Evolution of the Desk?

Every now and again, I am reminded of the Harvard Innovation Lab's video that captures the way the computer has reduced the number and kind of items we keep on our desks. And while any given version of the video will have commenters chime in about visual fallacies in the video, its message remains clear: Digital Technology has transformed the way we live and work.

As I sit here in a recliner with my iPad Mini resting on a lap desk as I write this with an Apple Pencil, what strikes my imagination most forcefully about the video are the assumptions we don't question about the changes that took place between 1980 and 2014 — now, as Dr. Robbie Melton pointed out at the AI for All summit, a decade ago....

If I may borrow Apple's formulation of the question, “What’s a desk?”

It's a less trivial question than it may sound, as CPG Grey pointed out during the pandemic. And if the advice he offers is targeted at mentally surviving the pandemic, its lessons remain applicable post- pandemic. We function best when we compartmentalize our lives. When we have a space we can dedicate to parts of our lives, it helps us accomplish what we want and need to do.

So, what is a desk? What is it for? And why, if we have transformed them in the way the Harvard Innovation Lab has suggested, why do they keep collecting stuff?

It has to be something more than the companies that design and manufacture the desk systems so popular with tech YouTubers (and, based on my watch history, with me, too). Even in the absence of such systems, we decorate the space with chatchkies, mathoms, and items we need to get to and are almost certain to sometime very soon.

What I am feeling that I should think through is the relationship between one desktop (physica) and the other (digital). Both are places I have invested time in personalizing and optimizing. But I’m increasingly conscious this summer as I move between my desk, the kitchen table, Alice Jules Coffee Shop, my campus office, and this recliner, that my physical and digital desktops lack a kind of connection that it feels like they should.

I want to spend some time considering that disconnect and if it matters.I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with the keyboard and how it, a pointer device, and an external monitor (and access to an outlet) have begun to define a desk in a way that isn't demanded by my iPad Mini.

What is it I an actually asking of the horizontal working surface and its associated storage?