Museums may soon collect the last physical button

A European design collection is said to be weighing a new acquisition category covering physical controls: switches, dials, rockers and the kind of button that travels a measurable distance before something happens. The category would be justified on the grounds that such objects are becoming historical, which is a curator's way of saying that a manufacturer has stopped making them.

The proposed display would be organised by tactility rather than by decade. One case would hold controls that click. Another would hold controls that merely acknowledge. A third, reportedly the most contested, would hold controls that do nothing at all and were fitted because users complained when they were absent.

“Our difficulty is that the collection would be functional,” a curator attached to the proposal would explain. “Visitors would press it. Visitors would press it repeatedly. We have never before acquired an object whose entire meaning depends on being worn out.”

The case for the category is not nostalgia, or not only. Physical controls can be operated without looking, which is why they persisted for a century in aircraft, kitchens and cars, and why their removal from dashboards produced a decade of complaints that were treated as sentimental until safety bodies started scoring them.

A reversal is already visible. Several manufacturers that removed physical controls have begun putting a handful back, describing the change as a response to customer feedback rather than as the retraction it plainly is. The museum's draft text would note this development in a single sentence and then move on, which is the most withering thing a museum can do.

The collection would end with an empty plinth. Under the proposal, it would carry a card explaining that the final object in the sequence is a flat glass surface, that it is not on display because every visitor already carries one, and that it can be examined at any time in the visitor's own pocket.

Nothing has been acquired. It is a proposal, a budget line and a curator with a point to make. But the point is sound: we spent a century learning how to design things that hands could find in the dark, and then spent fifteen years removing them for reasons that were mostly about the cost of tooling.