In the Bubble — John Thackara : Personal analysis
Two topics that fascinated me in that book, “In The Bubble” by John Thackara, are related to technology, how humanity became completely dependant on it, and how nature can sometimes surpass it and human-made products. These two topics are discussed in chapter 9 which John Thackara starts by speaking about penguins and saying how they are able to survive in their cold environment thanks to their body and compares it directly to the heating system he has in his house.
He highlights an interesting point right when he starts this comparison by saying that, besides being the most intelligent and advanced mammal on this planet, and besides having created a heating system designed to be “smart and the most efficient”, a “dumb bird” like a penguin can surpass human technology.
The question now is how is that possible ?
Thackara explains that by saying that many companies are today facing a huge problem, which is to figure out the difference between “the functionality of technology and the perceived value of that technology to the people who are supposed to buy it”. This quote tries to explain that most of the time, people are blinded by the features added on a product and tend to forget the first use of this product. He explains that through a very explicit example, the one of a rented car. The anecdote is that Thackara once rented a car in which was installed a pioneer radio device. This device had many features like voice commander, all kind of settings, and its design was very modern. Seeing that made him envious to rent this car, but he realised once he started his journey that one important feature was missing : the ON/OFF switch. Pioneer designed a product with thousands of features and a really explicit user manual, but forgot to include in that one how to turn the device on. This phenomenon is called “feature drift”.
Thackara created after having this experience two design laws to illustrate this tendency
.Thackara’s law state : “If you put smart technology into a pointless product, the result will be a stupid product.”
.The Law Of Diminishing Amazement (LODA) : “The more fancy tech you pack into a product, the harder it becomes to impress people with its benefits”.
The first law is explained in the previous paragraph. Concerning the second one, it tries to say that you can add as many features as you want for example in a car (memory seats, smart key card, crash sensors…), at the end, the product still is a car which main function is to transport your from a point A to a point B. Why would someone pay 200.000 US dollars for a product with the same use as a 10.000 US dollars one ?
We can clearly make a link between these concepts and our experience in India. In this country, I see a lot of people not having all the products required to cover what I would call their “most basic needs” (electricity, clean and drinkable water, proper houses…), but all of them have the latest smartphones. This example illustrates well the need of technology humanity is facing. People tend to be more interested in communication than anything else, internet and social networks are becoming drugs sucking their time and their life out of them and to have a smartphone has become a top priority in everybody’s life. What is making these facts interesting is when we start to compare the behaviour of adults to their children’s.
Most of the children I’ve seen in India don’t seem to be concerned or influenced by these needs. It has been proven than imagination is the biggest when we’re young, and that fact will help me to prove my previous point.
I often am seeing kids in Delhi’s or Noida’s streets, creating their own games, living in their own worlds. What is interesting is to see the materials and objects they are using to create these. I saw, for example, a young girl creating her own swing using a piece of fabric and an electric pole, a young boy create a sled with a piece of an old wooden board and ropes being pulled by his friends, a group of young boys and girls playing darts with small wood sticks they were throwing on a target drawn in dust, and more…
When we and John Thackara are asking how can we forget about useless features and focus only on our basic needs, I think these kids have the answer. What they are doing is observing how some games are played and how products are working to then recreate their function in the simplest way. Using the example of the darts for example, they don’t care if the tip of the stick they are throwing is pointy or not, as long as its is printing a mark in the dust they can know how much they scored. What they are doing is another version of the topic I chose to speak about in this writeup : BIOMIMICRY
This concept is basically copying the nature itself to create products having the same appearance or properties. Here is how John Thackara explains it : “Nature offers us countless examples of designs that could help us meet our basic needs in more elegant and efficient ways than our man-made ones”.
He uses examples of many natural materials found in our natural environment that have better properties than the artificial materials created by humans (spider silk, mussel adhesive…)
Humanity sometimes learns from nature speaking about the properties of material (strength, elasticity…) but most often ruins everything they have learnt with the process used to recreate these properties (example of kevlar : silent spider knitting VS petroleum and boiling sulphuric acid).
We already are surrounded by all this technology, that is why we can’t focus on other ways to do things, but children are living in their own world and are not influenced by this overflow of technology. “Stranded on an ice floe, with nothing but penguins for company, we’d probably study them more closely”. If we stop speaking about material properties but about functions instead, this is exactly what I could observe looking at these kids, and this is, I think, the kind of concept that could make the product I am willing to create for my Final Diploma Project as accurate as it can be.
