ArtByte
March 2000
The product selection at Target is relatively classy for a discount department store, comparing favorably to the wares at, say, Wal-Mart. Still, when Target introduces a line of in-house translucent-plastic electronics, it can be safely read as the final phase in a takeover of see-through plastics in consumer design. Regardless of the radically different structural problems such plastic poses (take Apple's iMac, for which a design team was suddenly forced to contour a visible, functional circuit board), the daring notion has met exceptional success in middle America. It's everywhere from the Ecko Clip 'n' Stay clothespin to the Swatch Twinphone.
Some may predict that such clear plastics will go the way of pleather, and even applaud when it happens. But, love it or hate it, the trend is pervasive enough to have deeper cultural implications: Translucence has become a signifier of the ultramodern in a gleefully synthetic time of plenty, and it owes its widespread adoption to the influence of digital technology—and the emerging association of its power with the invisible.
There was a time when powerful machines were visibly so. They had an apparent physicality to match their real prowess. Whether in the hammering pistons of a combustion engine or the glowering rockets of a cruise missile, machines flaunted their capabilities. In the production boom of the post-war United States—perhaps the headiest moment of the industrial age—even design for more benign products was geared toward an overt expression of strength. Take, for example, the chrome ribs on a Wurlitzer jukebox.
Today, the computers that generate our movies, calculate our spreadsheets, and fuel our stock market work at such speed and scale that they evade the human eye entirely. (In fact, techies often run "headless" computers without any monitor directly attached to them.) What computers begin, networks extend: Both the Internet and wireless technologies add the dislocation of space to the unseen movement of silicon. The Internet links people with others too far away to be seen, and wirelessness wraps the entire world in an invisible sheen of untethered communication—to the delight of some, and the resentment of others.
Designers of technological instruments have perceived this dilemma since the beginning, making superficial, representational concessions that read as transitional moments in the popular understanding and experience of computing. The very first computer, ENIAC, was equipped with a wall of Ping-Pong balls cut in half and lit from behind to make its computations visible for media events.
While computer power has been enhanced, this tension remains—meaning that little has changed in technology's relationship with culture. Much has been made of the fact the iMac's playful design gives the Internet a friendly, unintimidating face—Apple reported that almost 30% of its initial sales were to buyers who'd never owned any computer before—but it also taps into the mood of a digital age in full bloom. With exposed components and a half-visible casting, the iMac traverses both the physical and the ethereal, invoking both the physical world its users are rooted in and the technological world its users are increasingly dependent on. Users are given the opportunity to see the invisible, and to therefore believe they may grapple with it.
Arguably, technology is approaching a future where it is everywhere and nowhere at once. Design is its handmaiden. The most recent step: Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, announcing last October that the new iMac uses no cooling fan, and hence is two to eight times quieter than its competititors. One less thing to remind you that a computer is a physical object made of tangible parts. Perhaps one day Apple will introduce a computer that can surf the Web and help you write book reports, but does not physically exist at all. Perhaps one day Nike will buy the rights to Neil Gershenfeld's intelligent jogging shoe. Perhaps one day our tools will neither be seen nor heard—they will simply be.
But seen through the contemporary iMac's Bondi Blue, that future also begins to look like a shaman's chant. As Arthur C. Clarke noted, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In other words, unseen, ubiquitous, and widely misunderstood. If we become accustomed to inventions that compress fields of rational, articulated thinking into indivisible points of gestalt brilliance—accepting what we don't see blindly, as it were—we may neglect our capacity for reasoned inquiry. The triumph of the scientific age may lie in its own death.