I feel like a castaway in a sea of glossy black plastic, chrome, and glowing blue buttons. Can we really want each piece of electronics to appear an identical, sandwiched in this shiny ebony which is the 21st Century beige?

I go to buy a TV and my head spins out of boredom, making me sick. What the hell happened to industrial design? They have got no character or soul. Some people argue that, to recover that, we’d like to get electronics back into furniture. Shows like Mad Men are helping to bring back that style, and hipster geeks are following suit making side tables which are actually computers or AV centers.

But we passed that phase within the 60s. That\’s not the best way we will put character back into our gadgets. Although maybe… maybe there\’s no approach to get the character back.

Don\’t embarass me in front of my house guests

I want affordable gadgets and AV equipment that perform great but additionally look good. By that I mean something that I will put next to my furniture and make it a real section of my house, not a glossy attachment, as if Kal-El dropped a bloody Krypton crystal in my lounge, making a sparkly plastic appendix grow out of a walnut table. Except the appendix is admittedly made up of some polymer, gets filled with finger prints within a minute of getting out of the box, and doesn\’t make an holographic Marlon Brando appear in my lounge.

Some will suggest some high end manufacturers that make beautiful products. Products that perform amazingly well and are beautiful. They use materials like natural wood, leather, ceramics, and metal. They serve a function. They’re very pretty. The difficulty is that they may be also very expensive, because they’re usually made in small quantities and cater to the very best end of the market. (See: Geneva Lab)

This wasn\’t always the case. Inside the 30s, the Bauhaus promoted good design for the hundreds. They achieved that, combining good design with mass manufacturing, creating products that still look good today. Through the 60s, companies like Braun re-invented themselves by applying good design to their products and selling them at affordable prices. They were the first who moved from electronics that gave the impression of furniture-which you’ll see in TV series like Mad Men-to electronics that really gave the look of machines. But in that process, they didn\’t take the soul out of their products. They kept their character and fit into the surroundings of a pleasing home.

Going against the current

Today, everything seems like machines, but the character is gone.

However, I\’m not proposing that every single product accessible should seem to be a Dieter Rams design or an Apple product. All of the contrary. Back when Steve Jobs came to Apple, he and Jon Ive introduced the computer that saved Apple from irrelevance and brought the company back inside the spotlight. It was the \” Bondi\” iMac, and it spawned a million clones, from computers to gadgets to peripherals to home appliances. Its translucent white-and-turquoise skin became the beige of the late 90s and early Aughts. It worked for Apple, because it was their design code, which they kept evolving. But the remaining just looked ridiculous and cheap. The copies had no character. Or they’d the character of being cheap knockoffs. They were both fabricated from plastic, though. Maybe section of having character is being an original.

Later, the iPhone had an identical effect. But while Apple kept developing their own design language-which peaked with the iPad\’s industrial design, anything of the industry kept copying, introducing those elements in many products, but going for the cheap. There\’s little differences available in the market. Companies like Philips actually try and make some different things-like their high-end Aurea TVs-but their main lines are all of the same as everyone\’s else.

The temporary solution: Retrofit the old

The only good solution I\’ve been ready to provide you with: Get old stuff in eBay and modernize them with new components. Or even creating replicas from scratch, like this one:

It feels rather like cheating and bastardizing the originals, however it also feel like the best possible solution, now that the original cases are considered both rare and lovely and are product of lasting and romantic materials like steel and wood. There\’s an issue: It may get pretty expensive, like this Braun Atelier Speaker L1:

Still, a whole lot cheaper than an excellent-high end AV component. And you’ll find cheaper price gems, like this TS45 radio receiver, that may be an honest base for a custom Pandora or Spotify radio:

Or maybe turning the classic Snow White\’s Coffin into a multimedia powerhouse-including Blu-Ray player and tough drive storage-connected to a projector via HDMI:

Maybe an organization can do the retrofitting and sell the finished products at an inexpensive price. But they are going to likely end being much more expensive, so I\’m afraid we’ll ought to do it ourselves. The opposite problem with this solution is that design would lose its meaning. The pieces will look good, but they’ll be bastard hybrids by which buttons and dials lose their original meaning. Which might or won’t help a bit\’s character.

A dark and glossy future

Why don\’t manufacturers push design forward and experiment with other materials and designs? It\’s not because it\’s significantly dearer. The answer, I think, is that being different has a high risk. And extremely few companies desire to take real risks. Manufacturers are quite happy to keep churning out their indigestible sausages, and other people will keep buying the glossy black plastic, the chrome, and the glowing blue buttons.

But maybe there\’s another explanation: Maybe it’s all attributable to the undeniable fact that electronics are now all digital and getting simpler, thinner, and smaller daily. Perhaps this de-humanizaton of hardware design is obligatory. Perhaps the hardware has to lose the character and soul of analog designs to become just clear slabs of glass. As the human interface migrates from buttons, dials, and knobs to touchscreens and modal software interfaces, this might be the $64000 the reason is gadgets are losing their character. Character is shifting from knobs to touchbuttons.

Maybe here’s the worth we’ve got to pay.

Still, I adore to believe that some companies will provide you with a solution. I even have the feeling that the hot button is inside the materials-wood, leather, metal, glass-that could make these products more human and harder, and presentable, similar to those old Braun pieces, but in a new shape and with modern tech inside. That\’s what I need.

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This post is tagged: All, character, Gadgets, Giz, Wants