I’ve recently became enamored with vintage office machines. I’ve caught a bit of eBay fever – 8 years late according to my colleagues – from bidding on and winning an old adding machine, a 302 Series Telephone (designed by Henry Dreyfuss), and a turn-of-the-century Royal typewriter. Like many others, I find vintage devices appealing because their operation is mostly self-apparent. For example, when you press a typewriter key, it moves a series of linkages that ultimately smacks a typebar against an inked ribbon. Voila…there’s a fresh letter on your paper. Add some carbon paper between the top and bottom sheet and you get two letters!! The process is comprehensible. Compare that to the mysterious operation of a laser printer that quietly does the printing and then deposits the printed product in a tray. The user’s role is reduced to pressing a button, which clearly increases efficiency but forsakes physical and intellectual involvement in the task at hand.

My point? Just as many technologies are approaching extinction, so are many user interactions. Pulling an adding machine’s crank to perform addition, dialing a rotary telephone, and returning a typewriter’s carriage to start a new line are on the endangered list. People who still perform these actions either do not have access to modern technology and the requisite electrical power, or are keeping tradition alive in the same manner as people who grow and can their own vegetables. What else is on the endangered interactions list? Here’s just a few:

- Rolling a car window up and down
- Tuning-in a radio station
- Sharpening a pencil
- Loading film into a camera

In the near future, we will probably add:

- Turning a page
- Paying with cash
- Flushing the toilet
- Filling-in circles (or connecting a line with an arrowhead) on a paper ballot