWO big-enough screens and analog buttons. beautiful work

interpersonal features

i could probably write something just about the 3DS’ social features if im being real, but quickly:

• social media-esque features: miiverse, streetpass, etc all helped to keep gaming in-person social. their deaths came at a time when such play was declining, at least in my life.

• download play: made it easy to let people both try games and to not have to worry about finding games that you and your friend both have. while i know they’re bringing it back with the switch 2, can we get real im not buyin ts

ui design

i talked about this more in the previous article, but the 3DS’ interface legit looked and behaved like it’s own world. not only did it interact with our world (like on the homescreen when you yell into it and the current selection spins), but just about every app nintendo designed for it was built so it would seem like you were looking into the console on the top screen, and that you had real physical buttons on the bottom screen. back to the home screen (no i’m not going to stop talking about it), the background fr sits in the back of the screen and curves around as though it’s a circular room, and this effect is made much more clear in 3D.

in certain games like zelda twilight princess, when the 3D effect is on in the title screen you can literally look off to the sides to see what’s not shown on the screen. you’re looking into hyrule’s world, not just at it. the way that the 3DS is its own world locks in the special place it has in my heart, and although i understand the allure of the switch, i really would’ve loved if they just released more powerful 3DS models.

laptops | thinkpads

disclaimer: i’ve never owned a thinkpad. while i have used numerous thinkpads in my time, i’ve mostly loved them from afar

people really have a lot to say about thinkpads. they’re super durable, and have simple designs yet they aren’t minimal. they’re repairable, and even though it’s not as widely used as i imagine they wanted it to be, they actually added something new (the nub/trackpoint) to the mainstream laptop experience. they had quality parts and many people still upgrade their thinkpads today.

from my own use, the keyboards are remarkably comfortable and the placement of everything makes sense. the build is high quality and so are the parts.

design

their design even stayed mostly consistent, although they became slightly simpler:

by Evan-Amos, public domain

this model was released in 2007¹,

by SłodkiKarmelek, CC BY-SA 4.0

and this model was released in 2018².

it was simple as the goal, not just because it was a trend. their design was inspired by bento boxes³ and the internals are even arranged as such. the design was minimal, but thoughtful.

durability

i didn’t know this until i had started writing this, but thinkpads dont survive all those freak accidents by chance.

there’s a wide variety of features that were actually built into the thinkpad to make them this way; it’s not just “strong construction”.

many models have ROLL CAGES(????)⁴ and a whole lot of em have dedicated keyboard drain holes to protect it from liquid, as well as a previous system that apparently would stop the hard drive when the thinkpad DETECTED that it was falling. multiple were used on the international space station.

iii. love, of money

the constant pursuit of money is what caused us to get to this point; companies are too lazy to put effort into a truly new design, and even the previous bastions of innovation have failed us recently; look at apple (i will never forgive them) and lenovo; while the older macintosh was amazing, and macs still are good today, the design is nowhere near the same. look at the iBook compared to MacBook models:

by unknown author, public domain

by KKPCW, CC BY-SA 4.0

although i can understand that the iBook’s design is a bit much for some, you can’t deny that there’s much more creativity there than in the MacBook, the model of which doesn’t matter because they’ve all been genuinely identical outside of colorway for the past two whole generations.

as for thinkpads, while the newer models are still enjoyed by many, they have been slowly been falling in line with laptop trends, like being thinner at the cost of repairability and cooling performance.

modern designs lack heart. tech went from these cool, special and unique devices to being mostly the same, with little to no differences in design or even features between generations or rivals. while i was barely conscious while it was going on, i really wish i could’ve been a part of the era where tech was special and fun.