“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” (Apple Marketing Brochure 1977) Technology is in a constant feedback loop, changing and melding into new and old forms in a non-linear timeline. With the introduction of new portable digital, instead of continuing in new futuristic physical forms, designers went back to the literal board, the historical tablet. New digital technology references their form heavily to the wax tablet. Humans have used writing tablets such as wax and clay for centuries, encoding in people an intrinsic knowledge use. This intrinsic knowledge was used by new tech companies, and heavily by Apple, to make an easier transition from old media to new media. By making the form and interface already familiar to new users, the company creates an easier learning curve to new tech. Through this, the feedback loop is alive, referencing both new and old historical human habits within new digital media.
The foundation of technology development is in constant relationship with each other. In Jessica Pressmans, Old Media/New Media, “Media do not replace one another in a clear, linear succession but instead evolve in a more complex ecology of interrelated feedback loops. “What is new about new media,” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write, “comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (1999: 15) (See REMEDIATION). “Remediation” is evidence of how new media impact old media.” (Pressman 1) The new digital interface of the ipad or the tablet is seeing a physical example of remediation. The historical rectangular form with content displayed inside the outer blocked borders is the same with the interior replaced with a screen. While the manufactured medium of circuit boards now encapsulates the ipad inside, the old and new tablet have a working system of nerves that allow knowledge to be displayed on an interface, whether electrical currents or wood fibers. The use of the writing tablet for centuries set up the inevitable evolution of the object through historical human reliance. The digitization of the tablet was the next step of the transition of the tablet, having previous transitions like stone to wood or clay to wax.
Steve Job’s company focus was making his products accessible and familiar. His products weren’t new inventions, but recrafted objects. He stated in a recalled past interview with Walter Isaacson, “The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.” (Isaacson 10) Job’s emphasis on intuitive knowledge goes back to the feedback loop and intrinsic knowledge use. Making an intuitive interface creates a simpler experience interacting with new tech. By basing his company on this, it forms a trend of basing the new on the old and a successful tactic that makes a popular company. By keeping the Apple products as raw as possible, interference between the process of intrinsic knowledge and action from it is minimized. This is shown in all Apple products, from iPads, macbooks, and iPhones. Clay tablets were very portable, having a rounded base and edges that suggests it fit in the scribes palm. (Borsuk 13) This resembles the sleek rounded edges of a basic iphone model. The First Generation iPhone is significantly bigger than the rest, having a thicker shape which can be both attributed to the early development of a full screen interface with an encoded keyboard and the attempt to replicate the portable clay tablet and its importance on being held in the palm. Macbooks can be tied to the wax version of the tablet. In Chapter 1 of How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak writes“ that a physical structure was devised to match and help circumscribe the intellectual unit of the pagina materially…multiple frames were often hinged together with a strip of leather or ring to increase the writing surface.”(Mak 12-13) The macbook was created as a way to maximize the availability of knowledge and writing through making a portable computer. Again, the designers of Apple drew on the historical form of the tablet by attaching two tablet models, but with one digital tablet and one keyboard and a physical locked connector instead of a removable, deteriorable, binding.
Old media and new media constantly circle each other in their development. By creating anew, it cannot be created without contributing to the old. In the era of the 20th Century, the sleek digital technology and its allure had taken foothold, but its grasp on the collective cannot be attributed to the aesthetic of futurism, but the nostalgia of the past. The creation of the most popular portable technology company was based on the emphasis of building from what already was. The usage of intrinsic knowledge systems and relatable technology made Apple flourish because of their understanding of simplicity and familiarity. By remediating a historical object, Apple created a simple transition between physical to digital because of creating the basic form with modern elements. The form and the usage never changed, just the evolution of its parts from wooden fiber nerves to circuit nerves.
Close Reading
My creative project is a homemade wax tablet. It is first made with two rectangular wooden tablets with rounded edges. The interior is filled with layers of melted beeswax which has been dyed with yellow pigment to show a brighter canvas instead of a natural beeswax’s white or translucent color. I connected the two tablets with drilled holes and wire as they were too small to put weaved thread into. I have attached a carved wooden stylus that I made from a wooden dowel which I shaved the end into a point with a knife. This technique of a carved wooden interior and rounded edges go back centuries. It was used as an early writing tool as it was accessible and relatively simple to make, though it took time to chisel and dye the wax. This taught me about the physical form of the interface and its development. We can see almost exact forms through different time periods, through the clay and wax tablets, to blackboard/chalkboard tablets, to digital tablets like iPads. I have attached a photo of a chalkboard set I found at Old Town Historic Park as a comparison to my wax tablets. This shows that while the parts to make the tablets are different, the mechanics, outer shell, and interface, still relatively take the same form outline. Through centuries, our use of this important tool is constant, but also how we make its mechanics. Through this object, we connect to humans, past, present, and future, because of our past down knowledge of a reliable object. This object, though may seem insignificant, is a marker of our connection to and evolution as a species.
Works Cited
Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press. May 2018.
Isaacson, Walter. “How Steve Jobs’ Love of Simplicity Fueled a Design Revolution.” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-steve-jobs-love-of-simplicity-fueled-a-design-revolution-23868877/.
Mak, Bonnie. How the Page Matters. University of Toronto Press. 2011.
Pressman, Jessica. Old Media/New Media. Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality. 2022. www.jessicapressman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/13.01.22-Pressman_essay.pdf.
Tetzeli, Rick. “Why Jony Ive Is Apple’s Design Genius.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2017. www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/jony-ive-apple-design-genius-180967232/.
