Overview

As new technical developments alter the object and make it intelligent, they also set the object on a plane with no prior cultural references... although the physical aspects of these objects are still within the world of materials, their operation and their very state of being is well beyond the manipulation of matter and has more to do with information exchange than with form.

E. Manzini, THE MATERIAL OF INVENTION

Most designers of electronic objects have responded to this challenge by accepting a role as a semiotician, a companion of packaging designers and marketers, creating semiotic skins for incomprehensible technologies.

From Banham writing about portable radios in the 1970s, through the plethora of essays on product semantics in the 1980s, to Norman Bolz s 1992 essay The Meaning of Surface, the treatment of the electronic object as a package for technology, designed to communicate use, cultural meaning, and corporate identity through its surface, has been thoroughly explored. The electronic object accordingly occupies a strange place in the world of material culture, closer to washing powder and cough mixture than to furniture and architecture, and is subject to the same linguistic discipline as all package design, that of the sign. It is lost somewhere between image and object, and its cultural identity is defined in relation to technological functionalism and semiotics.

This chapter considers three perspectives on the electronic object: The Electronic as Lost Object briefly discusses theoretical perspectives, The Electronic as Object focuses on design approaches, and The Electronic as...