For many uses in our daily activity, buttons are travesties of the idea “form follows function.” In fact, I’m noticing that many buttons make “function follow form.” Buttons, of course, represent a technology whose function is unclear and abstract. For instance, there is no explicit information about the way a button behaves (depress and bounce back) that tells us whether it will bring an elevator to your floor or launch a nuclear weapon.
The only exception to this is when buttons were attached to top of small bells to make a noise. You press it and it actuated a little hammer, which then made a noise.
Today, a button will do a million things, of which only fifty of them is probably your desired behavior. High-tech is overrated for too many things in our lives.
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What about making a cup of coffee requires some kind of computational power? Here are the things you need.
hot water.
coffee ground. (more on this later)
a brewing chamber with a filtration method.
a cup.
a person (or two persons if the person making the cup isn’t drinking the coffee)
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Stupid buttons. I’m boycotting them from now til I have to get in the car to start the engine.
