The Case Against The Desktop

Richard Sapper once designed a TV with a handle. He hoped that people would use that handle to carry the TV into the closet after watching the specific things they wanted to watch. They never did, the living room would have looked strange, the armchairs pointing towards an empty stand.

The most common devices today do not have this problem. They are light enough not to need a handle. The phone is easy to put in one’s pocket, the laptop is easy to put in a bag and even easier to fold, which is often enough to do something else. The phone can be held in one’s hand, the laptop needs a table, but an empty table looks normal.

But there is still one device that dominates the room like the TV once did, that makes it as hard to do anything else and that is the desktop PC.

There’s only one equivalent to the closet that Rams hoped people would put the TV into, and that is to treat the entire room as a closet, to leave it, to close the door and to go to other rooms to do other things. But what if there are no other rooms?