Ang bagong diskette: May thumb drive ka na ba?

Blogger's Note: Those little flash drives, also called thumb drives, are now as ubiquitous tody as the 3.5 diskettes and CDs of yesteryears. Nothing is really permanent but change. Read on... 8-)
Dongles: Style, function and a human touch
By Phil Patton
http://news.com.com/Dongles+Style,+function+and+a+human+touch/2100-1041_3-5928018.html
Story last modified Wed Nov 02 06:23:00 PST 2005

When Tom Cruise uses it, a technology is out there. He did it in "Mission Impossible," with the computer disc.

More recently in "Collateral," where he plays an unshaven but polite hit man, he stores the key information about his victims on a USB drive.

USB flash memories, the tiny sticks that attach to computer ports and transport files from one computer to another, are variously called flash drives, thumb drives or dongles by their users.

The model Cruise employs is at least a dapper one, as slim, silver and sinister as his character. It is an Executive Attache model from PNY Technologies.

The humble dongle, with Tom Cruise, becomes a star.

Like many new technologies, dongles have been designed in many guises. They are basically chips in plastic cases. They can take all sorts of external shapes. Some are colorful and iMac candy cute, for students. Some hide inside pocket knives, pens, key rings and even wristwatches. There are amuletlike models, worn around the neck on lanyards, imitating ancient vials of perfumes or unguents.

Most outrageously, there are novelty models of USB disguised inside bits of plastic sushi, and really offbeat thumb drives hidden inside mock thumbs.

New technologies can be designed as pieces of equipment or as kitsch--and often simultaneously. Gadgets are jewelry for geeks, one theory has it, but good design manages to convert gadgetry into tool and accessory--into gifts.

Designers these days are more and more confronted with the retailing and marketing realities of a world where products must be--in a word heard often in the halls of store chains like Target--"giftable."

Tech's soft side
But if technology inherently tends toward coolness and efficiency, gift givers want warmth and emotion in the things they bestow.

"Technology at its best is precise, clean, organized, and sometimes even magical," said Dan Harden of Whipsaw, a design consultancy that shapes high-tech products. "Technology is friendly when packaged in forms people like--otherwise it is cold and lifeless."

Finding a human angle to technology is also the job of David Laituri, a designer who is manager for product development at Brookstone, the chain often seen as the ideal spot for buying gadgets and tools to bestow, especially on the male entries on the holiday list.

"It means a fresh way of looking at something so the person that receives it thinks of you when they use it." --Donald Strum, product designer, Michael Graves & Associates

But the idea of designing products specifically to be gifts bothers Laituri, who previously worked at Polaroid and the consultancy Design Continuum. "That word gift is at the other end of the spectrum to me from where ideas come from," he said. "It almost trivializes design. It's like you were making fishing lures.

"Good gifts come in classic solutions to everyday timeless problems, like opening a bottle of wine."

As an example of technology made personal and useful, Laituri points to a digital photo album he produced for Brookstone. "It's something you could give your mom," he said. "It is what you do with digital technology to make it valuable."

Harden said, "Design can soften technology, and make it into a warm and friendly experience."

Among his clients are Frogpond, which produces electronics aimed at children and their parents, and Rio. With the Carbon MP3 player for Rio, he produced a highly credible alternative look to the iPod.

With the shining--and intimidating--example of the Apple iPod ever in mind, designers are trying.

The iPod has spun off a vast industry of accessories--colorful and protective cases, tabletop speakers and so on. Called "paraproducts," such add-ons include waterproof cases from a company called H20 and speakers and boom boxes that pump the sound from the lovable little wafer.

But the iPod's influence extends further. Perhaps for those exhausted by the noisy competing claims of the latest, greatest technology, simpler designs have been showing appeal. The spirit of the iPod is evident in simple rubber-coated radios from Lexon or the big-knobbed Tivoli radios.

The basic bare lines of the iPod designs and the circle-on-a-square theme of their faces project a message of complexity made simple. They echo the midcentury modernist simplicity--classicism that outlasted the technology--of the radios and phonographs that Dieter Rams designed for Braun.

Digital technology does not offer the same comforting physical cues that aided designers of mechanical products. But its flexibility of shape opens the way to more imaginative expression.

Ellen Glassman, a designer with Sony, devised a radio and CD player in a shape many women immediately associated with an evening bag. The latest Sony MP3 players are about the size and shape of USB drives and come ready to be worn around the neck, colored in dusky, jewel-like hues.

Some believe that the design of the tech item should speak to its function. "I can't see an Art Deco P.D.A. or iPod," said Sam Farber, the legendary design entrepreneur who established the Copco and Oxo kitchen-product lines.

In more than a decade at Michael Graves & Associates in Princeton, N.J., Donald Strum has worked with Target devising household, personal and office products.

"A good gift makes a connection, and a good design does, too," Strum said. A high-tech gift must meet the same requirements as any other, he said.

"It provides a solution to a problem," Strum said. "It means a fresh way of looking at something so the person that receives it thinks of you when they use it. They say: 'How clever, you thought about some part of my life and how to make it work. You didn't just go through the motions on this gift.' "

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