the delight of specificity

re: teenage engineering, Christian Dior, Christopher Alexander

“The marvels of daily life are exciting: no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.” - Robert Doisneau, Le violoncelle sous la pluie, Paris 1957

One of the rarest feelings in the world is resonance. That immediate flicker of recognition when something is finely tuned to you. It deciphers your interiority, feeds your innermost desire to feel seen and known.

Exactitude is a virtue, but the process toward it is unbelievably laborious. It requires reading into the footnotes of a person. This level of effort is expensive.

So when you see effort applied, you notice. When someone amends themselves to your needs, you feel seen and loved.

On my latest visit to New York, Andy introduced me to teenage engineering, a Swedish audio hardware company known for their reimagined take on the portable synthesizer. Their products are built for a mix of purist audiophiles and indie creatives. The TP-7 field recorder, pictured below, is a reimagined music player and tape recorder, described as a sketchbook for sound:

Here it is outlined by teenage engineering

The workflow has been carefully optimized, whether working with multi-track recordings or just a quick memo. turn on metronome and count-in, set cue points for your arrangements, re-do takes, loop and scratch, bounce, or just play back your favourite high-res record collection.

…just press on the top edge to fast forward, and down to rewind. watch the wheel spin around and hear your tracks scrub in ’hyperspeed’.

Does a normal music listener require tracks scrubbed in ‘hyperspeed’? Does a normal person care about their thematic design principles of portability, depth, playfulness? Resoundingly, no.

On Reddit, debates go back and forth: Why wouldn’t you just use a smartphone? Another reviewer, a self proclaimed ‘hater,’ admitted: “It really made me think harder about how beautiful a hardware ux can feel.”

The products are described to demand difficult design tolerances, where any imperfection is immediately recognized.

This is the essence of specificity.

In providing a precise experience, you are necessarily polarizing. There’s a certain tyranny of NPS or averages you have to decouple from – where averages blunt a nuanced understanding of a product or experience. There’s that funny truism that the most authentic Chinese restaurants have the most 1 star reviews.

Distinctive features are not universally beloved, but are radiant and distressing. Are useless and baffling to the wrong user, and yet somehow delightfully elegant and intuitive to the right one.

I love absurd levels of intentionality. Reverence for the craft. Post-war 1940s, Christian Dior’s use of yards and yards of material for dresses was considered ‘offensively wasteful’, but he was adamant he needed to create hems that flowed a certain way. All I see when I hear about these stories of great creators, artists, technologists, is care. I’ve been thinking recently that exceptional businesses and people have both an infrastructure and culture of care. Infrastructure to capture and surface the right level of detail, and an embedded level of sharpened attunement.

Maybe the word I’m looking for to describe this feeling of resonance is activation, like, in an epigenetic sense? Something new is expressed in a particular environment. It opens your nerves. Makes you feel alive. When you witness something beautiful in a deeply granular way, it recalibrates your understanding of beauty forever.

There are no such thing as neutrals, Robert Irwin, the acclaimed artist of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s once said,

There is no such thing as a neutral gesture, because for the very fact of it being there it draws a certain amount of perceptual attention. Let's say it drags a weight of .06. well, then it's got to give back 0.12 in energy… there are tradeoffs, but I did come to quickly see this thing about there being no such thing as neutrals.

Specificity is the opposite of neutral AI slop. In a world of endless generation, there is a sense of too-muchness, a sense of throwing clay into an abyss and hoping it comes out fully formed. But there’s no sweetness or risk or pungency or voice. You don’t carve David that way. I realized it takes an abundance of small effortful choices to yield something you’re actually proud of.

I’ll leave you with a touching passage from Christopher Alexander on the nature of attention ⟣

One of the most moving moments in my life, was also one of the most ordinary. I was with a friend in Denmark. We were having strawberries for tea, and I noticed that she sliced the strawberries very very fine, almost like paper. Of course, it took longer than usual, and I asked her why she did it. When you eat a strawberry, she said, the taste of it comes from the open surfaces you touch. The more surfaces there are, the more it tastes. The finer I slice the strawberries, the more surfaces there are.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail. You can slice it thinly so there are more surfaces. Real delight comes when you get specific on what you value, and what you like to spend your time on, and what stabilizes you, and what excites you, and what you’re laissez faire on, and conversely, what drives sustained interest. And when someone pays attention to that particular alchemy, it feels like true recognition.

⟡ Special thanks to Andy Weissman for the emergent conversation that sparked this piece and edits. Read his blog here. ⟡

See 2024 Config with Jesper Kouthoofd for more.