Commoditising Conviction

We live in a world where the best of keyboards have become commoditised.
You can order a keyboard that ticks every technical benchmark a modern keyboard should, and have it arrive at your door in 24–48 hours.

Boutique keyboards are more concerned with making art objects to last a lifetime.
Functional experiences that bring meaning to your day-to-day, with fanciful embellishments that throw the value-for-money equation out the window.

But even in this, we live in a world where rapid output is easier than ever before.

In his lecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Virgil Abloh shared the idea of the "3% rule".
That an object needed to only be changed by 3% before it could be meaningfully considered something new.

The concepts of democratising design and remixing are ideas that I firmly agree with, but this 3% rule has always rubbed me the wrong way, and eloquently puts together my frustrations with products in keyboards today.

For a brand that wants to focus on creating something outside of ticking a spec sheet, it's worth is intrinsically tied to the perspective that an object carries.
Through lived experiences, iterations and re-interpretation can something so excessive and inefficient be worth something at your desk.

But the intrinsic impulse to take the path of least resistance is a huge factor of what drives stagnation in me, and keyboard designs as a whole.

Fully modelled TKL versions of Optica and Eden exist in my folders to this day and were planned to be listed in the time between 2024-2025 (where I didn't actually release anything.)

An easy way to make more money from a design that had already been validated.

But just like the keyboards that tick every technical benchmark, this makes my conviction a commodity, twisting it into something whose only reason to exist is that it would sell.

So the files stay in the archive. Not because a TKL Optica or Eden would be a bad keyboard, I believe that it would be a pretty dang good one.

But the decision has to be answerable, and "it would sell X units easily" isn't a conviction worth pursuing.