149 really need it big and small. So middle management say: okay, we’ll tell them to try harder. So, we go off and the cycle repeats until senior management shout at us. And then they tell us: oh, but now we want it thin, that’s the new priority.”156
It was a great tale, told with ironic fervour, and I thanked him. It reminded me of the negotiations and power asymmetries that were inseparable from the designer’s imagined landscapes of the future. Theirs was not the only future that mattered. Their ideals participated in a tapestry of woven and woven-over imagined futures.
There was more in his story, but Andy interrupted my thinking, asking if the two of us wanted to see the latest model of the cameraphone, the final design, which had just arrived from the model-makers. And, of course, we did.
He pulled open a desk drawer and extracted a small hard, black case, placing it carefully on the desk top. He released two latches and lifted the lid. It revealed two glistening white cameraphone models, held tightly, end to end, in grey foam.
“These were about five thousand each,” he noted. “I think they’re the most expensive models we’ve ever had made.”
He picked one up between finger and thumb, brushed a light palm over the frosted white front. I knew it was made of wood, sprayed to look like metal and plastic; knew from my own design experiences how it would feel slightly warm rather than metal-cool. Yet its exact mimicry was seductive. I looked back at the white bowl and translucent stones, sensed something of their luminescence in the rounded, soft white form of the models. As the smooth quartz pebble in my hand led my fingers to rub, almost absently, at a nagging
156
Expanded from ethnographic notes and memory.