Simo / The Object Itself

Clock, torch, map and diary in one housing.

The lesser functions are the ones that made the object impossible to leave behind.

The famous functions are not what keeps the phone in a pocket. The small ones do. It is the clock, checked without thinking, which is why wristwatches became jewellery or exercise equipment rather than instruments. It is the torch, which retired a drawer full of dying batteries. It is the timer for eggs, the calculator for splitting a bill, the level for hanging a picture, the compass consulted for four seconds outside a railway station. Each is a minor convenience. Together they mean there is no hour of an ordinary day in which the object is not, briefly, the right tool for something.

This is why arguments about the phone that focus only on its loud uses tend to miss. Nobody keeps a device within arm's reach for the sake of a function used twice a week. They keep it there because it has quietly become the answer to twenty small questions, and being the answer to twenty small questions is a very strong position for an object to hold. A kettle is used more often than a car and thought about far less. The phone has the ubiquity of the kettle and the capability of the car, which is an unusual pairing.

The map deserves separate mention because it did something the others did not. A clock told you the time and a torch made light, but a map that knows where it is standing changed the shape of a journey. It removed the moment of orientation: the pause at the corner, the turning of the paper, the search for a street sign to anchor yourself. That pause was where a place got learnt. Its removal is not a tragedy, but it is a real subtraction, and it belongs in any honest inventory of what the object does.