Death by a hundred buttons

I read an interesting article on Ghost this week by a designer called Tobias van Schneider. The title caught my eye: ‘ Death by a Thousand Buttons’.

A product rarely dies of one bad decision he says; it dies of “a thousand reasonable yeses”, each feature sensible on its own, until it does too many things and nobody can remember what it was for.

The essay was about feature creep in software design. I recognised it, somewhat, uncomfortably, as being about the state of my various hard drives. Gear Acquisition Syndrome (I know it well) reinvented as App Acquisition Syndrome. Same affliction - fewer deliveries and less cupboard space required.

My own version tends to arrive heavily disguised as ‘a more efficient way of working’. I keep complaining about the fact that I spend my life pressing buttons, then suddenly seem to find room for a few more.

Dragging sliders. Moving dials. Prodding at a screen. Wacoming my life away. All doing the same thing in the name of creativity - shuffling bytes and moving pixels from where they were to somewhere a few degrees to the left.

It prompted me to do a stocktake of my not-inconsiderable hoard of apps and plugins. One of my more recent - and I like to think reasonable - yeses involved a Leica app. For some time, Leica has offered the special Leica experience in the form of an app on your phone. One of the cleverest things it does is pretend to be a Noctilux - a lens with more admirers than owners that has sat at the top of the Leica catalogue for sixty years, is priced like a used car and worshipped from afar.

And for an annual subscription of around £65 - it’s good enough. You point the phone at something; the software cleverly works out what is near and what is not so near, and after some mindful negotiation with the focus, it purées the background into a soft, soupy glow. It looks almost like the real thing. Note, the word ‘almost’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Remarkable, really; it does this while also being a telephone.

A reprieve then for the Noctilux app but a Swedish Death Clean for most of the remaining camera apps. Their names escape me already. Grief takes many forms. But essentially, pretty much anything with the suffix CAM

The desktop is another story. A potted history of recent acquisitions:

• A design app (obvs).
• Plugins for the design app (because I’m a Virgo and I need to meddle).
• AI meeting notetakers app.
• An Obsidian notes app
• Templates and plugins for the Obsidian notes app, even though it runs perfectly well without my interference.
• An AI assistant.
• A second local AI running on my own machine, for reasons that made sense at the time.
• Video editing software.
• An AI search plugin for Lightroom
• An image generator.

I have realised with some dismay that the tools I use to create – the phone, the camera, Photoshop, a brayer are often sidelined. And outnumbered greatly by the tools whose job it is to talk to the other tools.

Somewhere in the last year, my workflow’s main product became itself. Thinking about getting ready to make something had become the activity, and one with no obvious end. Because of course, there is always going to be one more folder to organise, another small but essential tweak to be made in order that the actual doing can be further postponed.

I teach much of this dragging, moving, and prodding of buttons for a living, and I’m not about to stop; a lot of it is great fun. This is more of a lament about the current state of my hard drive.

What the tools produced in the last three months, since we’re counting:

• iPhone - another 600-odd photos of a sunset
• Photoshop: various demonstrations for other people.
• Obsidian: a great many notes about the work and a fair few essays, also about the work
• Video app - a library of identical videos of three dogs on the beach
• The AI: convoluted conversations about setting up the AI.
• The AI: slightly less convoluted conversations about the work
• The design app - very productive: two photographic tours around Portugal and one to Mexico.
• AI meeting notetaker - nothing
• A sheet of perspex and a tube of oil-based ink, produced in an hour last week; the first physical example of work I’d made in a year.

Undeniably it’s been a big year. A house sale. A move to Portugal. A storm. Convoluted insurance headaches. Residency issues. Tax riddles. And a house that is still mostly full of builders. It is also a very convenient excuse because nobody is going to ask what you made in a year when your kitchen is in a skip, and your etching press is in pieces in a warehouse in Sétubal.

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that the buttons were surreptitiously multiplying before the ink was dry on the sales contract for Tanyards. The teaching had rather taken over, and virtually everything I made in recent years was a demonstration for someone else. The camera and Photoshop had become teaching. I cannot remember the last time I made a picture for myself. It’s a consequence of being heavily involved in show-and-tell that nobody warns you about.

But I think the tide has turned. I now have a makeshift workbench - and I use the term lightly - a €85 metal table from Leroy Merlin. It is roosting dutifully in a corner of the spare bedroom, and is already buckling under the weight of packing boxes and the ironing piled up on it.

However, I finally pushed all deliberations and reservations aside last week, cleared the decks and made merry with a sheet of perspex, some black ink, and a mark-making tool. Well, when I say a sheet of perspex, what I actually mean is a flowered acrylic tray from Aldi. But hey, any port in a storm (pun intended), right?

I summoned up my best Paul Klee circa1919 and made an oil transfer. There is no undo. There is no button of any kind. I made a handful, one of which I felt had potential and emerged triumphant, feeling more like a person who makes things than I had in a long while.

Then I went back to the buttons. Because there is one more little plugin I want to share. Keeby. It’s a mechanical keyboard sound simulator app for macOS. It produces a comforting clack-clack-clack sound when I type, and it makes my button pushing feel so much more productive.