Tangible Data

      You all may or may not have already heard of Gigs2Go, but as designers I think it's one of those things we might want to keep tabs on and see where it goes and how it progresses. If you want to see the Kickstarter page where I found it here's the url: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1810233668/gigs-2-go-tear-and-share-thumb-drive-pack-in-recyc?ref=live

 Check out the video below:

    I work at the MAC store on campus and one of the biggest frustrations I hear about from customers looking to buy a new computer is that they still wish they could have a CD drive in their new macbook. Unfortunately that feature is one that is starting to get "pushed away". If you ask me for my personal opinion I think that this "orchestrated obsolescence" is a little preemptive. However I do not argue that it makes more sense that the market would head in that direction. And why shouldn't it? We as consumers are always fans of having things be smaller, slicker and easier to access. So moving our movies and other data to things like cloud servers, streaming devices, etc..., makes a lot of sense. I however believe that people are physical beings that have "tangible" needs. Even though CDs and DVDs are starting to become "obsolete" (more like pushed out of the market place by force if you ask me) people still need to backups and deliverable data.

    People value things that they can physically touch and hold in their hands, so we should not deny these aspects from the very products that we as designers are trying to sell, which is essentially "data". 

How will we continue to give digital files to our clients if they no longer have CD drives? Lets say we have just entered into a contract with a client: how do we deliver them progress reports and final digital files without forcing them to get on the same cloud service we use? We certainly cant email everything for the simple reason that it's more often than not too big of a file. So jump drives seems to be the last stronghold in the army of tangible data. And I think we as designers should pay attention to this. People value what they can touch, and as designers we need to consistently be keeping tabs on how we can continue to instill in our clients the value of our products.