Killing the Archetype: Day One of the FUSE Conference

Marco Beghin, president of Moleskine, delighted the FUSE conference audience in Chicago today when he skirted the traditional and, often tiresome, power point presentation and moved towards an overhead projector.  He placed his small moleskin notebook on top of the clean white screen to begin his talk “The Analog Digital Continuum.”  Storytelling in the most nostalgic way, Beghin flipped through his notebook to unfold pictures and script that were tucked between the pages. This underscored his narrative about the importance of artifacts in human identity, highlighting a 3,500 year old skeleton of a nomad found among his knives, bowstring, and copper axe as an example of how the objects that we carry with us can tell a story of our experiences. But Beghin wasn’t arguing for us to bury our experiences in notebooks. He explained the obvious: the possibility of sharing analogue experience is amplified by the digital experiences we have through online storytelling. At the Salon di Mobile this week in Milan, Beghin announced that Moleskin would display the reverse phenomenon by capturing all online data happening around the event with a 3ft high robot and transcribing it on pieces of paper to create a physical expression of the conversations happening digitally.

While the audience imagined themselves as digital nomads, designer Karim Rashid took the stage, dashing the romanticism, to go into a very scattered, yet provocative manifesto about the elimination of the physical world. Okay, so he wasn’t posing as F.T. Marinetti leading the Futurists to destroy the built environment, but he did wax poetic about the conversion of dated physical experiences into elevated digital ones.  Rashid believes that we are less interested in the overproduction of the physical world and this has led to a major shift towards dematerialization. He used our interactions with hotels as an example of how users relate to physical spaces through their digital expectations. We were formally more concerned with physical comforts and now are more concerned with the availability of Wi-Fi to make it a connected and familiar experience. Countering Beghin’s presentation, Rashid voiced his disgust with our hesitation to abandon our attachment to physical designs – ones that didn’t actually enhance our lifestyles. He cited coins as perpetuators of disease and car seats which indicate a lack of consideration for the aging baby boomer population - as an adherence to unnecessary design archetypes we hold on to.

Why are we bringing our “ritual” baggage into the digital age? Are these digital experiences humanizing us or should we nourish our nostalgia?

Discuss.

design mind will continue it’s coverage of the FUSE conference this week and frog’s Luke Williams, author of the book Disrupt, will present on Wednesday morning.