KEY POINTS:
We had the Ice Age and the Stone Age, the Iron Age and the Bronze Age. We had the Dark Ages and the Age of Enlightenment. We had the Scientific Age, the Space Age, and finally the Information Age.
We had, in other words, a long and glorious
procession from ignorance to wisdom, from subsistence to civilisation, from smelling really bad to spray-on deodorants.
But now, something has gone very wrong (except for the deodorants, which as far as I can smell are working fine).
Now all of those ages of incremental progress have given way to this age, the age of gadgetry, the age of extra features, the age, for want of a better word, of over-design.
Today, pretty much everything we use has been designed for many more purposes than we ever use it for.
Take television. In ages past, the television was a simple device that projected pictures and sound into a room occupied by people wearing cardigans.
Whenever you watched television you used every one of its features: the on-off button, the channel selection knob, and the TV aerial, which was never pointing in quite the right direction.
But now, in the age of over-design, the television is just one part of a complicated home entertainment system. This usually includes a video recorder, a DVD player, a stereo, a game console, and any number of children who are more or less permanently attached to it.
And yet the job of the home entertainment system is no different from the job of the traditional television. It projects pictures and sound into a room occupied by people wearing, with any luck, slightly fewer cardigans.
But home entertainment systems come with all sorts of extra features. Look at the remote control for your TV or your stereo or your DVD player and ask yourself how many of its buttons you ever push. Chances are the answer will be three or four, and the number of buttons on the thing will be 187.
Your home entertainment system is hopelessly over-designed for the simple tasks it most often performs.
Likewise, my laptop has enough computing power to send mankind to the moon and run the stock exchange. It is more intelligent than I am, but all I ever ask it to do is remember the silly words I type into its keyboard and not self-destruct out of sheer boredom.
Then there's oral hygiene. Not long ago, a toothbrush was a stick with bristles on the end of it. It was designed, as its name implies, to brush teeth.
But in the age of over-design, this was not good enough. The stick with bristles became the shaped stick with bristles, and then the shaped stick with bristles of varying length. And then it gained lots of extra features whose benefits are unclear.
Today's toothbrush is seductively curved for no apparent reason. It has "elevated rubber ribs to facilitate the user's grip". It has "special bristle design" and "raised polishing caps".
Most bafflingly of all, it has a "unique tongue cleaner for a superior whole-of-mouth clean". Today's toothbrush is horribly over-designed for the simple task it performs.
I could bang on about four-blade razors and tennis racquets, lawn mowers and golf clubs, cars and sandwich machines, all of which are just as packed with special design features that nobody actually needs. But I won't, because I want to bang on about telephones.
Centuries ago, communication was basic. Smoke signals didn't have web-surfing capabilities. Carrier pigeons didn't come with voicemail. Even telephones did their jobs tolerably well for a century or so without belting out ABBA tunes whenever your mother-in-law called.
And yet today, your bog standard mobile phone comes with all sorts of extra features which, if you are anything like me, you completely fail to understand.
My phone, for example, hosts pages of stuff mysteriously referred to as applications, and something called a minibrowser which I have no idea how to use.
But even the most sophisticated phones, with their cameras and their ringtones, are not a patch on the new iPhone unveiled by Apple. The iPhone will be able to do almost anything you can imagine a phone might do for you.
It can screen videos and record your conversations. It can do your banking and organise your birthday party. It can break up with your girlfriend while ordering you a pizza.
And yet, all of these extra features mean that the iPhone will be the most over-designed device in the history of humanity.
This is because, by and large, it will be used for the one simple task that almost every single mobile phone ever sold has been used for - helping its owner believe they are cooler than they actually are.