Hasta La Ideas

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As we look to 2013, it’s a common practice amongst designers to think about the future of design. The future, indeed, is quite exciting, with 3D printing, open data, green innovation, automated cars and a slew of other new technologies and systems opening the doors for designers to play and create. But as we think about the future of design, I’ve also noticed that 2012 has seen the past creep in to designer’s works in creative ways.

Kyle Bean’s neatly nesting mobile phones

This year, I’ve written about a few projects involving design nostalgia. There were Evan Roth’s popular Solitaire.exe playing cards, an analog throwback to the popular digital game and pre-social media time waster itself inspired by analog playing cards. Kyle Bean put together a set of nesting dolls of mobile phones, shrinking ever forward from the infamous DynaTAC, once a status symbol amongst the wealthy elite and now a laughable relic of the past. Each layer we uncover brings us closer to a future of mobile phone ubiquity while reminding us of the past technologies of their birth.

Austin Yang’s iTypewriter

And looking even further into the past is the iTypewriter, Alan Yang’s wacky mash-up of a physical typewriter with an iPad, which inspired a look at other nostalgic devices developed for iOS devices, which still feel futuristic, from an Atari joystick to the 1984 Mac OS GUI on a Macbook. That particular post prompted a variety of comments: reader C3 bashed it all as “hipster design… cute/ fun/fluff pr/etc,” while Renato Castilho offered a longer critique:

While the concept seems to have been carefully crafted, the very way it takes a forward-looking mobile device (which fits in an envelop [sic]) and makes it bulky, loud and cumbersome should be enough of a reason to shelf it [sic]—let alone the fact that it is by design less useable than the iPad screen or a regular Bluetooth keyboard…

It is certainly amusing, interesting, nostalgic but I can’t really take it seriously. The amount of energy, thinking and effort put into making the new feel (or worse work) like the old could be better applied but hey, at least it assumes, unlike Microsoft’s Surface, that a physical keyboard belongs on a table.

“Electrkobiblioteka” by Walden Wegrzyn

Most revealing is the reflexive nature of many of these projects. Take Walden Wegrzyn’s Electrkobiblioteka, a physical version of an e-book with real paper pages that you can flip and touch. It’s a book of an e-book of a book? And then there’s Jeff Skierka’s Mixtape Table, a throwback to eras when cassette tapes and plywood tables were trés chic. And if music isn’t your thing, you can always turn to Neulant van Exel’s Floppy Table, complete with a sliding compartment a la the classic metal shutter. And what does van Exel suggest we place inside? A remote control for a television, of course.

Neulant van Exel – “Floppy Table”

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