Digital patina

Something that’s been bothering me for a while, yet I’ve never been able to put my finger on is the “always new” thing you get with digital media.

I’m not really into new stuff, my furniture, while not being antique, is always bought used. My house is built with reclaimed materials. My car and my bike are from the seventies, my pepper mill is the one my mom used when I was little and I named my daughter after my grandmother.

I like stuff with a past. And I like it when that past shows, like the patina of a pair of 501’s or a dent in a car that must have a story.

I always associate traces of extensive use as a sign of quality. Stuff that has stood the test of time, must be good quality stuff, and if it lasted till now, it will last a lot longer, maybe even outlast me. The guy behind Hermes handbags once said “Le luxe c’est ce qui se répare”: A luxury item is one that you repair, rather than replace.

I miss all this in digital media. A website might have been around for over a decade, used by billions of people, yet it always remains as brand-spanking-new as the day it launched.

What a lot of start up web apps do now is show usage by having things like a profile pic of the latest three users that signed up, or the 10 latest added whatevers. Stuff that’s meant to convince the visitor this site must be good, because it’s being used.
Should there be a way of showing usage the analog way, like the picture above, it shouldn’t have to do this.

Apart from the emotional association of signs of usage with quality, it can also have advantages on a different level.

Usability for instance: when you want to flip through the channels at a friends house, you know you have to use the buttons on the remote where there’s no pictogram left. Or when a door scratched a quarter circle in the floor, you know whether to pull or push.

If there’s a way to do this with digital buttons, that would solve the same problem: Where do I click here? What am I supposed to do here?

I’m sure there must be more, this post was the “put-my-finger” on it post, now comes the quest for possible implementation.

Update: Grant McCracken also has some thoughts on this.

Tags: digital patina, post-digital, postdigital, usability, UX