Richard Sapper has never been a stranger to radical innovation, to ideas that changed the rules of the game: through a career encompassing almost all realms of the product design world, one should just think of the portable televisions he designed with Zanuso for Brionvega, or the Grillo telephone that again with Zanuso he designed for Siemens in 1966, the first single-plastic-body landline telephone to be activated with a clamshell opening, as more advanced cell phones such as Motorola’s StarTac would do 25 years later. In that latter period, however, Sapper was already exploring new grounds, working on a concept for IBM that disrupted the existing hardware categories (monoblock/desktop, and laptop) by breaking down the PC into three prisms, one of which, thoroughly designed, is a screen but also a removable tablet-reading and graphics support: the genesis of that quite unprecedented entity, a visible relative of the tablets (and certain graphics tablets) that would, however, appear more than a decade later, dives deep into a dialogue between Sapper and Domus where Gio Ponti, antique lecterns, and Stealth planes emerge. It was published in February 1994, on issue 757.

Imagine yourself with a precious reading-stand resting on the table in front of you, and on it an illuminated manuscript. Where words and images, interwoven by the artistic skill of an amanuensis, spoke a potentially supernatural language. Or with a tablet on your knees and an engraving tool in your hand, tracing signs in wet clay; signs for eternity.

Or again, sitting in front of a mirror looking at the reflected image of yourself and the room behind you; or dreaming. Or in the streets, wearing earphones and a video-musical device on your belt and maybe roller-skates on your feet. Images chronologically cutting across a few thousand years of history and all conveying the idea of man speaking, in human language, and dreaming of a marvellous “machine” with unlimited powers. 

Such dreams can today at least in part be concretized, with revolutionary effects and consequences that are extremely hard to assess. We attempt here to do so, by looking closely at the latest computer designed by Richard Sapper and made by IBM, with interpolated reflections and questions put by Sapper himself. First of all, the form. IBM have accustomed us, again through Sapper, to the personal computer archetype (see the PC Convertible of 1986): a small smooth and perfect box ready to open and reveal screen and keyboard.

With this new object, named Leapfrog, the concept changes totally: the parallelepiped has given way to a slender prismatic solid, with references to a “desk picture”, a reading-stand, a mirror. Could all this be redolent of Richard Sapper's early experience in Gio Ponti’s office in the late ’50s? Hinting at the Pontian metaphor of the diamond, the crystal? “Certainly the first time I saw forms like that, with a different geometric harmony, was at Gio Ponti’s. But if there is any reference I would call it unconscious. The form of the Leapfrog springs from the ideal posture Of the hand on a surface, for writing or painting, in short, from the inclination of a reading-stand. In a very preliminary sketch I envisaged a sequence of steps that were subsequently changed gradually into a tilted plane. I am particularly attracted by vanishing outlines of this sort. One of the best designed products of recent decades is certainly “the invisible aircraft”, a sequence of irregularly intersecting planes. When I saw it I felt a very strong connection with this project of mine”. A line apparently in a counter-tendency to the present rounding of forms, of which cars are the most striking example, carried to caricatured comic-strip extremes. 

“Cars today have no form or if they do, it is a form that has no justification at all, a ‘potato’ form, obtained by pressing a finger into plasticine. No concept, no generator, only the productive result of a practice which instead of assuming the necessity foradvanced research conducted by genuine specialists, postulates a design method based on market surveys. Asking people how they would like cars to be. But that’s exactly like a doctor asking a patient how he would like to be cured. You must take your own risks. I believe in my craft. This form for example had an outstanding success with the public unlike the one which all the surveys conducted had forecast. But in reality it is even difficult to get feedback, because at times the situations are inexplicably reversed. To mention one practical example, the timer which I designed many years ago for Terraillon was a huge success in France but simultaneously unsuccessful in Germany”.

So, to continue this formal analysis of the Leapfrog one finds oneself, as I said, thinking of crystals, of an inorganic world of irregularly perfect forms; whereas at the time of the Convertible the metaphor suggested by Sapper himself was that of an alligator suddenly appearing and opening its jaws to seize a person’s hand. “Rather than to the mineral world the reference here is to a ream ofpa per sliding over a top. But metaphors aside, what really interests me is the idea of an act. The act (of opening a door for instance, or a suitcase) is something that has always intrigued me. The simplicity of an action that can lead to an enormous complexity and consequent imagination”. 

Back in 1986 I wrote that one of the mainsprings or “I might say intrinsic features of Richard Sapper’s design is the surprise effect, the discovery of an object’s complexity in a second phase of use. There is in fact an initial moment, in which the object is configured in the neat and tidy state of its unitary form. All of a sudden however the user’s action can turn it into something else, opening up an inner complex and articulated view”. In this new generation of machines that surprise effect can be completely covered by a virtual reality. Rightly, it is Richard Sapper who also takes this leap. The object is not a magic box any more (the old musical box), it is an icon, a window on the beyond.

Consequently, like an icon, like a window it is formally delineated. Once again exterior simplicity and purity and great fantasy and complexity “inside” - except that the inside isn’t mechanical any more, but tendentially metaphysical. “I’ve always loathed the design method that proposes static, definitive objects like facades. I’m interested in structure, I want to walk round an object, physically or psychologically. What interests me is not the stage set, but the theatrical action”. A captivating definition of object relations that can widen and embrace virtual reality, including and transporting it into an eternally human poetic world. This is how Sapper sees the technological revolution: it has got to be profoundly integrated and controlled by man, precisely in its understanding of that poetic relationship. And to conclude this rough outline of reasoning on form, one could not fail to mention another work by Sapper, done in equally revolutionary times, in 1970, with Marco Zanuso: the absolute Black television set.

Certainly after the Leapfrog and machines of the up-and-coming generation, the very concept of in terface, the problematics of man-machine language, will have to be modified. Apparently man no longer transforms his language to be understood by the machine, it is the machine that has been humanized. Maximum technological development therefore rubs out the technological image. The more sophisticated and unknowable the technology, the more it tends to appear natural and non-existent. The time is approaching when machines really will disappear, when texts will be dictated or notes taken in the air, interacting with the walls of people’s rooms. Not in Orwell’s hypothetical “1984”, but really soon. “Tomorrow, if you like. However I believe the real innovation must not be considered singly but as a wider issue”. As a sort of social interface. “The problem of computers in the near future is their social role. A role liable to be heavily unequal. It is clear by now that these are not futurable hypotheses on the telematic house, they are a revolution in the working world. The question is how and when will this vast new potential start to interest the masses. If the industrial revolution saw the disap pearance offarm labourers, and the electronic era that of the worker, the next dramatic step is going to be the end of the white-collar classes.

“If industry today were to harness its full potential, unemployment would rise to 50%. That is why this latest revolutionary venture will bring in a social model altogether different to the one we have known to date. Work, the fact of being able to work, will be the great wealth of the future. And like all wealth it will be necessary to learn to share it among large numbers of people. In this light I found the signal recently launched by Volkswagen positively significant, with its general reduction of the working week to four days. But that is not all. Already with the technological achievements of today there is no longer any real reason to live in cities, no more reasonable justification for using very expensive offices in the centres of those same cities”. 

This means the end of site value. It must mean the necessity for management, for programming and design planning at a truly territorial level. “And, finally, it means that the metropolis will lose its whole sense. It means you will be able to be a worker solely on the basis of your qualities and of the results you are capable of reaching intellectually, even if you are blind or ill or bedridden. But even if you have simply decided to live on a boat or in a birch wood (as is already the case of the people who handle for example the statements of my German credit card which I now receive from a remote part of Denmark). So in other words, work as we know it won’t exist any more. We will have to learn to experience it in a different way, in another dimension. We will have to learn to share the benefits of computers with other people”.

Added to that is the individual necessity to learn to resolve the relationship with a powerful and interactive machine, capable of stimulating and offlattering, transcribing what you say, showing you pictures and playing music to you at the risk of cutting you off from the world. A small powerful object from which, if we are to learn to live socially with its fruits, we must draw great advantages, otherwise we’ll be suffering from solitude. Thus today the best minds in design should apply themselves to a new, social and territorial theme, individual and collective, concerning the capacity to react and to develop alternative models. So that our children, who will be familiar with portentous machines, can still travel even simply with imagination, driving rings along with sticks or playing ball games in the sand.