Defining The New Singularity

Defining the New Singularity

Mick Jagger is a beautiful man. That’s not to say he’s good-looking; one can’t overlook that large mouth, those slightly off-kilter eyes, that slur. Neither is it simply a matter of his being a rock star, though that’s certainly a part of it. He has neither the most beautiful face nor the most beautiful voice, the best style nor the best music. But what he does offer is an uncompromising singularity, a fully embodied personality that draws us, inevitably, towards him.

Let’s call this the Mick Jagger Phenomenon. It can be found in most things we call beautiful. Looking at Jagger, you don’t see a hybrid set of choices and opinions; you don’t sense an amalgamation of different views. He is who he is. You feel that there’s a distinct core identity from which it all radiates – and that singularity is his beauty. That singularity is beauty.

And it is this quality that we, as designers, must capture in our products. We have long sought to give our clients that je ne sais quoi that drives market success. We have worked to express the core values of each product, brand, and consumer in the function and aesthetics of our work. But too often, what we end up with is the average of multiple considerations: of client and consumer desires, of digital and manual functionality. We end up with The Monkees instead of The Stones. It has become increasingly difficult for form to follow function, or emotion, or consumer identity – leaving designers without a clear direction. Why is this happening? Because today, the complexity of our products is greater than ever before.

The Map Has Outgrown the Territory

Capturing this essence used to be a more direct process. Fifty years ago, the appearance of a product primarily reflected its functional demands. Over time, this simple charge expanded to embrace globalism, branding, emotional and cultural considerations, and eventually what was supposed to be the great catchall of the design process, “user experience.”

This is the irony of the situation: while the object itself has become less dominant in the overall product story, it assumes new importance as the icon for this much larger set of relationships."

Yet there was more on the horizon. As the writer Bruce Sterling puts it, borrowing a bit from Baudrillard and applying it to design, we are now approaching an age of technological advancement when “there is more stored in the map than there is in the territory.” Put more simply, the story surrounding a given “thing,” a product or service we buy and use, is rapidly exceeding the value of the thing itself. The identity of a product can no longer be easily defined through its form factor, but rather by the information that encases it, passes through it, and is accumulated by it over the course of its lifetime. The notion of this emerging product universe covers far more than we are used to considering in the creative equation: the form, the means of production, the business built around it, the social implications of its existence, the ecological impact of its creation, the object’s role in a system of multiple devices, the social community developed to manage, discuss, and enjoy the object at hand. Sterling calls this new modern thing a “spime” – and it has massive implications for design.