real world columns: marks and scratches

I am of the generation that has a 35 millimeter SLR camera instead of a compact 35, an APS camera or even a digital camera. The nice thing about the old SLRs was that they were robust, lasted for years and as a result quickly got covered in marks and scratches. Indeed, a long time ago the camera company Pentax ran a series of adverts showing the Pentaxes of the stars such as ‘Spike Milligan’s Pentax, Alan Whicker’s Pentax’ and in the picture a Pentax SLR camera appropriately beaten up, marked and scratched by years of reliable service with the renowned owner.

These marks and scratches are a form of personalization, not explicit as in ‘I want this mark here and two of those long scratches here’ (although there could be a market there!). These marks are what distinguishes your mass produced SLR camera from the millions of others of the same model.

It is interesting that you don’t have the same movement when it comes to cars, usually a dent or scratch is a reason to get the car to the garage as fast as possible to have it repaired. Why are cameras different? I reckon it has something to do with creativity.

What about archeologists and trowels then? They have a big thing about trowels, there is nothing worse than turning up at a dig with a shiny new trowel. Apocryphal stories abound of archeological volunteers using angle grinders and mud to give their new trowels the same aura as that of the dig leader. Are they creative? Or has it more to do with experience? Using a camera is a solitary occupation, only occasionally do you go out with anyone else toting a camera, whereas on a dig you are surrounded by crowds of other diggers all eyeing up each others trowels.

The industrial / interface designers associated with that gem of organization the Psion went in for personalization. They go by the name ‘therefore’ design, which sounds a bit strange but it does meant that they can use the mathematical three dot therefore symbol as a trendy logo. Anyway, personalization was part of their design, not just in the software interface but also in the hardware interface, in an implicit way, the casing was coated in a rubbery plastic substance that was designed to wear down in a personalized sort of way.

As well as this rough and tumble personalization there are many instances of more explicit personalization.

Personalization of our living space has always been a trend, with the current spate of television programs covering house and garden makeovers people are saying that gardening and interior design is the new rock-and-roll of our era.

The technological world has finally tuned into this human desire to personalize one’s environment. Take the mobile phone market for example. After the initial wave of mobile phones people started customizing them with leather carrying pouches, until the phone manufacturers got into the act with clip-on colorful phone shells. Even Psion joined in with colorful clip-on plates for its Sienna range.

Then there are ringtones. Ten years ago there were the first doorbells that you could configure to play the tune you wanted. Now seemingly everyone has a mobile phone that plays a different piece of beepy music instead of ringing, this is good design in that it aids recognition of whose phone is ringing, but there is also something nice and cozy about setting up your telephone to ring in the way that you want it to ring.

The flexibility of the computer meant that the on screen world was an ideal arena for explicit personalization of working environments. Just look at the difference in personalizing the Mac software environment and personalizing the PC environment.

The early days of configurable color windowing systems saw a boom in the effort people put into selecting their color coordinated background, borders etc. This movement reached its peak in the research world with the WOOL object-oriented graphical window system where every last pixel could be customized.

It probably set computing research back by ten years due to lost research time as the entire research community was defining background tiling patterns, frames with elaborate borders and detailed corner pieces. It was far worse than any virus.