Blobjects and mice

I've been reading about blobjects. It's a term apparently coined by designer Karim Rashid, though a Google search turns up a kind of promiscuous, unattributed use that makes me think its origins might actually be pretty hard to track down. Bruce Sterling lists and describes them thus:

The iMac (of course). The Gillette MACH3 Razor. The Oral-B toothbrush. Marc Newson's Orgone Chair. The Swatch Twinphone and the Philips USB Desktop video camera. Rounded, plastic creations, often translucent. Seductively hand-shaped: grippy little cameras, rubber-baby-bumpered PDAs. Gelatinous wrist-rests for the carpal-tunnel contingent. Pricey Cross Morph pens whose brushed-aluminum barrels blew up into bulbous silicone-grips.

The humpy, perky, retro-moderne New Beetle. The laser-guided Microsoft Explorer mouse, gliding under one's sweaty palm with a slick red glare like a molten hockey puck.

Blobjects are made possible by CAD/CAM systems that allow designers to model curves; new, flexible materials (injection-molded plastic, silicone, fiberglass, laminates); and microelectronics that perform the functions of the object, allowing its form to follow ergonomics, whimsy, or seduction. Form doesn't follow function any more; the function has been offloaded to a circuit board, and the form takes on different purposes. But that's not exactly right: the forms are intended to make the object intimate, easy to carry and use, and thus a constant companion. This in turn is important because many blobjects, like cell phones, are platforms for services; and in order to ring up those minutes online, you have to have a device that people will always have around.

Blobjects / Ubicomp

The blobject is also a harbinger of ubiquitous computing, a term first coined by Xerox PARC chief scientist Mark Weiser. Weiser envisioned a world in which we no longer interacted with computers that sat on the desktop; indeed, we would barely be aware of computers at all. They would be everywhere, mediating our communications, controlling devices, chatting with each other-- but in the background, embedded in furniture, appliances, even clothes. Blobjects are early indicators of ubiquitous computing.

Is the mouse a blobject? Certainly the current generation of mice-- the curvy, cordless models that Logitech, Microsoft, and neary everyone else makes-- qualify; but is there anything to be gained by thinking about earlier mice in these terms?

Comments

[Mr AutoCad]

Whats a blobject?

[Mr AutoCad]

Yah, what is one of those?