A world without things: dematerialisation and integration in contemporary production / Un mondo senza cose: smaterializzazione e integrazione nella produzione contemporanea

One of the most disconcerting phenomena that involves the world of objects in our time is undoubtedly that of its growing dematerialisation. We only have to look around and compare any object-oriented view with exactly the same view just a few years back, to come to the conclusion that most things around us are gradually disappearing. The main reason for this process is that, owing to digital technologies, objects are increasingly shifting towards a functional integration that is progressively reducing diversity and numerosity. When objects used exclusively mechanics in order to be activated, each of them was assigned a single function, around which a recognisable formal configuration was constructed. If, however, today we look at the most common device of the digital era, the mobile phone, it is quite obvious that, even if it was devised for making phone calls on the move, this original function is currently secondary to its miraculous ability to integrate, in a few square centimetres, so many other objects that, taken individually, would occupy the volume of a room and perhaps more. By default, our cell phones are making the printed newspaper virtually useless with its sheets frustratingly difficult to turn, and the book or even the encyclopedia or dictionary, too heavy to carry around in a bag, but also calculators, speedometers, cameras, video cameras, TVs, torches, and even a medium-sized weather station. All this, moreover, is enclosed in an object of dimension and shape very close to those of a common sardine can. And here we find a second consequence of digital technologies on the nature of contemporary objects, given, along with their progressive physical reduction, by their comprehensiveness. Until recently, man-made interaction was generated primarily by ergonomics and therefore by the very configuration of the human body. The dimension of the phone’s handset was linked to the distance between ear and mouth, and the object’s shape at each end had to create an area of amplification and sound capture, while its curved middle made for easy handling. Some thirty years ago, scholars such as Enzo Frateili, twigged for the first time that digital technology would cause a fracture in the world of objects, between the “functional area” relative to its technological-operational entirety and the “area of representation”, where the formal structure of the overall object is tackled. Frateili summed up the process of configuring evolved technical objects by assimilating it to that of a black box, which escapes one’s view, but also to the non-specialist knowledge of the product’s user.