Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era

2 | In Hand and On the Go: Design, Neuroscience, and Habits of Perception Handheld

Texas Chapter two InHand&OntheGo Design, Neuroscience, and Habits of Perception Handheld Eastman Kodak introduced the Cine-Kodak 16 mm movie camera in 1923, and the Cine-Kodak B two years later. Distinctive camera marks visible on the original filmstrip of The Augustas demonstrate that Scott Nixon shot the sequences of the Augusta Military Academy on a B model. Nixon also occasionally shot with the heavier, more professional Cine-Kodak Special.1 However, he seems to have relied mostly on the K model, which was introduced in 1930.2 The Cine-Kodak line of cameras targeted amateur filmmakers. Although all the cameras were designed to be portable, the B and K models were particularly suited to handheld use. Neither required a tripod. By design, these cameras encouraged filmmakers to take them everywhere, and someone like Scott Nixon could document Augustas with little more fuss and forethought than ensuring that the camera had been loaded with film. This chapter takes up the design logics that encourage the portability of twenty-first-century handheld devices, specifically the mobile —or smart—phone. I am interested in how concerns regarding heft and “wieldiness,” or physical manageability, that informed the design of amateur film cameras like the 28 Finding Augusta Cine-Kodaks, inform a new set of questions about intuitive interfaces and about how to engage a very large populations of users as opposed to the more select category of amateur filmmakers. I interpret industrial design’s pursuit of a “natural” look and feel as a managerial gesture, one that operates on individuals at the level of their nonconscious engagements with mobile devices. I find that the “nature” designers and engineers imagine collapses a plurality of individual hands into the abstract ideal of a universal “human hand,” a category that cares very little for skills-based, talent-oriented, or economically informed distinctions that seem to typify early twentieth-century discourses promoting affordable (“professional”-like) technologies for “amateurs,” that is, people who have disposable income and free time. For the purposes of this discussion, I focus on Apple’s iPhone as a representative example of contemporary industrial design’s commitments to evoking an “intuitive” feel and interface. That millions of consumers carry mobile devices in hand points to the success of this approach and also implicates industrial design in a larger biopolitical project. Design systematizes individual expression as personalization and thereby guarantees our psychic attachments to, for example, brand, platform, and carrier. The process whereby consumers select devices suiting their style and configure them to personal specifications obfuscates design’s accomplishment in setting the range of options that encourage such selections. We might more fully understand how populations come to embrace mobile devices and the managerial projects they entail if we think about our bodily attachments to them. In a very immediate and visceral way, the design of our handhelds pleases. For many hands, these devices do indeed feel like “natural” extensions of the body. To describe this relationship in ways that acknowledge design’s ability to succeed so spectacularly and also the cultural and scientific work involved in producing a new second nature, I 29 In Hand and On the Go turn to biophilosopher Henri Bergson, neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio, and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce. Designing (for) the Human Hand In the early twenty-first century, the iPhone epitomized the sophisticated , methodical, and successful effort to provide a tactile interface that feels “natural” and intuitive to all potential users. Manufactures such as Nokia, LG, and Samsung (which in August 2012 lost a legal battle to Apple, Inc., for patent infringement) also developed this approach, without, however, exemplifying it. In his MacWorld keynote address on 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone by asserting, “We’ve designed something wonderful for your hand. . . . It fits beautifully in the palm of your hand.”3 One might question to whom exactly this “we” refers. A good deal of practical labor goes unnoticed in the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby the CEO showman offers himself as a metonym for Apple. One might also question what is intended by the words “designed . . . for” and “your hand.” Just whose hand is imagined by design processes? And to what end? In truth, Jobs’s wonder implies an unacknowledged assumption that haunts the history of industrial design, namely, that the best interfaces will go unnoticed, that they will be intuitive and ultimately “invisible.” In striving to fit devices into myriad individual hands without...