The rise of touchscreens pushed buttons out of vogue. But they're making a comeback

The rise of smartphones, tablets and electric vehicles has pushed buttons out of many design interfaces. In their place are touchscreens, voice activation and motion sensors galore.

But according to consumer trend watchers, buttons are making a comeback.

Apple recently added two new buttons to its latest iPhone — one of which is tied to its new AI functions. In the automotive world, Hyundai and Volkswagen are bringing both buttons and dials back to buttress their touchscreens.

Rachel Plotnick, associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic and the Politics of Pushing, studies human-machine relationships.

In her research, she found that the history of buttons in the Western world likely began in the mid- to late-1800s, coinciding with the rise of electrification and industrialization.

Their use has been connected to everything from optimism to fear of increasing automation, and even to class consciousness — such as concerns about the ease of which a ruling class could order servants with the push of a button.

Here is part of her conversation with The Sunday Magazine's Piya Chattopadhyay.

The button game really changed in 2007. That's when Apple released its first touchscreen iPhone, and it influenced how so many of our devices look and operate today. So instead of buttons and knobs, everything seemed to have a touchscreen. Kitchen appliances, our microwaves, our stoves, to kiosks in fast food chains.

Why do you think the touchscreen took off in the way that it did at that time?

On the one hand, I think there was kind of this sexiness of design. You know, touchscreens were perceived as very high tech and new. This is after 2001, the movie Minority Report came out. There was all this excitement around this idea of: how will we manipulate technologies with our hands in new ways? And specifically, how can we touch our data and our computers in different ways? So I think there was kind of this paradigm shift in terms of design.

But also touchscreens [were] kind of wedding software to buttons to make our devices much more flexible. If you think about a physical button, it can usually only do one thing. It carries out one function, whereas a touchscreen can be kind of endlessly updatable so that [it] could over time, maybe do 20 or 30 or 50 different things. 

So there was this kind of newness in terms of the design and its appeal esthetically, but also kind of opening up the range of functions that were available to us on our devices.

You say that there's a sort of ebb and flow to our cultural attitudes about what we consider modern design to be.

I think that's absolutely true. You know, and it's very funny to me to think about the 1950s after World War II is often called the origin of push-button culture. And people were moving into the suburbs, and all of a sudden everything had to have a button on it. It wasn't a cool gadget unless it had a button.