Bits Blog: Tech Moves to the Background as Design Becomes Foremost

Stephen Lam/Reuters Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, discussing the redesign of its mobile software system.

In the last few decades, the computing industry has passed through several different eras. In the ’90s, the big tech companies were in a race for faster and more powerful computers. Then in the 2000s, the industry moved to mobile in a quest for slimmer phones with brighter screens.

Now, the industry is entering the era of design.

As I noted in my column this week, Disruptions: Mobile Competition Shifts to Software Design, tech companies are looking for ways to make sure the user interfaces of their products are unique.

Design experts I spoke with noted that many of the devices we use today look almost exactly the same, which explains the emphasis on the software that goes into that interface. Battery life and processing speed are only marginally different within product categories such as smartphones. But the look and feel of the software is what allows a competitor to leap ahead of the competition.

Cesar Torres, a former Apple designer who now works for Sidecar, a ride-sharing start-up, said on Twitter: “While I don’t agree with the stylistic choices in iOS 7, it excites me that ‘design’ is a term that shows up in major news site headlines.”

Design, it seems, is becoming a mainstream topic. And for those who have lived and breathed design for decades, it’s a refreshing change.

“In the ’90s when I would meet with investors, there was no return on investment for design. Yet today, 20 years later, every project I do is because design is seen as absolutely central,” said Yves Béhar, the founder of Fuseproject, a San Francisco design agency.

Mr. Béhar said that, now, directors, chief executives and investors often sit in meetings and ask about user interface, overall experience, and the look and feel of a product. Twenty years ago, most investors wouldn’t even know what those terms meant.

What the mainstream and the financiers are now starting to realize is that design is a doorway to something much more important.

“Design, even if you’re talking about Apple and their sexy devices, is a promise of quality,” explained James Victore, an award-winning art director, designer, and author. “It’s a promise that the public is not going to be let down.”

Circa Now: Background Checks and Personal Ethics in the Age of Google

When we hit our first lull in the conversation, I try to bridge it by asking you about the two years you lived in Boulder, Colo.

“How did you know I lived in Boulder?” you ask, darty-eyed.

“I Googled you last night. I’m sorry.”

“No, no. I’m, uh?... I’m flattered?”

You are? Which is what I was hoping for? But suddenly the tiniest shred of doubt is implied by all the tonal upticks.

“It’s perfectly natural and almost always appropriate,” said Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, about the practice of Googling social or business contacts before getting together with them.

“Obviously, one is always going to have to be discreet when talking about what you’ve found,” said Ms. Fox, a director of the Social Issues Research Center in Oxford, England. “But our brains haven’t changed since the Stone Age, and humans are designed to live in small groups in which everyone knows one another. Googling is an attempt to recreate a primeval, preindustrial pattern of interaction.”

But by the same token, doesn’t taking this shortcut to a primeval, preindustrial pattern of recognition sometimes rob encounters of their inherent mystery? The song is called “Getting to Know You,” not “I’ve Already Researched You.” Sometimes it’s better not to pore over the dossier handed to us, even if it comes from a natural blonde with the State Department in a sweater set and pearls.

Worse, sometimes our online research lands us in thickets. Tina Jordan, an executive in book publishing who has the same name as a former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, said, “I typically tell any blind dates before I meet them that they probably shouldn’t Google my name, otherwise they’ll be sorely disappointed when they meet me.”

Masami Takahashi, an associate professor of psychology at Northeastern Illinois University, used to use Japanese characters for his name whenever he delivered papers at academic conferences in Japan, until a colleague who had Googled him pointed out that Mr. Takahashi shared the same name in Japanese as a pornographic-film star. Mr. Takahashi said, “Since then, I use only the English alphabet for my name.”

Indeed, to Google is often to create expectation. A friend of Dean Olsher, a public-radio host and a musician, wanted to set him up on a date with one of Mark Morris’s dancers this year. Mr. Olsher promptly went online and started swooning over a gorgeous portrait of the dancer by Annie Leibovitz. But on the evening that Mr. Olsher and his friend trooped to Brooklyn to see her perform and to meet her, Mr. Olsher’s friend became distracted and never engineered the fix-up.

The disappointed Mr. Olsher said: “I don’t regret Googling her at all. I’m so baffled by this idea that we’re not supposed to Google people. Why would there be a line? Like everyone else is allowed to know something but I’m not?”

 In business, the line described by Mr. Olsher barely exists, if at all, because Googling is expected. Job applicants who reveal their ignorance of the doings or leadership of the company they are interviewing with can expect to meet with no enthusiasm. “I always Google my prospective clients,” said Janet Montano, a real estate agent in Tampa, Fla. “The mug shots come right up on the top. ‘Not going to get in my car!’ ”

But Ms. Montano said she would never tell a potential homebuyer that she had Googled him. “It’s not very polite,” she said. “I don’t go there.” In one instance, she said, the search worked in a homebuyer’s favor. “It was someone who I probably wasn’t going to work with,” she said. “But then I checked him out and saw who he was.” When she learned he was a popular radio disc jockey, she realized he was a qualified buyer.

Henry Alford is a contributing writer to Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.

Disruptions: Google's Project Glass Lets Technology Slip Into the Background - Disruptions

Jim Wilson/The New York TimesGoogle’s glasses, in a version for developers, cost $1,500.

I have seen the future, and it is wearable.

But before I tell you about this future, let’s take a short trip into the past, specifically to the mid-1400s, when a German by the name of Johannes Gutenberg was hard at work inventing the printing press. There’s a common misconception that Gutenberg’s press instantly changed society. This isn’t quite so.

Those first books were immense. The Morgan Library and Museum’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible weighs 33 pounds, 8 ounces. A book wasn’t something that you took on a walk to read on a park bench; it wasn’t something that was shared with friends. Instead books were immobile, often read only at a lectern. And, as most people were illiterate, there were a select few who could read them.

Those books were essentially equivalent to computers 30 years ago: large and inaccessible to almost everyone in society.

In the early 1500s, an Italian by the name of Aldus Manutius invented the pocketable book, changing history. Manutius realized that instead of printing one large page of a book on a printing press, he could print several on a single large sheet of paper, then cut them up, and make smaller, portable books.

Manutius’s transformation is like the shift to the smartphone, which are really just very small computers.

To continue our history lesson, another huge shift occurred in the late 1800s when the motion picture was invented. It enabled visual storytelling and at a mass scale unimaginable before.

The equivalent to that moment, of a technology that works regardless of age, education, literacy or intelligence, is happening right now with the advent of wearable computing. These wearable technologies like Google’s glasses that project information right where a person is looking will have the same effect on smartphones and computers as the motion picture did on books.

All these things share one distinct trait — a theme that has helped usher in new technologies since people drew on cave walls: storytelling. Storytelling for information and communication.

The ultimate form of communication occurs when “technology gets out of the way,” as Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, said this week at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference.

Mr. Brin noted this during a demonstration of Google’s Project Glass, the company’s glasses. See a person, and the glasses could tell you his work history. Look at a landmark and its significance could be explained.

I had a brief opportunity to try the glasses, and the experience was as mesmerizing as when I saw the iPhone for the first time.

The screen of Project Glass sits off to the side, clear and unobtrusive. You interact with it when you need to. When an e-mail or text message comes in, you can look if you want, or simply ignore it. It’s not as if a large red stop sign is jammed in your face when messages arrive. These things obviously have their share of problems. They cost $1,500, for a special pre-order. Although I’d gleefully walk around with a pair on, my sister and the majority of readers of this newspaper, would probably say, “No thanks. Way too geeky for me.”

But that will all change.

Mr. Brin said the glasses changed the way he posts his activities. “I have found myself responding to a text message or e-mails asking what I’m doing with a picture,” he said.

he told a story of repeatedly throwing his son, Benji, in the air with both hands, and then catching him. Google Glass took pictures and documented the moment. “I could never have done that with a smartphone or a camera,” Mr. Brin said. Instead, it was just Mr. Brin and his son, playing.

The technology was barely there.

And that’s the point. When technology gets out of the way, we are liberated from it. Wearable computing will free us from peering at life through a 4-inch screen. We will no longer have to constantly look at our devices, but instead, these wearable devices will look back at us.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com