Six months of History of the Button

The holiday season coincides with the six month semi-anniversary of the History of the Button. Sounds like a good time for a little reflection, and a little break. A lot of new readers have been here recently (welcome!), so I’d like to step back a moment to reflect on some highlights and offer some sneak previews for early 2007.

Most people who hear or read the phrase “history of the button” wonder, why? What’s the point? It’s just a button! Is that really how you spend your spare time? Frankly, I ask myself the same questions.

But it’s not just about buttons. It’s about technology and gadgets, their history, how we interact with them, how we perceive them, what this means for our future.

The History of the Button explores how technology has gradually become enmeshed with our everyday lives. Nearly everybody here in the developed countries has a cellphone and a computer, connecting each other tighter and tighter. We surround ourselves with gadgets. We are living and breathing technology, but this wasn’t always so. It’s important to look back and observe how we arrived at this point.

Focusing on buttons gives us a unique angle into how technology was designed to be used. It’s the history of interaction design. Every element of everything manufactured by humans was designed, whether or not each design decision was consciously made. By looking at buttons we can look at labels, icons, wording, simplicity, complexity and more. We can see how these trends have evolved over the decades, observing when we transitioned from words to icons, from few to many to few buttons, from physical to onscreen to a hybrid of both.

Highlights

As with most blogs, some posts are better than others. Of the 50+ posts, here are some highlights and favorites of mine you may have missed along the way.

• Tracing the history of our standard media icons for Play, Pause, Record, etc. (Part 1 and Part 2). Still to be answered: what was the first device to use the Pause icon?
• Complaining about the usability of buttons in microwaves and elevators. This last one also generated a lively discussion at Reddit.
• Buttons in gaming, such as arcade videogames, pinball and handheld games like Merlin.
• Exploring the evolution of common devices such as the pushbutton telephone.
• Following the phrase “pushbutton” in advertising, including its possible first use, by George Eastman of Kodak who said “You press the button, we do the rest.” Also, noticing how the word “pushbutton” means the product has crossed the chasm.
• Women are often used with pushbuttons in advertising to say “this is so easy to use, even a woman can use it!” For example, washing, cooking and just relaxing in the kitchen.
• Some of the earliest buttons to appear in the home were on doorbells, flashlights and light switches.
• The use of buzzers and buttons on game shows.

In the News

In December, I personally experienced the wonders of Web 2.0, how one good link can trigger a cascade of attention and traffic. RSS and generic blog technologies distribute information faster than ever. Here’s the story of one crazy week here at History of the Button.

• Sunday December 3, 2006. Rex at Fimoculous publishes his Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading and includes this site at #2. I’m floored and incredibly surprised.
• Monday. The record day for this site. Traffic begins arriving in floods from Fimoculous. Someone then posts my story for the day, Bad bad elevator buttons on Reddit. It slowly crawls up to the front page Hot Top 10 and stays there for most of the day. It crawls up to the front page of del.icio.us and was #1 at one point. Incidentally, six of the del.icio.us top 10 at that moment were all sites from the Fimoculous Top 30. In the end, over 10,000 people visit my site for the day.
• Also Monday. Dan Saffer listed this site in his Best Interaction Design Blogs of 2006. I really respect Dan’s opinion, so this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
• Tuesday. This site is featured in a video podcast at commandN.tv. Amber Mac calls it “reeeally cool.”
• Thursday. Rex is interviewed on Future Tense about his Top 30 blog list and mentions History of the Button. My would-be uncle George hears it on NPR live back in Minnesota.
• Friday. I am interviewed live on the air (via phone) by Sean Moncrieff on Newstalk, a radio talk show based in Dublin, Ireland. We talk about buttons, poking, typewriters and marital problems.
• Tuesday, December 12. History of the Button is featured on THE 9, broadcast on Yahoo! TV. I’m voted into 3rd place for the day and really enjoy the fact that I edged out George Bush and his dog Barney but lost to a site about squirrels. Maria Sansone really wants to push that Free Cheese button.

Coming Up Next Year

Here’s a preview of what I’m looking at exploring next year.

• A report from CES on new products using innovative physical interfaces. Touch-sensitive products are all the rage, but what new challenges do they pose? Do they solve or create problems?
• Industrial buttons. Early computers. The glorious era of automation in the 1950s.
• Tamagotchi. Push-button life in your pocket.
• A look back at fears in the 1910s of a push-button future, best stated by E.M. Forster’s famous short story, The Machine Stops.
• Thinking about pushing vs. touching. It’s a subtle difference, but it greatly affects product design.
• History of Amazon’s 1-Click button. How can a digital button be patented?
• Thoughts on Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0. Hypertext as buttons. Web 2.0 as reducing buttons.
• Many more scans of magazine ads and commercials plucked from YouTube.

So tell me, what do you want to see next year? Comment below!