Blobjectifying stuff is good

I support efficiency and cost effectiveness and design focused on completing tasks, but I also think the world would be incredibly boring if everything around us all of the time was strictly functional.

Thankfully, designers, particularly industrial designers, for the past decade or so have been part of a movement to bring more curves and swirls back to our equipment. The Christian Science Monitor provided context on this topic pretty thoroughly, as it related to an art exhibit filled with cuddly gear. This demonstrates an era in design where form no longer feels constrained by function.

Should ornamentation be empty? Should frills be added just to be cute? Of course not. Yet why not make a computer that looks huggable, as the iMac is described? It sure seemed to work for Apple. ... This goes back to a fundamental question of art: Why do we make anything beautiful? We can't really measure the pleasure we get from looking at something that inspires us. That seems to me more about the limits of our tools for understanding.