Mascarading tsukumfogami

In the wake of Apple’s “liquid glass” moment and Google’s latest Material refresh, the design world is once again all buzzed up. Linkedin swells with cringey hot takes. Twitter and dribbble are blossoming with the most random designs speculative offshoots. A familiar cycle, hype wave hit.

At the heart of it is a desire to rekindle delight in digital interfaces, some call this “expressive design.” It’s a shift that feels inevitable, even logical. After decades of prioritizing functionality, consistency, and efficiency, we’re at a place where most interface patterns are established. The gain from optimization is marginal. Aesthetic becomes the next available lever — not necessarily an act of ethical leadership, but a strategic move. A signal, not a revolution.

There’s something poetic in this pursuit. Tool makers, software included, seem to be reaching for the spirit of tsukumogami — the Japanese idea that objects, after long use, acquire a kind of soul. It's a beautiful metaphor: software as companion. But unlike the worn texture of a well-used tool, digital things rarely age with grace. They're versioned, re-skinned, deprecated, become “legacy software”, succumb to tech debt. Whatever spirit they accumulate is fleeting — more dopamine than depth. This may simply reflect our nature. We are physical beings, grounded in tangible experience. A well-made chair or a hand-thrown cup offers a kind of presence that most apps cannot. No matter how beautifully rendered, a glowing rectangle will always fall short of touching the skin and echoing in our sense.

Of course, delight is not a vice. Nor is ambition in design. But it’s worth asking what lies beneath the gloss. The latest demos, impressive as they are, often sidestep the real cost of our digital ecosystem: attention fragmentation, energy consumption, and mounting complexity. The interfaces become more animated, more playful, even whimsical while the infrastructure underneath is a back box; heavy, noisy, and harder to trust.

We’ve seen this before. Innovation dressed as salvation. We marvel for a second as the eye candy dopamine hit fades. And soon, we’re left chasing the next glow, the next gesture, the next feel-good feature.

In the end, a button is a rounded rectangle. An app is just a tool. Much of our digital landscape remains clunky, slow, and difficult to navigate. The real opportunity isn't in layering more delight on top of broken foundations. It’s clearing space, simplifying, and… fixing. Respecting our mind, bodies and environment. Improving to the commons. Making less, but better.

I started this piece the week after the design sizzle of Apple and Google. I meant only to rant and move on. Since then, Apple has already softened its liquid sheen. Jony Ive is partnering with OpenAI. The wheel keeps turning… Good (sofware) design is good business, not tsukumfogami.

← Index / Published on 2025-07-12