I was having a think about what kind of things might actually excite me in a new tech device, in the way a new Creative MP3 player used to (lol):

  • no AI included, or somehow even blocked entirely at OS/hardware level
  • look more visually interesting as an object, not just a glass block
  • physical buttons? Or more of a sense of the materiality of design beyond glass and screens
  • deliberate restrictions or limited affordances, like no screens or only audio interfaces (Apple TV+’s Sunny had an interesting depiction of this, thought this’d require even more AI I guess)
  • dumbing down devices and ability to impair their surveillance at a more foundational/hardware level
  • making some actual design decisions that lead to functions or features being removed?

Designers seem to need constraints to do interesting stuff. We should be demanding more limits on devices instead of affordances.

  • Sent from my Nokia 7110