Digitization claims its victims. Most of the time, these are things that no one mourns. Or have you missed the train ticket machines or patent-folded city maps in recent years?
But sometimes it also catches elements of our everyday life that we have come to love, such as the rotary knob, unnoticed. The supposed progress has long since downregulated the use of mechanical turntables (as these things are actually called). They are no longer found on computers, and only rarely on headphones. They are even threatened with extinction on radios and in cars – touch buttons are now being installed there.
The center console of the car used to be the natural habitat of many knobs. In the meantime, you can only find them on the steering wheel
And now the industry is getting to grips with them in the household as well. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an oven, stove, vacuum cleaner or coffee machine – where rotary controls used to be everywhere, today there are only touchscreens and touch-sensitive surfaces.
Whether these touch elements are easier to control seems irrelevant. The main thing is that it looks modern. Rotary controls would often be a better choice than a touchscreen.
You can operate the rotary knob without looking. You can tell where the scale begins and ends when you hit the stop, and you can turn the setting around at lightning speed or slowly, with a sure instinct, fine-tune it as required. Some representatives of this species, which is dying out, even convey gentle resistances that make adjustment degrees perceptible. All advantages that digital buttons and touch screens like to copy but never match. No other control conveys such a pleasantly comfortable feeling of control as a dial.
Our children will no longer know this feeling. They’ll stare at us blankly when we complain that the music is cranked up to the max. Won’t understand that when we say ‘turn’ we don’t mean a course correction.
A digital society can probably live without rotary controls. But anyone who has ever had the privilege of using a well-built rotary control switch will nostalgically long for it again in the future.