This conversation would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

So here we have what is supposedly one of the world’s leading technology companies launching what it calls a “magical and revolutionary” product. And what does it do? It goes and encourages developers to build twee simulacra of physical objects. How unmagical. How unrevolutionary. How dull. Apple have seriously employed top-flight designers and developers to build digital representations of address books and books and goodness knows what else that computers are designed to get rid of. And by “get rid of” I mean “eliminate as a concept” not “replace with a digital lookalike”. Now they want everyone else to do the same. No thanks. This is 2010 not 1910.

This approach is an enormous dead end that’s wrong on so many levels and plays itself out in various ways, some quite obvious, others more subtle and insidious. In a pragmatic sense, it just doesn’t work on its own terms. Digital metaphors of physical objects are full of leaky abstractions, being both capable of things that their physical counterparts are not and (surprise!) not capable of things their physical counterparts are. No-one seriously designs these metaphors to be perfect — it’s impossible. With computers being mainstream for at least twenty years I’m wondering why anyone’s still bothering at all. The desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was a smart-ish idea compared with the alternatives in 1984. With every year that passes it gets shot through with more and more holes. And the iPad is supposedly the device that moves on from all that. It certainly has the potential as a piece of hardware, as an OS, as a platform. So why try to limit designers’ approaches to something so decidedly retrospective?

But the real problem is much worse than some of the cheesy UI elements like page curls, as excruciating as they may be. What’s wrong with this scenario?

I go to the (virtual) bookshop and browse through the (virtual) books. I find one I like and I pay real money for it. The (virtual) book gets transferred to me and placed on my (virtual) bookshelf alongside the other (virtual) books I’ve bought and that I now have to store and organise.

Hey! It’s just like the real world!

Quite. With most of its limitations, inefficiencies and exclusions comfortingly intact. Business as usual.

Page curl and page turning is a cartoon of something that’s an artifact of pagination which is a consequence of the former necessity for long-form texts to be printed and bound and distributed as such in the physical world. So are bookshops. So is the concept of owning a book. So are bookshelves and private collections of books. And yes, I notice that the age-old tradition of handing over real money for the non-exclusive opportunity to access a particular small and pre-defined chunk of content is still going strong.

Designers: You can think of better ways of doing it than this. Numerous better ways. You could get the genius lovechild of Edward Tufte and John Pawson to redesign iBooks’ UI and it’d still be a bad idea. We don’t need iBooks any more than we need books. We still need ideas. We still need texts. But where they start and where they end and how we represent them and how we can explore them — that’s all up for grabs. Can we do this on the iPad? Probably. Should we try? Definitely. Does Apple want us to? Frankly, probably not.

Someone mentioned beauty. Supposedly there are 80% of people that like “functional” stuff and 20% that like “beautiful” stuff. That 20% are supposedly Apple’s customers. and the rest still use slide rules, telephone directories and Windows Mobile. I’m not going to pick apart how right or wrong that may be right now. But I’ll say this:

If beauty is making digital simulacra then we need a new aesthetic. If beauty is perpetuating not just the appearances but the cruel limitations of things past, it’s time to move on. We need a digital aesthetic that’s more than skin deep. One based on possibilities and power that continue to delight us as we use our new digital tools rather than briefly amusing us when we first encounter them. And yes, given that these are new things they should look like new things too. Get the message? If you’re not experiencing Google Search on an aesthetic level you’re not paying enough attention. I’m not talking about how it looks. I’m talking about what it can do for you. We need more of that. A whole lot more. In the short term, it’s about companies paying their bills, thriving, profiting. In the long run it’s about the entire field of computing progressing or stagnating, not the fortunes of any particular company. It’s about having an information society rather than an information technology society. You want to have something worthy of an upgrade in 2020? Step away from those horseless carriages. Don’t look back.

In short, if you love notebooks, buy a Moleskine. If you want to be a cartoonist, go and work for Pixar. If you’re confused about which way time’s running, go cyberpunk or trawl eBay for a Newton. And if you want to make a genuinely “magical and revolutionary” break with the past on the iPad platform — and I think you should — then forget about physicality and virtuality and retro computing and go and make something that not only doesn’t exist in the physical world but doesn’t exist in the digital one either. After two decades of mainstream computing we’re more than ready for something genuinely digitally native. We can stand the shock of the new. I hope that someone at Apple still understands that sometimes you’ve just got to break the rules — including your own.

Spec-obsessed techies bemoan the lack of hardware features and the relatively modest screen resolution, processor power and storage space. But the iPad isn’t about any of those things. It’s about providing a great user experience for the things it does, not beating the competition on points.

What competition, anyway? Netbooks, the Kindle and other e-book readers, smartphones and even Windows 7-based tablet computers are all aimed at different uses and audiences. Assuming Apple wants to keep selling iPhones, MacBooks and iMacs, it clearly doesn’t believe the iPad is a replacement for your phone, laptop or desktop. The iPad is in a category of its own for now.

So cutting past the “I wanted two cameras, multi-tasking, Flash and a 500GB hard drive” crowd, let’s ask the real question: Why wouldn’t you want an iPad on your coffee table?

What would be so terrible about being able to pick up a hand-held device with a lovely big screen and browse the web?

Why would such a thing be so awful if you wanted to curl up in a chair — or in bed — and watch a film or some YouTube clips?

Could you really not enjoy reading a book on such a thing?

No-one is stopping you popping your (smart) phone in your pocket when you go out. And no-one is stopping you working on a fully-featured laptop or desktop computer with all its multi-tasking, power and disk space when you want to do some serious work. The iPad is for sitting back, browsing, watching, listening. Writing the occasional email, tweet or comment. The kind of thing you probably either squint at a smartphone to do, or struggle to do with a netbook or toasty laptop and its poorly-suited trackpad.

You don’t need a full, multi-tasking OS to do any of these things. You don’t need Flash. You don’t need USB ports. And you don’t need a lot of storage, although by many sensible standards, the top 64GB model has a lot of storage — but not if you’re the kind of chap that has a computer dedicated to running BitTorrent.

No-one needs an iPad. Even at what appears to be a modest price for what it is, it’s a luxury item. While I would definitely argue that most working people and students need a computer and that many would benefit from having a smartphone, this in-between category of slick media viewer is pure indulgence. It will stand or fall not so much on what it can do, and even less on what it can do that other gadgets can’t. The user experience will be everything.

The test of the user experience isn’t on the spec sheet or in the promo photos or videos. It’s in getting into your hands (and hopefully, living room) and having a go. I’ll reserve further judgement until I get a chance to do just that, but if it’s as much of a joy to use as the iPhone and iPod Touch then it’ll definitely be finding house room and earning its keep by pure pleasure alone.

We’ll be seeing a lot more of these kinds of devices in future, from Apple and many others. Not just tablets, but a myriad of things-that-compute-that-aren’t-computers. For all its versatility, the general purpose computer and operating system is lousy to use, still feebly perpetuating the same interface and interaction design of the first Macs (and Lisas) back in the early 1980s.

Smartphones show promise, but their small screens will always limit their uses for many applications, at least until we can wire them into our goggles or optic nerves. The future is computers that are smaller, more specialised and more numerous, each of which is limited to but hopefully beautifully suited to its task. With its screen, controls, software and storage, what is a digital camera if not an elegantly-specialised computer?

If you ran a big organisation, why wouldn’t you want half a dozen iPads in the waiting area at reception?

The Litl in conventional laptop mode and in easel mode

I have a love/hate relationship with computers. Or more properly, I love computing and hate general-purpose computers. Supposedly modern operating systems — Windows, OSX, Linux — are far too complex for the average user let alone novices. Collectively they’re responsible for wasting more human time, energy, money and ingenuity than anything in the history of civilisation. Even Facebook. A plague on all their houses.

While most users can get their machines started up and find their way somehow to the internet (generally by double-clicking the big blue “E”), most administration tasks leave them stumped. Installing, upgrading and removing software. Managing drivers and plugins. Adding new hardware. Connecting to a new ISP or wifi hotspot. Virus checking. Backups. I doubt that more than 10% of home computer users really have their systems in order and know how to do all of these things competently.

So when I see the new Digital Inclusion Task Force (it’s a UK thing, international readers) announce that there are 10 million people in the UK that have never used the internet, not only does it not surprise me but I worry that it’s a precursor to a misguided, expensive and ultimately futile attempt to get those people online with conventional, general-purpose computers. I think that would be a mistake, because such things are horribly, unnecessarily complicated if all you want to do is get online.

For this and other reasons I’m very pleased to see the launch of the Litl, though currently they appear only to be selling in the US at present. The Litl styles itself as a “webbook” and aims to massively simplify basic, everyday computing.

Almost as good as a real kitchen timer and only $690 more expensive

In many ways it’s a similar concept to the forthcoming Google Chrome OS but it runs on its own custom, simplified hardware. You get what appears at first sight to be a conventional laptop with a 12-inch widescreen. It’s not a touchscreen, so all interaction is done with the keyboard and mouse. There’s also an optional basic remote control.

In many ways the Litl is defined as much by what it doesn’t have as by what it does. Unlike a netbook, the Litl is designed to be permanently connected to the internet. There’s no hard drive, just a small 2GB internal flash card that stores programs and a temporary data cache. The full hardware spec is here. All persistent user file storage happens online — in the “cloud” — and is completely transparent to the user. This arrangement completely eliminates the need for backups. It also makes it possible for users with multiple Litls to sync them together simply by connecting them to the same online account.

There’s also no optical drive. I’ve no idea whether you can install extra software but if you can presumably it’ll be coming from an online app store rather than a DVD or a conventional installer package.

Most importantly, there’s no conventional Windows, Linux or (obviously) OSX installation. It runs a heavily customised version of Ubuntu Linux but don’t expect to find a GNOME or KDE desktop or a terminal window.

The home screen is a set of thumbnail "cards" -- no menus or icons here

The custom Litl OS starts by presenting a home screen of “cards” — large icons representing websites, apps and “channels” (persistent mini-apps). This is much more similar to the iPhone’s home screen of icons than Windows’ start menu, OSX’s dock plus Applications folder and Linux’s start menu lookalikes. As with the iPhone, a card can simply be a web bookmark. In fact, this is the only native way to store bookmarks on the system. If you want anything more sophisticated you’ll have to use an online bookmark app such as Delicious.

There’s also a search box at the top of the screen which defaults to Google.

So from power up you’re just one click away from your favourite websites and immediately able to search the web without opening a single menu or app.

This approach is both obvious and brilliant. No other OS does this, yet how many people do anything other than open their browser when they first start their computer? While  in other OS’s you can configure your browser to start automatically, almost no-one does. Most of us hunt through an icon-cluttered desktop, menu or dock. The Litl treats the web as the main event, not just one of the many things you can do with your computer but very often won’t.

And this reflects the overall Litl philosophy — concentrate on the essentials and forget the rest. That makes it far less versatile than a general purpose computer but also far easier to use and maintain. In fact, having done as much research on this machine as possible without actually getting my grubby mitts on one I’m not sure what kind of maintenance it’d actually be possible to do. All software updates are delivered automatically without asking or even notifying the user (why would they care?) As mentioned above, there’s no need for backups or any kind of conventional filesystem that might require organisation. You’ll need to select your wifi network and type your password for it when you first set it up but that’s about it.

The general response online from techies to the Litl has been lukewarm but then it’s not for them. Yes, you can get a more powerful and versatile computer for much less (Litl retails at $700). But I doubt you can get anything that has the same combination of simplicity and functionality. The nearest thing to it is probably the iPod Touch but that’s stretching it a very long way. The Litl really is in a class of its own.

If everyone can use one, everyone will want one

While Litl seem to be marketing the device as a “lifestyle” product to the kind of urbane, affluent families in their promo photography (think one Litl per member of the household, plus a couple of spares for guests), I think it’d be absolutely great for first-time computer and internet users. Whether that’s younger children, older people who retired before computers made it into the workplace or anyone else that’s somehow missed out, getting those people online should be about the opportunities that the internet offers, not the curse of owning and babysitting a fussy, fragile, high-maintenance computer.

If you can’t use a Litl you definitely won’t be able to manage Windows. If some of those new Litl users eventually “graduate” to Windows or another full OS, that’s great. And if they’re happy sticking to the Litl, that’s great too. If there aren’t rows of Litls in public libraries, schools and community centres across the country in the next year or two we’ll definitely have missed a great opportunity to get many people online that otherwise would have found it too difficult.

And wouldn’t it be greater still if the mainstream OS vendors devoted more time to simplifying their cranky, bloated systems so that the rest of us can have more power without paying the price of complexity?

Mac fans have been working themselves into a predictable lather over yesterday’s new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Sitting at a comfortable distance with the detachment that comes from having been there and not being particularly keen to return, it all seems slightly odd. Of course, the new Macs are exactly what one would expect: glossy, gorgeous and stylishly pricey. Such is the Apple way. Yet despite their obvious charms, I’ve never been less tempted.

The reason? I’ve got a netbook and it’s by far the best computer I’ve ever owned. Before you dash off, this isn’t a Mac vs. PC thing but more of a smaller cheaper computer vs. a bigger much more expensive one thing. The Mac is a great system and to my mind is intrinsically no worse than Windows PCs and clearly better in some respects. If the Mac is your thing, you need neither my permission nor approval but by all means go ahead and enjoy yourself. Yet for me, the sheer personal-ness and versatility of a cheap, light 10 inch laptop is such a transformative experience that it’s hard to see how a bigger computer, no matter how slick and shiny, could compete. That includes bigger Windows laptops and desktops too, of course.

Size matters. When it comes to computers, a 15 inch or even a 13 inch machine is certainly portable but it’s not really mobile. These things work according to thresholds. For every extra unit of weight and size a computer gains it becomes an unbearable burden or even literally unusable in more situations. Too often the bigger machine is more trouble than it’s worth. It’s not until you have a computer that you can comfortably balance on one knee or carry open in one hand that you realise how handy it is to be able to do these things. You may not miss them if you can’t, but it’s a revelation when you can. Being able to squeeze into smaller spaces is never a disadvantage and sometimes a requirement to be able to work.

Price matters too. While some people are richer and less price-sensitive than others, it changes the way we think about computers when we can pick up a fully-functional laptop for less than £200. With portable computers depreciating so rapidly, so vulnerable to loss and damage and so expensive to repair, spending as little as possible on one is a fairly sound strategy. At these prices, upgrading every year seems neither excessively wasteful nor is prohibitively expensive. While you wouldn’t want to abuse your computer at any price, to lose a cheap netbook (as long as it’s backed up!) is more of a nuisance than a tragedy.

None of this would matter if the netbooks themselves were too small or too limited to be of general use. I’m pleased to say that for at least my model, the Advent 4211, everything needed for serious extended use is present and correct, including a very good sized and good quality screen and keyboard. While some of the smaller models have keyboards that are really only suitable for casual and brief use, the Advent is big enough to allow comfortable touch typing for reasonably long periods. Almost the only difference between netbooks and more conventional, bigger laptops is the usual lack of an optical drive. This is so rarely a problem when out as to be irrelevant and can of course be planned around by using USB flash drives and SD cards (most netbooks have a built-in card reader) if you really need removable media. At home or in the office, a network-shared DVD drive on another computer will handle most tasks or if you really want, an external USB DVD drive can be picked up for around £30. Otherwise, the built-in 80GB hard drive can hold whatever you might reasonably want to store.

What you won’t be able to glean from spec sheets or this discussion is the emotional impact of having a really small, really useful, go-anywhere machine. More than anything I’ve ever used they’re really personal computers in that they tend to go with you rather than you going to them. If you’re in the market for a new machine, try one out and borrow one for a while if you can. I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Parisimonious design is when you’ve got enough, but no more. It prefers simple solutions to complex ones and conserves scarce resources wisely. We might think of these resources in economic or environmental terms and design products that are both cheap and don’t consume an excess of material or energy. We might consider the user and reject designs that squander their time, attention, energy and space.

Many bad designs offend against the principle of parsimony by being too big, too wasteful, too expensive, too complex, too high maintenance. Such designs are the metaphorical sledgehammer to crack a nut. We find ourselves thinking, “Do we really need all this just to do that?”

Two relatively new products should provide cautionary tales.

The Segway PT has been in the news lately as various parliamentarians including the peculiar Lembit Opik MP have put their slender weight behind a campaign to legalise their use on Britain’s streets. Clearly the fact that the Segway is currently illegal both on the roads and on pavements in this country must put a dampener on sales. Yet I suspect that even if some form of legalisation is eventually forthcoming, the Segway or anything much like it won’t become a significant mode of transport in urban areas.

The Segway does well in packing some seriously complex technology behind a relatively straightforward user interface, but my instinct is still that it’s overdesigned for the tasks it’s supposed to serve. Employing a £4000 electric vehicle just to be able to travel a little faster than walking or a little slower than cycling and in many cases with less range doesn’t offer enough marginal benefit to be worth the price, let alone the trouble of having to charge, insure and maintain it. As indefatigable campaigners Living Streets keep reminding us, walking two or three miles for everyday journeys is often much quicker and more pleasant than we might imagine, particularly when compared with the alternatives. We’re just not in the habit of doing it. For those that want to travel further or more quickly, a £50 bicycle beats the pants off vertical milk float technology in almost every respect bar sloth.

So whenever I see Segways now I can’t help but be reminded of simpering Mr Opik proudly standing eight inches above a group of bored journalists selling the idea that his dorkmobile stands between us and ecogeddon as if his life — and ours — depended on it. Not parsimonious, I’m afraid. Move along.

This week sees the launch of Sony’s latest ebook reader, the imaginatively-titled Sony Reader (PRS-505). The Sony competes with Amazon’s Kindle, forthcoming wizardly wonders like the Plastic Logic Reader and, well, books.

Despite — or perhaps because of — my love for good old fashioned dead tree books, I’m instinctively drawn to the idea of an ebook reader in almost equal measure to how I’m repelled by cumbersome personal transporters. Ebook readers promise to lighten our loads and cut clutter by replacing paper books with ethereal digital equivalents in much the same way that MP3 players have eliminated the need for CDs and vinyl for many. Is this parsimony?

The environmental credentials of ebook readers are hard to guess, but I’m sure they can be calculated. On the downside we have a (say) £200 device with complex electronics and a lifespan of five years, to be generous. On the upside, we have the lack of dozens or hundreds of paper books per device, their storage, transport and ultimate disposal. If the device really does provide an adequate substitute for paper books, I could be persuaded that it has environmental and space-saving benefits.

But there’s the rub. As the designers of the original Palm Pilot found, competing against the speed, flexibility and cheapness of paper is tough. Moleskines are the new PDAs. In The Myth of the Paperless Office, Sellen and Harper offer a compelling explanation of the obvious: Digital technology has increased rather than decreased the amount of paper in use and this trend looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. The things that paper does well, computers do not. Further, computers have stimulated and expanded the various kinds of knowledge work in which paper is an essential tool.

So are ebook readers parsimonious? Could they be? At the current state of technology, ebook readers are adequate for linear reading but very little else. If you’re addicted to airport novels they could be right up your street. But the complex browsing, cross-referencing and annotation that is commonplace with professional and academic reading is way beyond current ebook readers’ capabilities. Moreover, it’s usual for students and professionals to refer to several books and documents at once, implying that for this kind of use, the ebook reader is competing not just against one simultaneous book but several. It’s no consolation that your ebook reader may have the capacity to store 6000 copies of War and Peace when what you really want to do is to refer to all of Tolstoy’s works at once. If £200 for an ebook reader sounds reasonable, try budgeting for a dozen of them.

While ebook reader technology will presumably evolve to incorporate more of the characteristics of paper and thereby gain paper’s flexibility and affordability, right now the most parsimonious way to use large chunks of text is to print them on paper and bind them into attractive and durable covers. You can’t compete with tree.

The Segway and ebook readers condemn themselves to whimsical or niche uses by flagrantly ignoring the parsimony principle. Between two designs for the same purposes, the simpler one is the better one.

So here’s a list of what my “simple” Nokia 1100 can do, and what I actually do with it.

Features that I have:

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. choice of ring tones
6. profiles (stored sets of settings)
7. headset jack
8. torch
9. welcome note (customisable message when you switch on)
10. call diversion
11. automatic redialling
12. speed dialling
13. clock
14. alarms
15. reminders
16. games
17. calculator
18. stopwatch
19. countdown timer
20. ringtone composer
21. screensaver

1. telephone
2. SMS
3. contacts
4. call register
5. clock

Recently I sold my Asus Eee PC 701 netbook and it took me longer to get it back into its complex cardboard home than it did to work out how to restore the operating system and run it. In fact, I never did work out the various flaps and folds of that box properly — I just packed the power brick and battery in a separate box and gave up.

So here’s to a practical application of unboxing videos beyond conspicuous consumption. Play them backwards and work out how to get the spaghetti back in the box when its end comes.

Bring on the reboxing videos.

Then there were the guerilla benchers, installing street seats where the local authority had been too poor or too mean to do it themselves.

On the web, a growing community of civic hackers has been building sites on top of public information to mash it up in new ways that the publishers hadn’t imagined or didn’t have the means or motive to build.

In digital and physical space, if something can be hacked it will be. People are no longer content to live with what designers give them. As Stewart Brand argues in How Buildings Learn, the end of the formal, official design process isn’t the end of design, it’s just the start of the informal process where the users take over and adapt their spaces to their ever-changing needs.

Within the design profession, the practice of co-design is acknowledging that products are better when the users aren’t just consulted but actually participate in the design process. But this is only half the story. Design is part observation and part clairvoyance, discerning likely future needs from current and past ones. When the scope is limited and familiar — a container to hold liquid temporarily for drinking — one has to try very hard to design badly. When the scope is broad and novel — a cashless and paperless ticketing system for a large urban transport system — the risks of poor systems and rapid obsolescence increase.

This is where the hackers, or guerilla designers, come in. Hackers take a designed system or object and modify it for their own needs, sometimes by changing the thing itself, sometimes by combining it with other things to produce new possibilities. Unpaid and usually unrecognised, the hacker delights in the intellectual challenge and the satisfaction of making something for practical use. Sometimes the results are crude, sometimes elegant. The only true criterion for success is that they work.

Relatively few people have the inclination or opportunity to work as big-D professional designers, but as design tools and the hacker ethic become ever more embedded in the general population, the world is looking a lot more malleable than it used to be.

Where do you want to hack today?

Just twist and go.

No low-contrast LCD display.

No instruction booklet.

No learning curve.

No fiddly buttons.

No modes.

No batteries.

No battery cover to snap off or lose.

No battery changes.

No weedy digital beep-beep-beep.

£3 delivered.

This is simplicity. Does it really need to be any harder than this?