In this presentation, David Ross discusses the idea of “enchanted object”. This is basically a kind of design that uses daily and common objects in our lives but adds extraordinary things to it. David Ross suggests that this is an option of how future technologies should be designed. He also mentioned some other possibilities such as “terminal world”, “Prothetic World”, “Animism”, but he also suggests that they each have their fatal flaw, such as being distracting or discouraging communication between people.
The one thing about “enchanted object” that is the most interesting for me is how it focuses on making the daily things around us become more useful and extraordinary. This idea makes the design much more blend-in in our lives rather than imposing new concepts to its users. I think this is very important in this modern time, for the reason that avoiding distraction and disturbance of new technology has become many people’s concern in their lives. Modern technologies have brought us access to tons of information, via the internet, phones, and computers. However, this also makes us exposed to unnecessary information and distracts us from living our own lives. In my opinion, “enchanted objects” provides a solution to dial down such distraction without having to reduce our access to information. Specifically, each object is designed to provide only the information that is meaningful for its purpose, and only at the time when actually need it.
However, I also think that there could also be problems with “enchanted objects”. For instance, when we have too many of them from us, blinking or beeping, then this could be even a more terrible distraction. Meanwhile, maybe always designing our technologies into building products following the idea of “enchanted objects” won’t be a very good idea either. Because sometimes society does need designs that bring us completely new invention, and the idea of “enchanted object” does not really provide ideas for conducting such designs.