No rectangles

Life after smartphones

There’s a rectangle in every pocket.

There’s a bigger rectangle on my desk. It blinks these words back at me as I type. There’s a rectangle on my wrist that vibrates when I’ve done enough steps and there’s a rectangle on the coffee machine that plays a screensaver of horses galloping when nobody’s made a coffee for a while.

It’s a rectangular world.

A history of rectangles

In ancient times we carved tablets; often clay, occasionally stone. Sometimes wax because you could melt it down and reuse it when the thing you’d written was no longer useful. When the debt was settled.

Scrolls are essentially just really long rectangles.

Then we invented scrolls 📜. Scrolls are essentially just really long rectangles. Scrolls were great because you could always make them longer when you had more to say, just attach another bit of parchment and keep going. It’s way more convenient than a big pile of stone tablets.

Eventually we developed books 📚. Books are better still, they’re easy to read, easy to search through, they’re portable, they stack well on shelves, they’re protected from the environment by hard covers. They’re amazing. They were the dominant rectangle for a millennium and a half. Right up until recently, when we went back to the scroll.

Tablets, scrolls, books. It’s all rectangles.

Smart rectangles

At some point we set out to create a smarter rectangle.

Newspapers are rectangles that change their content every day. Televisions are rectangles that change their content every second.

We plugged our rectangles into our phone-lines.

TVs are interactive rectangles with buttons to change channel, computers are interactive rectangles with buttons to do damn-near anything. We plugged our rectangles into our phone-lines and then Geocities and Wikileaks and Reddit and we all just adapted. Our rectangles got really smart.

Designing for rectangles

The greatest artistic minds of any given generation spent their career filling rectangles. Artists, authors, illustrators, cinematographers, graphic designers, app developers. Kubrick, Vonnegut. The medium changes but centuries pass and ultimately the medium is always rectangle.

The greatest artistic minds of any given generation spent their career filling rectangles.

The rectangles all converged into the smartphone. We put one in every pocket and here we are today. Ok. So? Let’s talk about life after rectangles.

No interface

“The best interface is no interface”. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. My lights turn off automatically when I leave my flat because I am the interface, my presence is the light switch.

The second best interface is voice. It’s the most natural command-line ever invented. It’s evolved over millions of years. We’re so adept at talking that we can do it in our sleep (heh). “Hey Siri, clear my diary, I’m staying in bed today.”

IoT and proximity, gesture and voice, we extract the superpowers we gave our smartphones and build them frictionlessly into our habits without missing a beat and then what? Discard the classic rectangle of old? The Guardian editorial, the local village newsletter, the great American novel?

We’ll still read in the future won’t we? We won’t evolve into an Audible dystopia where all written text is narrated by an English man with impeccable diction. So then how will we consume content?

Reality

We’ll virtualise reality. Or at the very least we’ll augment it.We’ll overlay, we’ll throw text directly into your field-of-view.

We’ll take that field and fill it. You’ll wear AR glasses (or contact lenses, or nothing at all) and we’ll augment a rectangle in the middle of your field-of-view and we’ll put some words on it.

We’ll give you a virtual smartphone and you’ll read your virtual book on your virtual smartphone in virtual reality, projected in the middle of your field-of-view as you walk. It’ll flash red if you’re at risk of bumping into something.

We’ll hang onto the rectangle for a while because we don’t know how to let go. And then we’ll let go anyway.

Letting go

G.K. Chesterton once said:

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

The frame has almost always been a rectangle. So what happens when the rectangle is gone?

I guess we’ll just have to find ourselves some new limitations.