To what extent is the relationship between innovation in academia and industry preventng Anthony Dunne’s “post-optimal object” from entering the mainstream of consumer culture?

was the title from my recently completed dissertation.

I was inspired to conduct this research after reading Hertzian Tales, a book by the acclaimed industrial designer Anthony Dunne in which he argues for an alternative future in the development of electronic products that is focused more on metaphysics, poetry and aesthetics than on performance or technical functionality. His argument stems from the lack of cultural speculation in the design of electronic products today.

presense, my major practical project from my masters in Interactive Media, a communication device for emotional communication, was inspired by this alternative reality that Dunne speaks of. Presense is just one part of a huge area of research done in academia over the past 20 years into so called “phatic technologies,” which are devices that allow people to communicate in more subtle or emotional means. They are born out of the concepts of ubiquitous computing, first realised by Mark Weiser in his seminal 1991 paper “The computer of the 21st Century” and phatic communication, which was first coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who defined it as communication “whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to convey information”

Despite the abundance of research in academia into phatic technologies there is little evidence that this has crossed over into commercial development. I started my research with the assumption that there was a lack of communication or a divergence between the goals of innovation in academia and innovation in industry. I hoped to find out whether this was the cause for a lack of post-optimal products in the marketplace or if there were other factors at play.

I decided to focus my research on three phatic communication devices developed in both academia and industry. By analysing the motivations of the people behind them and the resulting impact they subsequently had, I hoped to gain an understanding of what is preventing these products from entering the mainstream of consumer culture and if and when this will change.

Please download the thesis here and send me your comments and thoughts…

Connectibles! developed by Jeevan Kalanithi at the MIT Media Lab

Emotion Communicators Developed by Philips Design

Social Mobiles Developed as a collaboration between IDEO and the artist Crispin Jones