ACM Interactions

Image Contributors: Eli Blevis

Genre: Documentary observation and reflection

An icon denoting a long-obsolete circular mechanical phone dial adorns a phone booth replete with push-button pay phones—another obsolete technology. The icon is somehow comforting, nostalgic, and curiously familiar despite its reference to vintage technology. Icons are a large part of interaction design. The point that some icons live on past the lifespan of the technologies they picture is interesting apropos of what is and what is not durable in design.

©2013 ACM  1072-5220/13/01  $15.00

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2013 ACM, Inc.