A really interesting thought appeared on Daring Fireball this week (originally from Allen Pike’s longer article about Our Unevenly Distributed Future) regarding how some of the most obscure, innovative or futuristic things become quickly mundane once they hit the mainstream.
And while Pike cites his experience of the self-driving car, sometimes in life these are simpler notions. Take, for example: the hundreds of artist and band names that may at first seem atrocious, but soon go onto instead be associated with great music and not ridicule (Arctic Monkeys is rightly often cited); or changes in language, where before you know it ‘literally’ everyone is using something differently, however grammatically incorrect.
This phenomenon is, though, indeed more interesting in the product design world where it is more commonly seen with visually different pieces of technology that don’t, at first, fit our social norms or standard interactions.
Apple’s innovation has, of course, led to many examples over the years, recently notably the Apple Watch (paying for things with your wrist still seems strange), and, more visually, AirPods – which to many looked so remarkably awkward at first, but are now the market-leading headphones.
Ironically, it’s this same methodology that weighs heavy on some ‘wow’ factors in products too. The Kano model represents this perfectly: ‘Delighters’ within a product only remain that way for so long before time and/or mass uptake means they simply become normalised, and indeed, lose their delight of novelty, and therefore value.
Designing with this normalisation in mind is tough, but worth considering when trying to predict the future of a product – knowing that all innovations will indeed, one day, simply be mundane.