Aging Without Grace, the Trouble with New Stuff

Khoi Vinh has a great piece up on Subtraction, “Design Deterioration,” which is all about the way in which products age and how attractive they can become when they do. He then talks about digital hardware and how foreign the idea of aging is to those types, from an unsightly PowerBook to “the dirt that develops in your keyboard. The long and short of it is that these new bits of shiny technology aren’t ever designed to age or grow character with use, they’re expected to be in mint condition forever, which is certainly what never happens out here in the real world. It’s an interesting thing to put your mind to and certainly one we’d never really thought about before.