Deyan Sudjic has always been at the forefront of the design conversation. As the founding editor of Blueprint, editor of Domus and a subsequent director of London’s Design Museum (as well as an ongoing contributing editor to Wallpaper*), Sudjic’s research, curation and writing have done an enormous amount to recalibrate the consumer understanding of the cultural importance of the design industry.
Analogue: A Field Guide, by Deyan Sudjic
Analogue: A Field Guide is his latest book, the story of technologies that have now passed into history, considered bafflingly simplistic and convoluted by a new generation weaned on clouds, search, streaming and digital assistants.
The book offers up succinct summaries of four core areas of technology – sound, vision, communication and information – as well as short biographies of 250 different objects, from typewriters to televisions. It’s sobering to consider a single modern smartphone can probably outperform every one of these devices combined, and then some.
However, it’s this singularity of function that gives each piece of featured technology its appeal. In its focus on the minutiae of origin, form, function, and material, Analogue offers an insight into the almost fetishistic relationship we’ve developed with tech, old and new.
One of Sudjic’s first books was entitled Cult Objects, published way back in the aesthetic hinterlands of the mid-1980s, just as the V&A’s Boilerhouse Project was evolving into what became the Design Museum, courtesy of Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley’s beady eyes.
Much of the visual content in Analogue could have come straight from the pages of Cult Objects, which was one of the earliest celebrations of technology’s raw appeal to both designers and consumers. Forty years later, the consumer electronics of Starck, Rams, Sottsass, et all, has shifted from highly desirable signifiers of status, to outdated, unwanted junk or obscure museum pieces. Now, everything has become a cult object once again.
Analogue is not just a chronicle of how industrial design gave form to the technologies that in turn shaped our culture, but also a love letter to a lost world of tape, vinyl, celluloid and 35mm.
Analogue: A Field Guide offers up a treasure trove of forgotten electronic equipment, much of it now much sought-after, following decades of being left to rot languidly in landfill sites around the globe.
Yes, there’s nostalgia here – you can almost smell the acrid tang of warm electronics – but the book could also give an unknowing generation a far greater insight into the craft and complexity of old-school content generation.
Analogue: A Field Guide, Deyan Sudjic, £30, Quarto.com, @quartobooksuk
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