Status Quo Ante

        Whenever something new is released, it always seems that peoples reaction is “how did we deal with this before?” as if what they are doing/using/holding/etc. was previously done in some archaic manner. There’s always something better about these new devices or ways of doing something, but I find it hard to say it wasn’t unexpected. Take some recent cell phone announcements, they talk about nearly 48 hour battery life. After its announcement, people went “Wow, I can’t imagine something with that much battery life!” What? Are you daft? If you never used a cell phone, you’d question how someone used one when it only had a couple hours of battery. If you have, you practically dreamed of this point in history. This kind of view recurs often, especially when people can easily spread such opinions, “ideas”, and views easily through social and mass media. So why do people take for granted that something won’t change? Why does the status quo become the finite end of development, with the status quo improvements affecting these products and actions? Wait, but then it’s not status quo, its status quo ante, or the state of things before. We are improving and developing, but we’re doing it with expected improvements. To use the prior example, the latest cell phones are just last year’s cell phone with a CPU, memory, screen, wireless, etc. that was, or has been in development for years prior to that cell phone appearing on a developer’s task list. But my care about the stagnant standard is not with the direction it’s going.

It’s with the directions it isn’t.

Who decided that a door should be rectangle? We’ve seen architects show off a round door, either in a movie or possibly in some art exhibit. But why did that stop? If some individual back in prehistoric times went “Ugg want to cover this opening to my cave”, to go with the stereotype, and then chose a round cave entrance… cover, would we be using round doors? What if that did happen and when more permanent settlements, which were presumably best built with vertical posts and horizontal rafters, decided to cover their entrance, they found a rectangle fit the entrance better? That’s probably what did happen, but why don’t we give a round door a try? Sure, it will be unwieldy for the architect at first, but when it comes time to move furniture in, suddenly it will be realized that lifting a wide object to waist height, and having a round door fit perfectly. Fingers and hands have plenty of room. The unfortunate state of health in society didn’t make people square, it made them round. It’s well known that arches spread structural load over the span, and it’s also known that circles spread pressure evenly around its circumference. So now, along with fitting better with modern society, the round door also can act as a singular structural support as opposed to the rectangular door being placed outside of a load bearing area or needing two structural supports around the door frame.

What about other areas where development has seemingly frozen? Energy production comes to mind, partially due to being a proponent of nuclear power. It’s frozen due to political and social fear, but to focus on the technicalities. Nearly everything about nuclear power was developed within the 1900s, with development all but halting after the Chernobyl Disaster. Yet, factual arguments against nuclear power are the dangers of the nuclear fuel, waste treatment, and costs. Costs have to do with social fear, causing rising insurance costs and lack of willful development that often brings lower costs. Both other issues have also been solved already, but due to costs and the additional worries of installing a full-scale reactor of an otherwise small-scale tested system, it is virtually impossible to get one installed. A nearly impossible stigma to shake leaves nuclear energy the tapped, but underutilized power that could be greater then what most believe it to be.

The last example, to tie in my previous graphics articles, has to do with user interfaces. A common view, alluded to in my user experience post, by UI designers, is that common UI elements are not good. Text will always exist, as will images, but buttons, sliders, dials, switches, etc. are not needed. They were defined by Xerox PARC when they were researching home computers. They are classic skeuomorphic designs, but UI developers dislike them, and thus want to remove them. The problem is, as explained in the UX article, they are how we develop UIs and those visuals define how we interact with them. When someone says they are going to get rid of a button, they instead replace a clickable square with text, with clickable text. Did they really change design, or did they just change the visual? But will a user know that it’s clickable? If they highlight it, underline it, etc. then it becomes “the new button.”

This is the issue. The state of things before. Real development occurs when someone looks in a different direction from the path that others follow. But as John Day of OSI stated “Unix killed innovation because once it came out, nobody needed to work on any other OS.” Once the real development occurs, new developments become a mimicry of the prior development, almost to the point of being skeuomorphic of the theory and design itself. You look at almost any car and can probably name another company that makes a similar looking car. You look at a cell phone, and they probably look identical to one or more other cell phones. You look at the fabric of society, whether physical or social, and there is some aspect of it that mimics something from before. It’s not the same. It’s not status quo. It’s status quo ante, and represents the state before, with variances changing “look at a car and can name a car that looks exactly like it” to “look at almost any car and can name a car that looks like it.” The differences provide variation, but differences follow similar development paths. So many theories and discoveries were co-discovered that it has led to the theory that “as soon as society is capable of the development, one or more individual will develop it.” If I had any idea on how to take something so ingrained within the mental process, maybe I’d have a bestselling book on how to “Think Different”. But even education and industry, whose goals are to foster a desire to learn and discover or to develop something new, provide guidelines and box in individuals mental capabilities in an effort to help them, but all that happens is they are directed down the same path as everyone else.

The future isn’t the next iPhone or Prius. The future isn’t status quo ante. It is status que dissimilis. Unlike the status quo.