I was reading about the future in the Australian Financial Review last weekend, and for the most part it was completely and utterly obsessed with what you could do if you had alot of money, but a few interesting ideas came out of it anyway. one of them was that there would be borne of all this technology an elitist group of consumers knowns as Tactilists.
These are people who in our distantish future will still seek the experience of holding the cd booklet, reading smelly old books, buying things for their design and shape as we do now, they will actually seek things that heark back to a simpler time. buying a case for your iPod that gave it the look and feel of wood, for example.
Simultaneously anyone who’s been watching BBC’s Grumpy Old Men will recognise the frustration and anger at the number of gadgets in our lives and how bloody complicated they’ve become. I mean it all started with the unprogrammeable VCR. But now even your camera bleeps at you when you try to take a photo.
This is all taking shape right now as seen with the Hipster PDA. a revolution of paper media set to replace the nearly outdated PDA. Hey index cards with a butterfly clip will biodegrade gracefully, are recyclable, and you don’t have to figure out the software, run out of batteries, or even have to upgrade when the bloke from across the office sneers at your 8 month old model. Just buy new index cards when you fill the old ones. Like Ian, the Press Secretary does.
Essentially we’re saying that our brains still do a better job of organising our lives than computers do, we just need the simplest back up support for our unreliable memories. Computers still haven’t found the perfect way to get ideas out of our brains and into the world, the pen still does it better. Mostly because you don’t have to think about how to use a pen.
Meanwhile there is the Moleskinerie, a group already well aware of the seduction of paper organisation. Mostly concerned with ways to organise their creative life, they seem to obsess about the many wonderful qualities of having a moleskine notebook in your pocket. particularly a practical one with expandable folder, elastic band and your choice of plain, lined or graphed sheets.
It is a future market, coined by producers like Apple who learnt the easy way that, these days, people will pay more if it is designed well, what is outside is just as important as what’s inside. Apple’s next trick will be to learn that what is inside needs to be as elegant as what’s outside.