New thesis 11106180013 07 05 20

New Analogue – Design In The Post Digital Age Alan Mathewson B. PhD SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Science (MSc) in Strategic Product Design January 2020 Thessaloniki – Greece Student Name: Alan Mathewson SID: 11106180013 Supervisor: Prof. Georgios Liamadis I hereby declare that the work submitted is mine and that where I have made use of another’s work, I have attributed the source(s) according to the Regulations set in the Student’s Handbook. January 2020 Thessaloniki - Greece Abstract This dissertation was written as part of the MSc in Strategic Product Design at the International Hellenic University.

The aim of this project has been to develop a technological artefact that will address the brief of being a product which imparts some of the analogue experience we used to be exposed to before the emergence of digital technology. However, it must also be a product for the post- digital age. This has required the development of an understanding of how digital technology affects us in our daily lives and the places where we would like to see more human interactions and contact. The biggest challenge for me in this project was to think like a product designer.

The course in IHU has provided the tools for this and I now understand the interfaces between art and design and science and design. I have been an engineer for a long time, and I think that the rigor and discipline that is required for engineering, can in some ways stifle innovation and creativity. This project has been a refreshing change and it is really liberating once you embrace it. This thesis reviews the ideas in design that have arisen since the turn of the 20th century.

It provides information on contrasting design approaches and it also provides a background, (in an appendix) for the growth of the electronics industry from the invention of the transistor to the current post-digital era. A product concept which I believe has the potential to create a market in tourism and electronics has been designed and the necessary skills to turn it into a real product have been elaborated. The product, a portable inkjet printer for creating and sending postcards which are personalized to your experiences, has been proposed. This device will create more tangible memories of your vacation and will let people at home know that you are thinking about them.

I would like to thank Professor Liamadis for his great ideas and support and I would like to thank Kim Roberts, Rania Emmanouilidou and Olga Simoni for their technical support and proofreading efforts. I would also like to thank Cian O’Murchu for helping me to find many of the books I have read in the course of this work. This course has not been without its interesting and challenging moments, but I have really enjoyed participating in it. A Big - Thank You to all the staff and students on the course who helped me and talked to me in English on those long hot summer weekends.

Keywords: New Analogue, Post Digital Design, Design Thinking, Digital Technology, Postcards from the Cloud Alan Mathewson 20, January 2020 Contents Chapter One - Introduction. 8 Post Digital Technologies. 10 Chapter Two - Creativity and Design. 11 Background to Product Design.

15 Human Centred Design. 17 Design and Politics. 19 Chapter Three - New Analogue. 21 The Analogue World.

23 Analogue Publishing and Journalism. 26 Analogue and Retail Sales. 30 Board Games and Instant Photography. 34 Chapter Four - Design In The Post Digital Age.

35 Design Thinking In the Post Digital World. 41 Miscellaneous Post Digital Devices. 45 Chapter Five - Potential Design Projects for the Post Digital Age. 47 Possible Design Projects.

47 New Analogue- Design in the Post Digital Age. 47 Facial Recognition Obscuration System. 48 The Do Not Disturb Table. 48 Postcards from The Cloud.

51 Prototyping and Test. 52 Design Proposal One. 53 Summary of Feedback on First Design. 56 Design Proposal Two - The Revised Printer.

58 Chapter Six - Discussion and Conclusions. 61 Summary and Conclusions. 63 Appendix - The Evolution Of Digital Technologies 1949-2020. 66 The First Computers.

69 The First Transistor. 76 The World Wide Web. 77 The Internet of Things. 91 Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

93 The Post Digital Era. 97 Challenges of Extended Reality (XR). 99 New Analogue- Design in the Post Digital Age. 100 Secure Financial Transactions (Block Chain).

101 Summary and Conclusions. 109 New Analogue- Design in the Post Digital Age. 7|P a g e Chapter One - Introduction Introduction The title of this dissertation is ‘New Analogue – Design in the Post Digital Age’. This topic was proposed as an area that would be informative and interesting to investigate in terms of how digital technologies will impact our lives over the next ten-year period and beyond.

The main questions to be answered are what will the post digital world look like? and what, exactly, is New Analogue? The concept of analogue circuit design is a complex area in electronic circuits and systems. This is an area which requires considerable skill and a detailed understanding of where currents flow in circuits and how to optimise their flow. This process cannot be automated, and it requires exceptional design expertise because it concerns itself with current flow in individual transistors. Current is a very big function of the structure and geometry of the device and no two transistors behave in exactly the same way, even if they are drawn to be identical.

This happens because process variations conspire to change dimensions minutely and those minute geometrical differences impact directly on the current passing through the device. Analogue Circuit Design primarily involves the layout of individual transistors in a circuit, so that these non-uniformities cancel each other out. All the stimuli around us are analogue in nature and we interact with them in real time. However, computers are unable to do this directly, they must respond to the real world by converting all the signals that they encounter into a digital format before they can be processed in a computer.

Once processed, the signal is reconverted into analogue to be fed back into the real world. At both steps in this process the real-world signal is approximated into or from the digital domain and something is lost. This is normally a very small amount of the signal and good designers can almost eliminate it. However, this deficit or mismatch is still there in all our interactions with the digital world3.

New Analogue is an analogy of this concept and illustrates what is happening when people use digital devices and digital media in their everyday lives. They use the tools but do not really understand how they work, and this leads to a certain distrust and the feeling that something is being slowly removed 1 Optimizing MOS Transistor Mismatch, Simon J. Lovett, Marco Welten, Alan Mathewson, and Barry Mason, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, VOL. 1, January 1998 pp 147-150 2 Matching Properties of Deep Sub-Micron MOS Transistors, Jeroen A.

Croon, Willy M Sansen, Herman E. Maes, Springer 2005 3 Hertzian Tales Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design, Anthony Dunne, MIT Press, 2008 New Analogue- Design in the Post Digital Age. 8|P a g e from the user experience, but they don’t really know what it is4. There is just a lack of full and complete satisfaction from the experience.

This is creating some disquiet in users of digital devices and media. Post Digital Technologies Digital technologies have become all pervasive in our lives now and the next generation of technologies, based on them are starting to emerge5. Some of these technologies will be used to extract information and patterns from our interactions with media, which may compromise our personal space6. Some will cause us to further engage us with our various screens in ways that are deleterious to our emotional health and relationships78 and this will further diminish the experience we get from them9.

Take the act of reading a book for example. A text can be read in an e-reader which has many useful features. You can read it in the dark without disturbing your partner, you can choose the font and its size and you can change the page by pressing buttons or swiping the screen. Reading an actual book, magazine or newspaper is a more traditional activity.

However, it is one in which all the senses are invoked. You can feel the weight of it, tell the quality of the publication by the size and density of the font and the paper quality, by feel and smell as well as by eye. ‘Turning a page’ is a step in the journey, and you can tell how far you have been and how far there is to go just by looking at where you are physically. You can bookmark pages and annotate the margins as you proceed, and while these things are also possible in an e-reader it is not as easy, and the experience is not the same.

The other item of significance is that you either own the book or borrowed it from somebody who owns it. What passes for ownership of downloaded texts is predominantly a licence to read it and it is not easy to share it with others without accusations of piracy arising10. Alternatively, according to Florian Cramer 11 ‘The term ‘post-digital’ can be used to describe either a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has become historical…. 4 New Dark Age - Technology and the End of The Future, James Bindle.

Verso Books 2019 5 The Shallows, What The internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr, W. Norton 2010 6 The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You, Eli Pariser, Penguin 2012 7 Reclaiming Conversation - The Power of Talk in the Digital Age’. Sherry Turkle Penguin Press 2015 8 Networked Living, P. Papadimitraki, Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Computation, Communication and Aesthetics Milan 2019 9 Digital Minimisation, Cal Newport, Portfolio/Penguin/Random House publishers.

2019 10 ‘The Digital Continuum: The Influence of Ownership, Access, Control, and Cocreation on Digital Offerings’ K. Oliver, AMS Rev (2019). PP 1-18 11 ‘Florian Cramer What Is Post Digital ?’ APRJA Volume 3 , Issue 1 2014. pp-11-24 New Analogue- Design in the Post Digital Age.After Edward Snowden’s disclosures of the NSA’s all-pervasive digital surveillance systems, this disenchantment has quickly grown from a niche ‘hipster’ phenomenon to a mainstream position — one which is likely to have a serious impact on all cultural and business practices based on networked electronic devices and Internet services’.

Dissertation Outline This thesis concerns this disquiet and describes the motivation for the need of an analogue experience even when surrounded by digital applications. Chapter Two provides a recent history of Design and Chapter Three describes this perceived need for an analogue experience in much more detail and provides some examples of industries where the implementation of digital approaches is not as successful as people imagined that it would be. Explanations for this, based on the analogue experience deficit, are provided and based on this information. Chapter Four describes some current design case studies which demonstrate a trend towards the desire for an analogue experience in the post digital era.

Chapter 5 provides some suggestions for possible design projects and an example of an analogue system which is enmeshed in the digital world. Chapter Six summarises the work in the dissertation and establishes some conclusions. There is also an Appendix which describes the evolution and development of the digital era and indicates what is to come in the Post Digital Age. New Analogue- Design in the Post Digital Age.