Hasta La Ideas

“Hello, Dave.” The LaCie 5big Network hard drive has a HAL-like presence

Embracing compression
After moving into a teeny New York studio and going through the psychically exhausting task of purging possessions, I found myself frozen in the middle of the room holding the dictionary in my hands, quickly coming to terms with an inevitable fact: it had to go. Many people gasp at the notion of doing away with books (clothes, yes, electronics, of course, but books—never!) but lets face it, dictionaries (aside from a few luscious grand, old tomes) don’t age well. They aren’t made for casual browsing, they don’t reflect the dynamic nature of language, and they take up a lot of precious shelf space. I hesitated to admit it, but I knew I could manage just fine with an iPhone app or another online lexicon that pulled data from the mighty digital “cloud.” Out it went. While I was at it, I wondered what other space saving digital conversions I could make. Could I compress all my CDs to MP3? Could I invest in one of many advertised services for digitizing every last one of my photographs? Where would it end? These thoughts then led me to the line of questioning that keeps designers up at night: “What would life be like in an object-less home?” “What physical artifacts would be spared cloud absorption?” and the grand daddy of all questions, “With more and more of our artifacts being replaced by digital files, when do physical objects matter, and why?”

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