In a restaurant on Paseo de Gracia, two clerks from a clothing store sit down to eat. On the table they do not place their mobile phones, instead they put two walkie talkies. Given the surprise that this causes, this journalist asks them if they use them a lot in their work. They agree, explaining that since they started working, more and more businesses are using walkies to communicate.
These have significant advantages over mobile phones for communicating with store staff. One of the most important is battery life and another that allows very fast, instantaneous communication. And above all very simple.
Something that puts us on the track that sometimes the best technologies are not the most sophisticated, but rather the simplest. Perhaps that is why Fuji’s or Polaroid’s instant cameras succeed like never before. Who was going to tell us that in 2023 these cameras, whose technology dates back to 1937, were going to be a mass phenomenon.
The use of some old technologies is justified because they achieve things that the most sophisticated electronics are not capable of achieving, perhaps precisely because of the excessive complexity that sometimes entails. Let’s look at a radical example of this.
Benjamin Hitscherich is a product designer who can boast that one of his creations has been awarded several prizes. It is a clitoral stimulator that does not have any type of motor or electronic components.
This is the Womanizer Wave, a shower head designed to produce orgasms. We talked about this amazing product with someone who has tried it. This is Manuela Martínez, art teacher and specialist in sex toys.
By email, she explains that “it is an object that pays homage to a habitual practice among women such as masturbation in the shower.”
The Womanizer Wave uses three modes to disperse the water, one that sifts it in the form of a caress, producing a tingling and relaxing sensation of caress, another that concentrates the stream of water directly to the clitoral orgasm and one that uses three intersecting water outlets its flows to produce a sensation of pulsating rhythms.
Martínez says that this device really fulfills a more important function than we might think a priori: “finding pleasure in the daily routine, in practicality, is a daily experience for many women. Masturbating in the shower is made visible and celebrated. Wave is located in the current feminist boom that places the self-esteem of the woman linked to self-love and self-pleasure, openly”.
This expert also explains that the practice of female masturbation linked to toileting is a theme present in the history of art: “The toilette intime is the rococo pictorial reference that authors such as François Boucher or Antoine Watteau used to represent scenes in which they recreate the female intimate bathroom The protagonists are aristocratic women, caught in full pink blush or hot flashes, while they wash themselves. Dressed up to the eyebrows, in the middle of the room, surrounded by furniture, mirrors, curtains, gold, flowers, the maid, some visibly altered pets and some voyeur”.
All of this indicates how a product that on the surface only looks like an exotic shower head, hides technology that is both simple and devilishly complex. Well, combining the ritual of the daily bath and pleasure in a camouflaged sex toy can be much more complex than creating an algorithm.
Another trend that we find in technology that seeks simplicity above all else is knowing how to put barriers to excess. Something that we can see in digital notepads that use electronic ink screens, such as Lenovo Smart Paper.
If there is something that catches the attention of this digital notebook, it is that it almost makes us believe that we are writing on paper. Not only because of the response of your pointer, but also because the texture of the surface has really been made to resemble that of vegetable fiber and not that of a screen.
At Lenovo they have also purposely limited the version of Android that this device uses to make the user experience as simple as possible. Which also helps concentration. Although it is capable of recognizing our handwriting and transforming it into digital characters.
A radical example of simplicity of use can be found in the world of robotics. The Aiper Seagull Pro is a robotic pool cleaner that is disconcerting when using it for the first time. As much as one looks in the instruction manual, there is no application that allows you to control it.
Something curious, because it is even capable of climbing the walls of a pool vertically. Its creators have prioritized ease of use over any other consideration. It is enough to press a button incorporated in the robot itself to indicate what type of cleaning we want and introduce it into the pool, a very simple operation.
The device almost seems almost designed to disappoint all those adults who play to control all kinds of devices with their mobile phones.
Another aspect of technological simplicity is to relocate ourselves to what really matters. It is something that we can see in products like the Pioneer DM-50D speakers. At a time when all kinds of speakers are being sold that seek to show a sound that is as spectacular as possible, but hardly real, this model has been designed to listen to faithful sound.
Although they can be used for DJ sessions by activating a special mode, these speakers are sought after by all those who want a pure sound. No coloring. Some use them in music production, but there are also those who are fed up with listening to a sound that is not the one with which a song has been recorded.