Thesis Design

One of the reasons people projected so much future wealth for the Vermilion area was THESIS.

THESIS wasn’t always a joke of a company. Before they ventured into artificial intelligence, THESIS made a variety of practical appliances. It really was their early appliances that were the profitable ones, whereas the increasingly strange creations they made in later years were less successful.

Both the success of early inventions, and the failure of later ones, could probably be attributed to the idiosyncracies of Crane and to a lesser extent, Clemens.

Crane wasn’t a designer, unlike clemens, but he did have a strong sense of aesthetics, and opinionated takes on the way things ought to be built or engineered, or used. One thing he was well known for in the creative community was his taste and vision for design.

For a computer scientist and all-around cutting edge scientist, he was often accused of being a luddite. He especially disliked modern interface conventions, including holograms, voice recognition, and even touch screens. He described such things as superfluous, and even “tasteless” and “decadent.” Instead, he had a love, some would say a fetish, for mechanical things.

His apartment reflected these sentiments. His computer was built to look like an old daguerreotype box, and its keyboard was a custom creation made from an old typewriter: a family heirloom. While these items could certainly be described as retro, there was more to his preferences than this, as is seen through his early inventions.

One of the things to put THESIS on the map was the Nanochef Series of appliances, such as the Nanochef Mixologist and the Nanochef Butcher Pro. They were intended to help restaurants, or particularly wealthy and lazy consumers, to make food and drinks easily. Such devices, especially beverage ones, have been around for a long time. But unlike competitors, the Nanochef series featured no touch screens. It had a single small, black and white screen used almost entirely to display text. It was manipulated through mechanical keys.

When it was announced and photos were released, tech blogs and critics panned it as “already outdated.” To public surprise, the critics were wrong. What tech pundits criticized was its design. Where’s the touch screen? Why is it a big ugly box? and of course, Why would anyone want steak that comes out of a giant metal box like some kind of dystopian factory creation?

What these people failed to realize, though, was that business owners weren’t everyday consumers looking for the next shiny, colorful fad. People found the nanochef to be supremely usable and efficient, despite its boring looks and lack of bells and whistles. An aspect of its design not immediately apparent to reviewers was that the Nanochef devices were almost insanely durable. One owner claimed that when his restaurant burned down, literally everything was destroyed except the cement tables, the fireproof cash box, and the nanochef. Although the glass covering the screen cracked in the heat, it worked as soon as the power cord was replaced.

So despite little advertising in the early days, THESIS enjoyed a slow but steady sales growth. Their practical, austere machines grew in popularity among business owners so much that they began to seem commonplace in their hometown of Vermilion. And because they rarely needed to be replaced, they became more and more common even without any kind of huge sales growth.

THESIS is thought of as being responsible for a shift in the public’s aesthetic taste. Although this was regional. People in New Alexandria began to move away from the ultra-sleek, supposedly “futuristic” design paradigm that had been dominant since the rise of Apple, and toward a boxier, overtly physical design sensibility. People no longer wanted seamless razor-thin tablets or shiny watches with holographic displays.

In some ways, it was a return to earlier design styles: some of the ornate flourishes of the victorian era, as well as some of the dignified, utilitarian boxiness reminiscent of Sapper, who created the classic Tizio lamp and the original Thinkpad.