Shapes Of Being

I was doomscrolling the other night, as one does on their smartphone, waiting for the new iPhone release. It was, of course, the same rectangular touchscreen with a slightly better camera, slightly different color. Yay. Oh, you can make emojis now, it seems.

I love to snark about our tech overlords as much as anyone — it's always the same phone, right? But it made me think: what else could they make? Is there really another 2007 Steve Jobs moment ahead of us? Or has the phone just... arrived at its final form?

There's a moment when a design stops feeling like design. When the effort behind it disappears, and what's left just feels right. Obvious, even. Like it was always supposed to be that way.

I've been noticing this feeling everywhere lately.

In the late 1990s, paper maps that once helped conquer countries and civilisations went digital. MapQuest, MapBlast, Yahoo Maps: services that let you type in an address and see a map on your screen. On a physical map, moving from location to location meant just moving your eyes. Online, this translated to something clunkier: arrow buttons.

Click "North," the page reloads with a new tile. Click "East," wait for it to load again. For nearly a decade, this was the norm.

Then in February 2005, Google Maps launched with something new: you could drag the map. Click and pull it around like sliding paper across a table. The old arrow interface, standard for ten years, suddenly looked primitive.

The arrow-key interface wasn't trying to be temporary. It genuinely felt like the solution. It's only after the drag gesture arrived that we could see the previous version for what it was: a transient form, an earnest attempt that got us closer but wasn't quite there yet.

This is how design actually moves: through forms that feel complete until they don't. The glass rectangle in your hand? That's what I'd call a canonical form — a design that feels so resolved, so inevitable, that it's hard to imagine what comes next. But it's only canonical for now. In ten years, we might look back and realize: oh, that was transient too.

Or take the phone itself. In the 1980s, it was a brick. By the 90s, it got smaller: flip phones, candy bars, Nokias that could survive a drop. Then came keyboards, the BlackBerry era, tactile buttons under your thumbs. It felt solved.

Then in 2007, Apple released a phone with no keyboard at all. Just glass. People were skeptical. But within a year, the touchscreen slab became the template. Every other form — the flip, the keyboard — became retroactively transient.

The phone in your hand right now feels inevitable. But it's just another step.

Take the chair you're sitting on. Its purpose is ancient and simple: support a human body at rest. But the forms that have tried to satisfy this? Wildly different. Egyptians sat on folding stools. Medieval nobles on throne-like seats. The four-legged chair with a backrest, the design that now feels universal, didn't become standard in Europe until the 16th century. Before that, it was just another transient form among many.

Each era thought it had solved sitting. And in a way, it had — for that moment, with those materials, for those bodies and those social contexts. The canonical form is always provisional. It's just the best answer we've found so far.

Every object has what I'd call a purpose: the job it's supposed to do. A chair's purpose is to support the human body comfortably. A phone's is to connect you to information and other people. Simple enough.

But here's the thing: the purpose stays stable while forms keep changing. The purpose of "comfortable sitting" hasn't changed in millennia. The forms that try to satisfy it? Endless. Stools, thrones, benches, Eames loungers, bean bags, gaming chairs, each one an attempt to resolve the same problem.

Most of these attempts are transient forms: designs that work, that feel right in their moment, but haven't quite clicked into place. And then, occasionally, something crystallizes. The four-legged chair with a backrest. The rectangular touchscreen slab. These become canonical forms, designs so widely adopted, so seemingly obvious, that they define the category.

The monoblock plastic chair might be the ultimate example — billions made, pure function, found everywhere from Nigerian markets to Manhattan offices.

But here's what's humbling: you never know which you're inside of. When you're holding a flip phone in 2005, it doesn't feel transient. It feels done. The transience only becomes visible in hindsight, when a new canonical form rewrites what "obvious" means.

Aristotle called this telos, the idea that everything has an inherent purpose it's trying to become. An acorn's telos is to become an oak. A knife's telos is to cut. Design, in this view, is the process of finding the form that best fulfills an object's purpose: stripping away what's unnecessary, resolving misfits, until form and function align. Christopher Alexander called this "fitness to context." The canonical form is the one where nothing feels extraneous, where the design has found its purpose.

But here's what Aristotle didn't account for: the telos keeps moving. A phone's purpose in 1990 was to make calls. By 2007, it was to access the internet. By 2025, it's to be an AI interface, a camera, a wallet, a map, a mirror. The purpose expands, and suddenly the old canonical form becomes transient.

So maybe design isn't discovering a fixed purpose. Maybe it's chasing a moving target, getting closer and closer to something that keeps revealing new layers.

Right now, we're living inside transient forms for AI interaction. You're writing something, you need help, so you switch tabs, open ChatGPT, type your question, wait for a response, copy it, switch back, paste it in, reformat it to match your document. Six steps just to ask a question.

It works, but it's clunky in ways we'll only see clearly once the canonical form arrives. What's the purpose we're trying to satisfy? Maybe: "seamlessly augment human thinking without breaking flow." Someday, someone will design the interaction that makes us say, oh, of course, this is how it should have always been. And all these text boxes will look like arrow-key navigation.

You can never identify a transient form while you're inside it. It only becomes visible in the rearview mirror, after something better arrives. This is what makes design so humbling and so endlessly fascinating. Every canonical form is just waiting to be exposed as transient. Every "final" solution is provisional.

Maps, phones, chairs — these are recent. But the pattern is ancient.

From the first tools humans shaped from stone to the lamps that lit fire to the weapons that conquered nations to the screens we carry today, every object has moved through this same process. Transient forms, one after another, each feeling final in its moment.

I'm only two months into design. I don't know what I'll make, or if it will matter. But I know what I want to witness: the moment a transient form becomes canonical. The moment something clicks into place and feels inevitable. That shift, watching it happen in real time, that's what made me fall in love with this work.

Every object around us has a story to tell, somewhere along its journey from transient to canonical and back again. Some born minutes ago, some centuries, and some reaching back to the dawn of human civilisation.