I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as makers tried to figure out what would work best. It's easy to wax nostalgic for all the various flip phones/slide-out phones/"twist" phones, etc., but the fact is the "glass slab" really ended up working best - it has a lot fewer components to wear, and the lack of physical controls means that apps have lots of freedom to make full use of the screen. The glass slab design won out over all the others.
If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot.
The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...
It's easy to romanticize a past where electronics were designed to be statements in your home or office, but I think that the reduction of glamour is more so a dialogue on the utility of these devices in a modern world.
Previously, personal computers in the home were something of a novelty that didn't necessarily have a ton of value or that value was still being discovered. And now we see that the content that is displayed on the digital screen is most of the value, and so akin to many Hollywood sci-fi takes, where the screen becomes just a piece of glass, modern technology is moving in that direction.
The device itself is not the point, but the content that the device enables access to is.
Part of me agrees with the design takeaways here, and part of me admittedly prefers when my devices are as slim and unobtrusive as possible (no amount of lost desk space is worth the aesthetics of a zany computer monitor for me), but either way I'm always a little wary of these "remember the good old days of tech?" comparisons. Sometimes it feels like they're creating a false dichotomy where yesterday's devices were more pleasant to look at because they weren't tainted by corporate greed, and that today's devices are somehow uglier because all companies care about now is profit.
But these have always been mass-produced consumer devices. Even if you prefer the aesthetics of the original iMac to today's iMac, and even to the extent that corporate greed has arguably gotten worse, your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
As much as I like to reminisce about the good old days, I'm not sure the thesis is entirely true. In the 1990s, home computers were more conspicuous, but we didn't really have such a variety of designs. Almost every PC-compatible computer looked the same: a beige plastic monolith. Most corded phones looked the same, most TVs looked the same, most film cameras looked the same, etc.
Now that we look at the designs from 20-30 years ago, they stand out simply because they're outdated. In another 20-30 years, someone will write an article about the beauty of "glass slab" phones of the 2020s.
We also tend to cherry-pick outliers. You can find some beautiful designs in every decade, but they're not necessarily representative of everyday life. There's a modern-day company making portable cassette players that look like this:
As a hardware founder, who takes great pride in our industrial design and how we've made the thinnest, and most sleek EEG ever, we wanted the device to basically disappear. Nobody wants to wear an EEG headband, it isn't what they are buying. They are buying the neurostimulation that provides better sleep.
On the other hand, our industrial engineer wanted our headband to look just like a headband. It would be completely enclosed in fabric.
I wanted it to be appealing visually, not look "weird" but also, remind the user that there was magic inside. This is one of the reasons we left a bit of the electronics poking out the back and that element has a bit of ornamentation to it. (https://affectablesleep.com).
I have a folding phone. It isn't devoid of design. The design makes it function.
I think the article is confusing ornamentation with industrial design.
My laptop (Asus something) has a ceramic something finish with some etching on it. That's ornamentation. It's feel. Same with the speaker grill holes, they have some design to them.
Is it dull? It certainly isn't ground breaking. But it's pleasing, and it gets out of the way. But how much ornamentation do I want?
Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.
The TV example in the post doesn't really explain that we needed to have these plastic gray cases for TVs with speakers and buttons. But why was that a better look than just a screen?
To my eyes, those old TVs are ugly. But I remember when Sony brought out an interface where the channel showed up on the screen and had faded away after displaying the number, and I was blown away at how beautiful the interface was.
Additionally, my Kindle Scribe is a pretty boring slab, but I've tried buying nice pens to go with it. I don't think the Lamy (which I currently have) is a beautiful design, but it is better than the pen that comes with the device, which is devoid of any emotion.
As we move to glasses interfaces, I think we'll see a new heyday of electronics design.
> The peak here was arguably achieved during the 1990s and early 2000s
Interesting coincidence how the peak was achieved right when most of the audience would have been children or young adults, and therefore a time they're likely to be nostalgic for.
Talking about TVs the article goes all the way back to 2007, and not the console TVs which were actual wooden pieces of furniture with scope for artistry in the enclosure, not just "industrial design" or "Frutiger Aero" or some other buzzword.
Optimizing a screen to a slab (really a sheet) is like optimizing a nail to head shank and point. That's the underlying primitive form factor. You can change the ratio of threads and drive types to differentiate, but you don't undermine the underlying design to make the tool worse without good reason. And there really aren't many good reasons outside reducing to more essential paper/portal like properties, i.e. foldables, and hopefully soon scrollable.
Dieter Rams' style of industrial design has just dominated influencing electronic product design. More expressive industrial design at large isn't dead. Even in the electronics adjacent spaces you have boutique companies making interesting industrial designs for things like synths or computer keyboards.
Though I think there's another perspective to entertain here that isn't just about the industrial design style of the phone or display. Instead, think about how many discrete products general computing devices have subsumed. The disappointment comes across to me less that a slab is consumer computers dominate form, it's that the slab has made the rest of environment more sparse and now a slab is the sole focus point.
The modern smartphone has become an indispensable tool of daily life, its familiar “slab” design refined to minimize cognitive load.
For something I handle hundreds of times a day, I want it to be unobtrusive — free from design gimmicks or unnecessary distractions.
In that sense, the “Cambrian Explosion” of early smartphone designs has undergone its own form of natural selection — a Cambrian decimation that left only the most functional forms to survive.
Unlike the author, I think featureless slab phones are an improvement, yet I'd like my phone to have several user-customizable buttons on one side (or maybe both?) in order to be able to call up some of the phone's functionality solely by touch. An on-screen app shouldn't always be the sole interface to a device, in my opinion.
My theory is that stuff like this converges on the most economic and market-accepted form factor over time. Look at airliners over the last half of the 20th century - you had all kinds of weird and interesting designs (727, CV990, L-1011, Concorde). Now you invariably have a tube with two engines hung off the wings. Yawn.
I wonder if this motivates the recent interest in "cyberdecks", computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs designed to resemble futuristic computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs, replete with offset displays, displays with unusual aspect ratios, nonstandard ergonomics and form factors, etc. The design of these devices is definitely intended to inject style and pizzazz into a field largely dominated by gray rectangular slabs.
Upon reading (or rather, listening to) Neuromancer again, I get the feeling that the original "cyberspace deck" envisioned by Gibson was a plain, rectilinear device not at all like the greeble-encrusted gadgets you find on r/cyberdeck. It's very sparsely described, but we do know it has a built-in keyboard, "trodes" for the brain-computer interface to serve as a display, and with all this talk of "ROM constructs" and "slotting in" it accepts software via cartridge. In short—it probably resembled a 1980s home computer, like a TI-99/4A or an Atari 800XL. Gibson's technological world in his early cyberpunk works is very much informed by a cursory examination of the tech of the day, combined with a lot of imagination and guesswork.
Modern cyberdecks draw much more inspiration from all the cyberpunk stuff that emerged afterNeuromancer: movies like Strange Days and The Matrix; video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shin Megami Tensei, and even Wipeout; and anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which provide glimpses into a world in which technology might have evolved, visually and ergonomically, in a different direction from what it did. I find this sort of technofetishism fascinating for its role as a sort of roleplay of an imaginative alternate universe where modern-era tech was still cool and fun. A specific subgenre of this is the Amiga enthusiast community, where people soup up old Amiga hardware with modern, very expensive FPGA-based addons (the nearest a solo hobbyist can get to modern "custom chips") in an effort to show what computing might be like had Commodore not failed.
I view touch screens, keyboards and mice as the saddle points in the usability landscape. These kinds of decides don't change much because their designs have converged to an efficient form factor, from a usability perspective. That does not mean there is nothing better, perhaps these devices sit in a false saddle point, and perhaps there is something better that has not been invented yet.
I think the trend of removing "artistic" elements from products has been continuing for literally centuries; e.g. if you look at industrial machinery, 18th and 19th century designs are extraordinarily ornate even compared to early 20th, which are themselves far more artistic than late 20th and 21st century machines.
It's like books - another device like smart phones, computer and tv that are mostly about the information they contain rather than the form of the product. Those have also been rectangular with the same form of pages and a binding at the end for hundreds of years because people want them to read, not to have some weird shape or binding mechanism.
Non information products still have a variety of design forms. People say cars are bland but a Mini, Ferrari F80, F150 pickup, Range Rover etc have pretty different forms.
There are lots of electronics that have a wider range of industrial design.
Even looking just at phones, Nothing is doing interesting things.
But looking more broadly, some categories that have interesting design work going on:
Synthesizers & other electronic music devices: Arturia (minifreak and microfreak) and Teenage Engineering are quite well known but there are lots of interesting smaller players
Headphones: Design has become quite a differentiator - things like the B&W PX8s and the Apple AirPod Max have their own interesting design languages
Coffee machines: Everything from interesting pod machine designs to things like Rocket Espresso machines all have distinct designs.
Dull electronics, because of the convenience factor. Nobody wants to carry a brick anymore, and instead of a huge CRT monitor, we can have 4-6 thin displays for the same weight. Also, no need to buy a Walkman or cassettes because streaming is convenient. This is the natural evolution of tech, serving humans to live more conveniently. Nostalgic? Yes. Desirable? No.
There are still weirdly shaped phones sold today (Unihertz, for example) and strange-looking music players for the home. They are not selling well because nobody wants them.
Their take on monitors that aren't just the typical black plastic office-aesthetic slabs. I like what they've done with it, and personally would have been interested but this is 27" 4k and I can't downgrade from 5k (converted an old imac to work as an external display and I love it!)
For phones I prefer a bit more generic look. If I keep something for years then it can’t really be pink with polkadots just because that’s how i felt on day of purchase. Black rectangle works in that context
So, I was curious because I have this pretty cool like vintage looking popcorn maker, and I was wondering, is industrial design really dead? So I searched Amazon for "vintage mp3 player" and found this, "MECHEN M30 HiFi MP3 Player"
So, like most things, It seems like Industrial Design is alive and well, just not from the big dominant players; and isn't that what you would expect? Wouldn't you expect you'd be celebrating smaller indy shops than the big monopolies?
But, for some reason these small shops have become so anonymized that they're out of our collective consciousness, and I think there's truth to this, the problem in a sense isn't that industrial design is dead, or there are no interesting electronics, but there are in fact too many players making interesting electronics, and there's no "middle class" anymore.
TV's and smartphones are an interesting place to start though, I'd generally say that TV's and Smart Phones have improved by just being a big screen. Cars seem to me like a better example, where it feels like even companies that used to pride themselves as being different (Volkswagen) now basically all cars look the same.
I think this article really misses the root cause. Take cellphones, for example. In the early 2000s there was a "Cambrian explosion" of cellphone designs as makers tried to figure out what would work best. It's easy to wax nostalgic for all the various flip phones/slide-out phones/"twist" phones, etc., but the fact is the "glass slab" really ended up working best - it has a lot fewer components to wear, and the lack of physical controls means that apps have lots of freedom to make full use of the screen. The glass slab design won out over all the others.
If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot.
The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...
It's easy to romanticize a past where electronics were designed to be statements in your home or office, but I think that the reduction of glamour is more so a dialogue on the utility of these devices in a modern world.
Previously, personal computers in the home were something of a novelty that didn't necessarily have a ton of value or that value was still being discovered. And now we see that the content that is displayed on the digital screen is most of the value, and so akin to many Hollywood sci-fi takes, where the screen becomes just a piece of glass, modern technology is moving in that direction.
The device itself is not the point, but the content that the device enables access to is.
Part of me agrees with the design takeaways here, and part of me admittedly prefers when my devices are as slim and unobtrusive as possible (no amount of lost desk space is worth the aesthetics of a zany computer monitor for me), but either way I'm always a little wary of these "remember the good old days of tech?" comparisons. Sometimes it feels like they're creating a false dichotomy where yesterday's devices were more pleasant to look at because they weren't tainted by corporate greed, and that today's devices are somehow uglier because all companies care about now is profit.
But these have always been mass-produced consumer devices. Even if you prefer the aesthetics of the original iMac to today's iMac, and even to the extent that corporate greed has arguably gotten worse, your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
As much as I like to reminisce about the good old days, I'm not sure the thesis is entirely true. In the 1990s, home computers were more conspicuous, but we didn't really have such a variety of designs. Almost every PC-compatible computer looked the same: a beige plastic monolith. Most corded phones looked the same, most TVs looked the same, most film cameras looked the same, etc.
Now that we look at the designs from 20-30 years ago, they stand out simply because they're outdated. In another 20-30 years, someone will write an article about the beauty of "glass slab" phones of the 2020s.
We also tend to cherry-pick outliers. You can find some beautiful designs in every decade, but they're not necessarily representative of everyday life. There's a modern-day company making portable cassette players that look like this:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MfFjHvcZjFzZLRPa4p7QZm-970...
Striking and prize-worthy, but not how we roll.
I'm really torn by this.
As a hardware founder, who takes great pride in our industrial design and how we've made the thinnest, and most sleek EEG ever, we wanted the device to basically disappear. Nobody wants to wear an EEG headband, it isn't what they are buying. They are buying the neurostimulation that provides better sleep.
On the other hand, our industrial engineer wanted our headband to look just like a headband. It would be completely enclosed in fabric.
I wanted it to be appealing visually, not look "weird" but also, remind the user that there was magic inside. This is one of the reasons we left a bit of the electronics poking out the back and that element has a bit of ornamentation to it. (https://affectablesleep.com).
I have a folding phone. It isn't devoid of design. The design makes it function.
I think the article is confusing ornamentation with industrial design.
My laptop (Asus something) has a ceramic something finish with some etching on it. That's ornamentation. It's feel. Same with the speaker grill holes, they have some design to them.
Is it dull? It certainly isn't ground breaking. But it's pleasing, and it gets out of the way. But how much ornamentation do I want?
Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.
The TV example in the post doesn't really explain that we needed to have these plastic gray cases for TVs with speakers and buttons. But why was that a better look than just a screen?
To my eyes, those old TVs are ugly. But I remember when Sony brought out an interface where the channel showed up on the screen and had faded away after displaying the number, and I was blown away at how beautiful the interface was.
Additionally, my Kindle Scribe is a pretty boring slab, but I've tried buying nice pens to go with it. I don't think the Lamy (which I currently have) is a beautiful design, but it is better than the pen that comes with the device, which is devoid of any emotion.
As we move to glasses interfaces, I think we'll see a new heyday of electronics design.
> The peak here was arguably achieved during the 1990s and early 2000s
Interesting coincidence how the peak was achieved right when most of the audience would have been children or young adults, and therefore a time they're likely to be nostalgic for.
Talking about TVs the article goes all the way back to 2007, and not the console TVs which were actual wooden pieces of furniture with scope for artistry in the enclosure, not just "industrial design" or "Frutiger Aero" or some other buzzword.
Optimizing a screen to a slab (really a sheet) is like optimizing a nail to head shank and point. That's the underlying primitive form factor. You can change the ratio of threads and drive types to differentiate, but you don't undermine the underlying design to make the tool worse without good reason. And there really aren't many good reasons outside reducing to more essential paper/portal like properties, i.e. foldables, and hopefully soon scrollable.
Dieter Rams' style of industrial design has just dominated influencing electronic product design. More expressive industrial design at large isn't dead. Even in the electronics adjacent spaces you have boutique companies making interesting industrial designs for things like synths or computer keyboards.
Though I think there's another perspective to entertain here that isn't just about the industrial design style of the phone or display. Instead, think about how many discrete products general computing devices have subsumed. The disappointment comes across to me less that a slab is consumer computers dominate form, it's that the slab has made the rest of environment more sparse and now a slab is the sole focus point.
The modern smartphone has become an indispensable tool of daily life, its familiar “slab” design refined to minimize cognitive load.
For something I handle hundreds of times a day, I want it to be unobtrusive — free from design gimmicks or unnecessary distractions.
In that sense, the “Cambrian Explosion” of early smartphone designs has undergone its own form of natural selection — a Cambrian decimation that left only the most functional forms to survive.
Hardware is now a blank canvas for the software to flourish. Not really a bad thing.
Plus there's still Teenage Engineering if you want things that look nice when powered off :)
This is why companies like teenageengineering.com has a niche slice of the market. We need similar companies out there, albeit with much lower prices.
Unlike the author, I think featureless slab phones are an improvement, yet I'd like my phone to have several user-customizable buttons on one side (or maybe both?) in order to be able to call up some of the phone's functionality solely by touch. An on-screen app shouldn't always be the sole interface to a device, in my opinion.
My theory is that stuff like this converges on the most economic and market-accepted form factor over time. Look at airliners over the last half of the 20th century - you had all kinds of weird and interesting designs (727, CV990, L-1011, Concorde). Now you invariably have a tube with two engines hung off the wings. Yawn.
I wonder if this motivates the recent interest in "cyberdecks", computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs designed to resemble futuristic computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs, replete with offset displays, displays with unusual aspect ratios, nonstandard ergonomics and form factors, etc. The design of these devices is definitely intended to inject style and pizzazz into a field largely dominated by gray rectangular slabs.
Upon reading (or rather, listening to) Neuromancer again, I get the feeling that the original "cyberspace deck" envisioned by Gibson was a plain, rectilinear device not at all like the greeble-encrusted gadgets you find on r/cyberdeck. It's very sparsely described, but we do know it has a built-in keyboard, "trodes" for the brain-computer interface to serve as a display, and with all this talk of "ROM constructs" and "slotting in" it accepts software via cartridge. In short—it probably resembled a 1980s home computer, like a TI-99/4A or an Atari 800XL. Gibson's technological world in his early cyberpunk works is very much informed by a cursory examination of the tech of the day, combined with a lot of imagination and guesswork.
Modern cyberdecks draw much more inspiration from all the cyberpunk stuff that emerged after Neuromancer: movies like Strange Days and The Matrix; video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shin Megami Tensei, and even Wipeout; and anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which provide glimpses into a world in which technology might have evolved, visually and ergonomically, in a different direction from what it did. I find this sort of technofetishism fascinating for its role as a sort of roleplay of an imaginative alternate universe where modern-era tech was still cool and fun. A specific subgenre of this is the Amiga enthusiast community, where people soup up old Amiga hardware with modern, very expensive FPGA-based addons (the nearest a solo hobbyist can get to modern "custom chips") in an effort to show what computing might be like had Commodore not failed.
I view touch screens, keyboards and mice as the saddle points in the usability landscape. These kinds of decides don't change much because their designs have converged to an efficient form factor, from a usability perspective. That does not mean there is nothing better, perhaps these devices sit in a false saddle point, and perhaps there is something better that has not been invented yet.
I think the trend of removing "artistic" elements from products has been continuing for literally centuries; e.g. if you look at industrial machinery, 18th and 19th century designs are extraordinarily ornate even compared to early 20th, which are themselves far more artistic than late 20th and 21st century machines.
There are some exceptions to that, like for example the Nothing Phone 3: https://www.wired.com/review/nothing-phone-3/ But yes, I’d like to see more diversity along those lines.
It's like books - another device like smart phones, computer and tv that are mostly about the information they contain rather than the form of the product. Those have also been rectangular with the same form of pages and a binding at the end for hundreds of years because people want them to read, not to have some weird shape or binding mechanism.
Non information products still have a variety of design forms. People say cars are bland but a Mini, Ferrari F80, F150 pickup, Range Rover etc have pretty different forms.
There are lots of electronics that have a wider range of industrial design.
Even looking just at phones, Nothing is doing interesting things.
But looking more broadly, some categories that have interesting design work going on:
Synthesizers & other electronic music devices: Arturia (minifreak and microfreak) and Teenage Engineering are quite well known but there are lots of interesting smaller players
Headphones: Design has become quite a differentiator - things like the B&W PX8s and the Apple AirPod Max have their own interesting design languages
Coffee machines: Everything from interesting pod machine designs to things like Rocket Espresso machines all have distinct designs.
Dull electronics, because of the convenience factor. Nobody wants to carry a brick anymore, and instead of a huge CRT monitor, we can have 4-6 thin displays for the same weight. Also, no need to buy a Walkman or cassettes because streaming is convenient. This is the natural evolution of tech, serving humans to live more conveniently. Nostalgic? Yes. Desirable? No.
There are still weirdly shaped phones sold today (Unihertz, for example) and strange-looking music players for the home. They are not selling well because nobody wants them.
Just today I came across Home Tech Co: https://www.hometechco.com/
Their take on monitors that aren't just the typical black plastic office-aesthetic slabs. I like what they've done with it, and personally would have been interested but this is 27" 4k and I can't downgrade from 5k (converted an old imac to work as an external display and I love it!)
I don't care about mobile phone design. I want just a rectangle with a screen. Like Star Trek's PADDs and LCARS.
For phones I prefer a bit more generic look. If I keep something for years then it can’t really be pink with polkadots just because that’s how i felt on day of purchase. Black rectangle works in that context
So, I was curious because I have this pretty cool like vintage looking popcorn maker, and I was wondering, is industrial design really dead? So I searched Amazon for "vintage mp3 player" and found this, "MECHEN M30 HiFi MP3 Player"
https://a.co/d/hJyBsyw
So, like most things, It seems like Industrial Design is alive and well, just not from the big dominant players; and isn't that what you would expect? Wouldn't you expect you'd be celebrating smaller indy shops than the big monopolies?
But, for some reason these small shops have become so anonymized that they're out of our collective consciousness, and I think there's truth to this, the problem in a sense isn't that industrial design is dead, or there are no interesting electronics, but there are in fact too many players making interesting electronics, and there's no "middle class" anymore.
TV's and smartphones are an interesting place to start though, I'd generally say that TV's and Smart Phones have improved by just being a big screen. Cars seem to me like a better example, where it feels like even companies that used to pride themselves as being different (Volkswagen) now basically all cars look the same.
No results for ctrl-f kitsch.
BS. Everyone is trying to make interesting designs - See Nothing and Teenage Engineering as just two examples.
I for one, like the commoditization of the mobile phones.