We often talk about future technological trends, but sometimes we have to admit that in the pursuit of more efficient digital world, there are also many classic solutions with great times, which are gradually being eliminated by rapidly changing emerging technologies.In the past ten years, creator knob Defeated many competitors, courageously advanced in the struggle, and polished many good products for customers. https://www.azilian.co
To this end, Ai Faner will launch a series of articles around the theme of “Good Design Abandoned by the Times” to discuss the exquisite structural designs that have accompanied us day and night, their past, present and future stories. This is the first article.
The knob has been half buried in the grave, which was ten years ago, and no one will believe it.
You may remember that when you were a child, almost every household had an old-fashioned radio, and the silver cylindrical knob was evenly engraved with scales. One of the joys of childhood is to lie on one side and fiddle with the knob. The sizzling sound of electricity in the radio, the babbling sound of human voice and music appear alternately with the rotation, as if the sound waves with emotions have been transmitted alternately and endlessly.
Maybe not on the radio, but I’m sure you’ve felt something similar.
The knob is not an invention that changes the world, but it can do what keys can’t.
As a mechanical structure, it is impossible to test which equipment the knob first appeared on. Maybe it was a telegraph in the last century? Or some oscillograph? It may also be the later radio or TV. Like many buttons, it was naturally born on electronic equipment, and then gradually became popular, becoming a part of the electronic dashboard, and it has been used as a controller all the way to this day.
The knob itself is very delicate, which is different from pressing a switch to output only one quantity. The knob may correspond to several quantities or a limited range of “0-10”. For example, the common volume knob will allow the user to make any adjustment within a certain value, and the desired volume can be obtained with a slight turn, which can not be achieved by pressing the up and down buttons all the time.
Because of this feature, when you adjust the volume by turning the knob, you don’t look at the scale information carefully (some don’t even have a scale). Maybe you don’t care about the size of the number at all, but you will “find” a just right sound with your ears.
A similar experience can also be felt from the desk lamp. We will adjust the brightness through rotation, but in fact we are also relying on our eyes to find the right light source, instead of paying attention to a specific digital scale or color temperature range.
If it is a product that really pursues texture, it will also pay attention to the damping feeling of the knob, in order to allow users to adjust to their desired position more accurately through the feel, whether it is a paragraph-like jam or a smooth transformation, it will make people fondle.
A typical example is the first batch of Atari game consoles in the 1970s. At that time, the joystick and direction keys were not yet born, and all the controls were handed over to the knobs. Although it can only control two directions, the rotation degree of the knob can output more accurate moving variables than the keys, which is enough to play a simple 2D plane game like PONG.
This is the immersive experience brought by the knob, which can make people focus on the information itself. Or, under this continuous control, we will naturally have this intuitive behavior, because our ears and eyes have already responded to the results in advance.
But even with such exquisite design, the knob has rarely appeared on mobile phones or computers. Now, let’s not talk about common devices. Smartphones and laptops are basically invisible to us. Even in the era when the touch screen has not become a standard configuration, the knob is not the first choice for most products.
But the knob is not completely extinct. You can still see it in some specific places, such as the ECG monitor in the hospital or the mixer in the school broadcasting room. There are still controllers of various sizes on such professional instruments. Some consumer electronics products also recognize the intuitive and easy-to-use characteristics behind the knob, so it also exists as an auxiliary interaction scheme.
If those digital and graphical controllers pursue unity and high efficiency, then the knob and so on are preserved, which may be our original unconscious cognition of this operation mode.
Good design should dance with the times
It is quite logical that Digital Crown will appear on Apple Watch. According to Jony Ive, the chief designer of Apple at that time, he hoped to create a “strange familiarity”-both the meaning of crown in traditional watches and the form of auxiliary interaction of smart watches.
I still remember a very clear detail. When setting the alarm clock interface through Apple Watch, you slowly push the Digital Crown knob, and the numbers will jump one by one. Once the speed of pushing is fast, the numbers will change rapidly with this frequency, which is exactly the same as the sense of control brought by the crown of the traditional watch, and this knob can be operated with only one finger.
At its root, Apple Watch is not like a smart phone. Its screen size is only about 1.5 inches. Two fingers can cover the whole screen, and it is impossible to control it accurately.
In order to avoid the problem of visual occlusion, the original virtual crown scheme was directly abandoned, and the Digital Crown appeared in a physical form. At the same time, there was a pressure-sensitive touch control developed based on Taptic Engine, which also continued to the later iPhone.
The Dial input device on Surface Studio may be regarded as the most creative attempt in the Microsoft Surface series. Anyone who picks up this huge cylinder will basically understand how to use it as a part of the “button” and as a “knob”. Although this is not an interactive scheme for mass consumers, I believe that most people will like this simple, direct and attractive design as long as they get started.
