This is the twelfth and final essay in a collection written by Byron Ferris for the "Design Sense" feature of the Sunday Northwest Magazine insert of The Oregonian during 1984 and 1985. We should point out at the Byron's reference to Will Vinton is timely; Mr. Vinton, who remains a Portland icon, created the studio that later became LAIKA, now owned by Nike's Phil Knight. LAIKA recently produced the excellent animated feature film, "Coraline". And knowing Mr. Ferris' declared admiration for Max Bill, we'll venture to guess that his "Swiss-made, dial-face" watch just might be one of these. The Editors.
The sense of surprise and delight that kids display as they learn about how the world works seems to escape as they grow and become more blasé. On occasion, however, the gift of wonder can return to big kids, as it did recently from the technical magic of a special-effects movie, a movie that pictured fantasy with such sharp-focus reality that it seemed to be an actual adventure.
The film was "Return to Oz," a Walt Disney production that includes Claymation sequences created by Portland's Will Vinton Productions. The Portland folks sculptured figures in clay, moving them slightly for each of the pictures on a movie film strip. Projected on the theater screen, the figures come to life in smooth movement: a talking moose head, a pumpkin-headed scarecrow and a copper clockwork robot, clockwork because the Oz stories were written in the early 1900s, long before the age of electronics.
When I was very young, the event of the week was a visit to the neighborhood theater, the "RIO," which was a place of dreams, providing once-a-week magic to think about until the next Saturday's shot of dancing pictures on the silver screen. Part of the drama was imagining how great it would be to move to a house built against the wall of the RIO so that I could cut a hole through the wall of my room and watch a movie every night right at home. Of course, I knew that would never happen. But now, when I turn on the television for the evening's shows, I think of my early dreams and wonder at the fantastic changes technology has brought right at home.
Sometimes though, the changes can go too far. When the spring in my venerable wristwatch recently needed replacement, I bought a digital watch as a temporary timepiece. It is a marvelous instrument with large lithium-crystal numbers, a quartz-controlled electronic chip and smaller numbers that pulse the seconds away as though the watch were alive and had a beating heart. Staring in fascination at the seconds changing pulse-to-pulse, I've been wrenched by the realization that my new digital display graphically shows life's moments slipping away into the past. My clock-face watch never frightened me that way its dial always reassured me that more seconds, minutes and hours were coming in the day.
When I explained my unease to a friend who is an electronics engineer, he said of the clock face, "Oh, yes, an analog display." I realized that he was so steeped in his computer craft that the numerical readout of a digital watch was normal and right to him and that, in his mind, the clock-face way of reading time had become merely an analog, or alternate method, to the proper way of showing the information.
I pointed out that a short glance at my clock-face watch gave me more information about the time in relation to the whole day than does the reading of a digital watch, which shows only the moment. My friend just shrugged.
A marvel of mass production and new technology, however, my new digital watch, with all its electronic wizardry, cost only $6.33; my Swiss-made, dial-face watch cost more than $300. Both do the same excellent job of telling the precise time, but the clockface watch is "user-friendly."
Sometimes the magical new products of technology can be superfluous. Recently a friend brought her plug-in air-freshener with her to our beach house for use in the guest bedroom. The little air-scrubber pulls air through itself and collects dust particles on an electronic anode grid. But the air at the coast, coming off the Pacific, is so clean that the little electronic miracle whirred away at an impossibly useless task.
I almost felt sorry for it as it worked away valiantly at its assigned fantasy in this new fantastic world.