The role of weight in luxury

As a child, I loved space. I still do. The thought of zero-gravity, of feeling weightlessness is a feeling I’ve always wanted to experience. It’s ironic that I’m now musing about the “comfort” I’m finding in weight.  I’ve been designing interactive digital experiences now for 7 years. I’ve always had an interest in computers and art so it seemed a natural progression for me to pursue a role in interaction design. It’s really satisfying work; designing, architecting and developing a successful online user experience but this year something is different. Something is missing in my day to day. I find myself pining for something tactile. Something to feel, to hold, something with texture, something that isn’t backlit, something with… well… weight.

I was sitting on the train this morning with my 1200 page copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. My wife was sitting next to me with her e-reader, clicking her way through Moby Dick. A stranger on the other side of me had his kindle out, making digital notes against a paragraph he obviously thought was important and the lady across from me was swiping away at her iPhone – I felt like the lucky one. I had with me an object of what some would consider excessive, unnecessary weight these days. This one book is about 2kg in paperback, and yes, it’s just one story. It doesn’t have a library of thousands of books bundled with it nor can I flip a page with a one-handed click, but it feels comfortable.

Sure, it may be considered inconvenient or impractical but reading a story isn’t just about information absorption for me, the words conjure images. The feeling of the uncoated, off-white pages, the weight of the pages in my hands, the musty, second-hand bookstore smell that wafts across you as you progress through the book all work together to make it a strong, multi-sensory experience. I found myself taking immense comfort in weight.

Many of my colleagues and friends say “digital is the way of the future, you work with the internet and you don’t even have a facebook account”- and maybe they’re right. Maybe I should. Maybe I should just de-clutter and live in the cloud. However it’s unlikely that as technology improves, the devices we use will gain weight. It got me thinking, what will this mean? The race is on for hardware producers to provide devices to consumers that are faster, thinner and lighter than their ancestors. No matter how light something becomes, until it’s implanted within us, somehow woven in to our biological being, it will always be considered too heavy. Does this mean that the path for technological advance is already laid out before us as the inevitable? Are we heading towards a future where interfaces are controlled by brainwaves, we think and therefore it is? Where does that leave our sense of touch?

Historically, weight has always been associated with comfort and quality. The term “comfort food” is the label given to the meals we prepare that are high in fat, that make us feel good, that also make us gain weight if we overindulge. The paintings of the Botticelli era, having seen them in person in Italy last year, show women with curves and bellies, this “weight” was and still is considered beautiful to look at. When shopping for furniture, you can often distinguish between Ikea chipboard and solid wood by how heavy it is. The heavier the item, often the higher the price; and I’m not talking about shipping costs.

It’s the same with design and architecture books; hard cover versions cost and weigh substantially more than their cheaper, paperback counterparts. Today’s musicians now release vinyl versions of their albums as well as CD and MP3. Your buying more than the experience of sound with a vinyl – the music feels more substantial as you place it on your record player and pick-up the 20g needle to place it on your disc to make your speakers crackle and sing. You’re forced to sit within earshot and listen because in 20 minutes, you’ll have to be there to turn it over if you want to listen to side B. Even money has more value when we can hold it and feel it. Spending $250 on a single electronic transaction makes it so much easier to part with money than feeling the weight transfer of 5 crisp $50 notes from your back pocket to the shop’s cash register. It becomes more than hypothetical visual information, it becomes a physical representation of the work you’ve put in to have the weight in your wallet in the first place. There are many more examples I could share but I digress.

My fear, as the world becomes more digitally engaged, is that humans will become less touch-sensitive, less haptic, less able to feel. Weight is and will be seen as an inconvenience rather than a tool that designers can use to create emotions and reactions in people that our other senses are simply not capable of communicating to our brains. My classic training as a designer taught me the devices I had at my disposal to create effective graphic design; colour, line, type, etc, no one ever mentioned weight beyond light, medium and heavy typefaces. It’s something we feel so naturally that it’s almost too obvious to teach.

Print a business card for a high-priced lawyer or boutique, international design studio on 120gsm paper and it simply feels wrong. The weight of the card adds credibility to the content. But, add 100 grams to the next generation of the iPad and the community will be in an uproar about portability. This begs the question – by what measure do we judge the quality of content we consume in the digital world? It’s interesting that the rules of weight in other forms of consumption; furniture, painting and the printed word seem to invoke an opposite reaction for interactive digital devices. The flimsier the device, the more we see it as an advancement, as ‘better’. Would an uncoated version of a touch screen feel more luxurious or would it feel cheap and unfinished? Imagine if every printed document that was ever produced had a shiny, gloss finish akin to the LCD screens of today’s smart phones.

Are we sacrificing our sense of ‘touch’ and ‘feel’ for convenience and portability or will touch just take on a different meaning now? Are we about to witness a revolution in making our multi-touch devices more tactile? The quilted back of the Kobo, the plethora of leather, wood and felt cases for all our current mobile devices, make it obvious to me that I’m not alone in wanting a more comforting digital experience. It’s clear that humans find comfort in tactile experiences, what interests me going forward in my professional life is how we’re going to address this need if our content is trapped within the confines of the 2D, gloss-coated LCD.