apple i-Think

"Dear apple, you had the power to do something really good for the generations to come, but this is what you have done so far, probably in an irreversible manner"

'Good is not good enough when the best is expected', I had read somewhere sometime ago. And in context of this article, this does not refer to the apple products, but what they could/should have done with the way they design them!
I always liked the way apple designed their desktop computers (i-mac) and laptops, for their simple, clean, neat and 'different' design. Visually this translated into compositions of nice rounded rectangles mostly! This smart design sense certainly helped them earn a clearly distinguishing identity for the apple branded products as well as its consumer group. To some extent, this design language can be spotted in many other products of various brands, making apple the trendsetter in today's consumer electronics design.
This is certainly good for apple, but lets have a look at a little bigger picture. Look closely at the tiny icons seen on the big screen of i-phone.

Even if you couldn't read most of them, you still can figure out what they stand for. Great, isn't it? But Give it a thought. Why could you understand them? Why do you think the green icon in bottom is for 'PHONE' ? Why the second icon means 'MAIL' or 'messages'? Why does the youtube icon or the CLOCK icon looks 'normal' or familiar to you and me? Because we have associated these different shapes/visual identities to some specific objects for a lot of part of our life so far. Look at the 3 pictures below viz. TV, wall clock and telephone. Quite familiar right?

At some point of time in past, we have used or at least seen these vicually clearly different objects and we already know what they used to do for us. And that is why we can recognise the icons on i-phone's screen!

Now have a look at the following few pictures.

Yes, these are images of some phones, digital camera, waching machine and TV. These products (i am tempted to call them blobjects) exist in the same era as that of apple i-phone. But can you imagine apple or anyone else using these 'forms' to make icons for the products we discussed at the start of this article? Do you think our next generation kids born in this world full of soft-touch rectangular objects will have some distinct visual identities associated to them (and their icons)? The worst part is, Aplle won't be able to use even the icons discussed in the beginning which we could very easily identify. These kids wouldn't have seen the products which made these icons! All they will get to see is a nice rounded rectangle!

It's time we pause for a while, think about what we, as designers are doing, for the world yet to come, to think if form is still following function? or just the technology born yesterday? or just some other form?

I fear, one day we will all have some rectangular screens looking just the same and we will wait till the device starts and shows its 'visual interface' to know what that product does... or even worse, we will have to download 'apps' to actually be doing something with that nice rounded rectangle!