Reading Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style didn't tell me much that I didn't know, but it encouraged me to think more about how technically advanced and advancing electronics-based products do and do not benefit from the input of aestheticians. And I was also caused to think some more about such things by this link from Alex Singleton's personal techy-blog to this rather stylish computer. It is small, cute, and made out of just one piece of aluminium, and with a flat and empty top. And see also this picture of Perry de Havilland's new computer.
Perry's new computer has a curvy top. I prefer flat and empty tops for this kind of beast (also for music boxes), such as the thing Alex linked to has, because then you can put other gadgets on top, and pens, and paper clips and biros and Disprin and plates of food and cups of coffee. My new digital radio is wondrous, but I can't put stuff on top of it, and my new digital TV add-on is shaped not like a book but like a bug and is most inconvenient. Here is a case where being "aesthetic" is a downright negative.
The trouble with getting all aesthetic about computers, aside from the trouble caused by doing it badly, is that the technology is not stable. Imagine how car design would be if every two years or so they invented a whole new subsystem you had to bolt onto the thing. But actually, car design is stable. That is why the aesthetics department of car companies is so large and so important and so commercially vital. Aesthetics can regularly make the difference between car famine and car feast, and once you've perfected your new design, it can, with a bit of ducking and weaving, last quite a few years.
Not so with computers. By the nature of computer technology, extra bits of junk accumulate all the time. Techies may reply: ah but you can stuff it all inside, and thus ensure the aesthetic integrity of that cool box. Yes, but non-techies are the ones most influenced by aesthetics, and non-techies prefer to just add things on by adding them on, on the outside. (This is why the USB standard for adding on add-ons is so important to us non-techies.)
That said, computer technology is now more stable than it was ten years ago, and for that reason, computers of all kinds are becoming more aesthetic. Think Apple. The trend now is more towards buying a very similar machine every few years to the one you had before for far less money, or towards buying a massively more powerful machine than the one you had for the same money, but with the basic architecture and functioning of the machine changing less now than it was changing ten years ago. Computers are becoming more carlike, in other words. Hence, as with cars, the boxes are getting rather prettier.
The other things that influence whether gizmo aesthetics are worth bothering with are expense, and portability, which are closely related of course. Portability equals small. And with luck, small may mean cheap, and hence replaceable in entirely every year or two.
My new digital camera is very aesthetic, and yours too no doubt, if you have one. Why? Because digital cameras don't have add-ons. When digital camera technology does its customary leap forward every eighteen months the only ways to respond are either by getting a new camera, or by making do with the old one. Add-ons get added on in the design stage. Users aren't going to cart them around in their pockets.
(Although, I do sometimes carry with me my little widget for stuffing the photos on my Flash Card into other people's computers. Aesthetically, this gadget bears no relation to my camera. By the way, being able to take this little thing on holiday with me is part of why I didn't want to bolt it irrevocably into my big box computer.)
It is noticeable that aesthetics has a far greater impact on the shaping of portable computers than it does on the shaping of the big bastard non-portable computers of the sort that I have. This is because, for the kind of people who buy them, portable computers are actually very cheap (corporate petty cash) and are hence replaced every year or two in their entirety, and because portable computer people can't be doing with carting extra bits of clobber around. Thus it makes sense for someone to pull everything in a portable computer together into a sexy looking package. As with cars, all the components are the same as they are for all the other portable makers (not completely true but it will do as a generalisation). Aesthetics can make all the difference.
Portability also says aesthetics because portability means that you are more likely to be showing the thing off to second parties, to corporate rivals, to admiring audiences. Portable gizmos are more likely to be aesthetic status goods. See also: portable phones. Very similar tendencies there to digital cameras, only more so. Think of all those fancy new cases you can buy for them. And note how when portable phones do a leap forward technologically, aesthetics steps back a little. (That's happening now, isn't it? – and those fancy covers are a little less common now. They'll be back.)
But that big computer box that stays under my desk? The only aesthetic I want there is how such things look when they work well. The functional look is all I want there. The aesthetic "honesty" of the engineering brick or the out-of-town warehouse circa 1960. My computer is a boring metal box which is there to do a job, not to look cute. And it looks like a boring metal box, which is just fine by me. We need to be "smart and pretty" now, says Postrel. All I want from my big box computer is smart, thank you.
