Os blobjects e gizmos de Sterling (2002)

STERLING, Bruce. 2002. Tomorrow now: envisioning the next fifty years. New York: Random House.

O BLOBJECT

[T]oday [2002] we have, along with all those old-fashioned “modern plastics” of the 1960s, a truly weird repertoire of ductile goos’such as Styrofoam, nylon, Kevlar, urethane, epoxy, and silicone. […] The crawling foam has very few design limits and almost no material authenticity. It is not local to anything or anywhere, and it can have any property that you are willing to pay for. Everything about it is arbitrary: its grain, texture, color, weight, shape, elastic modulus, strength in compression—all these qualities can be specified on demand. These new powers and new materials have led to the design and creation of a singular totem object of contemporary times: the “blobject.” The term was coined by contemporary designer Karim Rashid, author of a book aptly titled I Want to Change the World. […] They are computer modeled objects manufactured out of blown goo. They are rounded, humpy, bumpy plastic creations. They are often translucent. And though they’re merely made things, blobjects tend to be fleshy, pseudo-alive, and seductive: rubbery, grippy, flexy, squeezy, pettable, and cuddly. […] Blobjects carry the flag in a world whose manifest destiny is “organic behavior in a technological matrix.” Chips shape them and make them behave. Computer-aided design and injection molding allow them to assume any form. They get their organic forms directly from us: from mimicking human flesh. […] Unlike classic twentieth-century industrial objects, their form does not follow their function. That’s because their functional parts, being chip-based, are too small to see. Form can no longer even see function, much less follow it. Since blobjects are made from molten goo, they can take on any shape, cheaply and dependably. So they have adapted themselves to the only remaining design limits: the sensori-motor needs and desires of the human body. […] Blobjects evolve from human ergonomics. Screens must be large enough for human eyes to see. Buttons must be properly sized for human fingertips. Telephones must be properly sized to the human mouth and ear. The ergonomically spectacular Oral-B toothbrush is all about human teeth and human gripping pads, right down to the crook of the little finger. […] Blobjects look like us because they stick around with us, and they live with us, and they try to please us—they are blobs because we’re blobs, too. We also grow, we’re spongy, we’re curvy, we’re pettable, we’re eager to please, and sometimes we’re even lovable, if people can only see us for who we are, swallow their distrust and distaste, and give us a chance to make them happy. […] Blobjects are not impressive industrial Molochs like the steam locomotive or the Saturn-V rocket. They are humble, disposable, and easy to miss. They resemble commensal organisms, little remoras or pilot fish, snuggling up to the human body, attaching themselves to belts and sneaking into purses and backpacks. They puff up like rubbery puffer fish to seal human feet with air pressure. They even worship our eyebrows as tinted designer sunglasses. […] Translucency has become their signifier of digital power. Translucency says that they do something strange inside themselves, something potent but hard to see. […] Blobjects are intimate and disposable: they don’t deal in permanence or monumentality. There are no great architectural blobjects, though the rippling metal extravaganzas of Frank Gehry come close. Future Systems of London has an unbuilt skyscraper project called the Blob, while Lord Foster of Thames Bank has riposted with a master plan for the Gherkin. Although blobjects creep and swarm about us in their very millions, they don’t dominate our skylines, and for good reason. […] Very few people would choose to live in a fully blobjective environment, a wobbling inflatable tent furnished with beanbags. Contemporary people strongly prefer to live among ritual architectural symbols of personal heritage and continuity. […] Blobjects don’t offer us these ritual comforts, because blobjects are the unreal thing. They are the genuine avatars of contemporary technological circumstances, which are formless, full of opportunity, ultraflexible, and radically flimsy. Blobjects have something genuinely unsettling and uncanny about them. Their lines are sometimes Pokemon cute, but they’re commonly fungal, epicene, and creepy. […] Although they look vaguely “organic,” they are profoundly unnatural, because they come from computer-aided design and manufacturing. CAD-CAM is a technological matrix of mathematically specified computer geometries. Blobjects are really new, a genuinely modern design trend, in the way that the Art Nouveau whiplash line was once new, in the way that streamlining was once new. Because they are small, temporary, and throwaway, they incarnate the spirit of the times. […] This computer in front of me (a poison-green Apple iMac) is a blobject. […] I spend many hours in its company, and I earn my living with it. Of course it cannot sincerely and faithfully return my feelings. But it does have its own name. It’s demanding and temperamental and very unforgiving of abuse. I’m forced to pamper and pet it rather more than I do my cat. […] Blobjects are almost as ripply, whippy, and hysterical as Art Nouveau handicrafts at their most extreme. However, blobjects are not rebels against industrialism—they are the postindustrial conquerors. They survived, killed, and buried twentieth-century mass production. They are fully tied in to the dominant industries of the new century: computers and networks. (Sterling 2002:74-80)

LISTA DE EXEMPLOS (acrescentar: iMac; the new Beetle…)

Some contemporary examples: the Gillette Mach 3 razor. The Oral-B toothbrush. The Swatch Twinphone and the Phillips USB desktop video camera. The Handspring Visor PDA. Gelatinous wrist rests. TechnoGel in office seating. “Morph” Cross pens with bulbous gel grips. The curvy, slithery Microsoft Explorer mouse. The curvy, plastic Oh chair and magnesium Go chair. […] Automobiles were among the first objects to enjoy the benefits of computer modeling. Taillights, windshields, hoods, and fenders often look strangely rounded and ductile nowadays, as if they had grown in place or had partially melted. The New Beetle, with its humpy retromodern look, looks like it was cast in aspic. (Sterling 2002:75)

END USERS

But blobjects are not made for the consumer. They are made for a knowing participant in the technocratic scramble for wealth, the “end user.” The end user does not consider himself a consumer. He’s not plucking random junk off the wire rack for the sake of having more stuff. He is deeply engaged in the system, exploiting and adapting it. End users are a brainy, fastidious, postindustrial ruling class.(Sterling 2002:82)

INTERFACE

Let’s cozy up to the warm and sensitive place where human flesh physically touches the network. (Sterling 2002:82)

TECNORELACIONAMENTOS

Postindustrial blobjects don’t “solve problems” either. Many of the signature devices of our times are portals into long, complicated relationships with service industries. They are cell phones that sell hours (Sterling 2002:87-8)

ECONOMIA DA ATENÇÃO

These are not anonymous consumer transactions, in which I pay some cash, take my box off the rack, satisfy my dark lust for possessions, and am henceforth left alone. All these devices demand continued, meticulous pampering and attention. They are not ‘‘consumer” products. They provoke and demand end-user behavior. (Sterling 2002:88)

QUALIDADES ORGÂNICAS

The insufficiency of machines was once a human job magnet of titanic proportions, but that era of merely mechanical insufficiency is over. So contemporary people are not inhumanly degraded into assembly-line robots, as in the sci-fi visions of Modern Times and Metropolis. Not because of noble sentiment or social justice but because machines have become far more ductile and disposable than human beings are or ever can be. The movement is all in the other direction. Machines are taking on organic qualities. […] They are apprentices in organic behavior; they can’t jump right for the top of the food chain. They are taking on primitive organic qualities: buglike and petlike qualities. (Sterling 2002:88-9)

GIZMO

So “gizmo” is a better, more truthful term than “machine.” Because a gizmo is a small, faddish, buzzy machine with a brieflife span. Some gizmos are blobjects. Most blobjects are gizmos. When you buy a cool new blobject gizmo, you are at the hot-wired cutting edge. You are living large! […] The nineteenth century made machinery. The twentieth century made products. But the twenty-first century makes gizmos. In a “product,” form follows function. There isn’t much decoration, because that would be irrational and inefficient; it increases production costs on the assembly line. For a gizmo, the function is the decoration. A gizmo, like a cell phone or a jogging shoe, has more functions than the user will ever be able to master, deploy, or exploit. It is designed to have baroque and even ridiculous amounts of functionality. A gizmo “empowers the user” but not in any permanent or predictable way. It has irrational levels of power, which are based on experiential values like “fun” and “amusement” and “involvement” and “technical sweetness” and all things hip and designery. […] A gizmo is neither a “machine” nor a “product” It doesn’t want you to accomplish any task in particular. It wants a relationship; it wants to be an intimate experience, as close to you as your eyebrow. It wants you engaged, it wants you pushing those buttons, it wants you faithful to the brand name and dependent on the service. […] A gizmo needs an interface, and an interface for its interface. It needs tech support, and tech support for its tech support. Even its web pages need web pages. And this is where you work. Because the mental insufficiency of these bleeping, begging little gizmos has become a human job magnet of titanic proportions. The near-infinite complexity of a network of rapidly obsolescing, disposable gizmos can suck up near-infinite amounts of human effort and ingenuity. (Sterling 2002:89-90)

COMPUTADOR

A computer is an ultimate gizmo because it is both amazingly powerful and amazingly temporary. It follows that anything mediated by a computer, anything containing a chip, tends to take on a gizmolike character. A car with a computer is a computer with wheels. A plane with a computer is a flying chip. Pretty much any object or any process can contain a dedicated chip. This should mean that a gizmo carnival is just over the horizon. […] The holdup is not the chip or the wireless communications technology. Chips like Transmeta and wireless systems like 802.11 are clearly moving in this direction. The holdup is batteries. (Sterling 2002:91-2)

IOT

If you had a very small fuel cell that would run quietly and dependably, a kind of warm, primitive gizmo heartbeat, that would change things radically. Your house would swiftly be infested with lovable commercial Pokemon and Furbies. An overwhelming plague of Furbyization would hit everything you own: toasters, vacuum cleaners, jogging shoes, your television, your pet’s collar, beer bottles, aftershave, deodorant, toothbrushes. There would be a silent cacophony of interactivity in all domestic and industrial objects. (Sterling 2002:93)

GELADEIRA

A refrigerator, for instance, is always plugged into the wall. So perhaps a “smarter” refrigerator could read the bar codes on all the goods that enter and leave it. It would then “know” that you had no milk. Perhaps it could order some milk for you off a website. Or it could answer its cell phone when you called it from the grocery, and get you up to speed on its contents. (Sterling 2002:93-4)

CARRO

Cars also have plenty of onboard power. So a car might as well become a mobile office cubicle; it will talk to a cell phone and laptop, read text files aloud over its radio speakers, take phone calls, even ask for handy directions from satellites overhead. The smart tires will complain when the tread gets low. The smart gas tank knows all its favorite gas stations in the area. The speedometer silently calls Dad whenever the family teenager does ninety miles per hour. (Sterling 2002:94)

Relacionados:

Pesquisas do LaSPA – Episódio [02]: Qual a relação entre desenvolvimento do design e do capitalismo? Uma conversa com Rafael Malhão Crise no ciberespaço-tempo neoliberal (Fisher 2013) Mediação algorítmica e aprendizado de máquina Surfar sem morrer na praia (Foucault, Kittler e Mandelbrot, via Deleuze 2013 [1986], Winthrop-Young 2000 e Plant 1997)) Matéria e sentido (Barad 2007)