Morning Snip:
Piece of Mind

Damon Darlin in the Times‘s Personal Tech special section: Can This Be Love?

So it should come as little surprise that people feel lost or actually grieve when they lose a personal electronic device. “You are leaving your brain behind,” says Mark Rolston, the chief creative officer at Frog Design, a leading product design shop. He says the extension of our brain can be seen in how these products now look and feel. The devices — whether a flat-screen TV, an EVO Android smartphone, a Toshiba laptop or a Samsung Galaxy tablet — have become frames around a screen that gives us access to the amazing software that is that brain. Designers have begun to refer to that screen, in whatever device it is in, as “the window.” The frame keeps getting smaller and the window gets larger and clearer.

In other words, what we’ve become attached to is not the glass and metal and plastic, regardless of how it is beveled, but to the software running on the device. The love wasn’t there until the software got smart enough. “I doubt that people really loved their cellphones,” says Don Norman, a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a design firm, and author of “Living With Complexity.” The software inside a smartphone changed that. He thinks people merely like their Amazon Kindle e-readers, but don’t love them because the software doesn’t function as an auxiliary brain.

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