Greetings, vehicular archivists and dashboard decorists! Last week, we pulled over and reached into the mysterious goings on of our glove boxes. Did you find inspiration in the messy, human strata of wrinkled napkins, fading receipts, and those straws you will not use, but cannot refuse? Will your newly imagined glove box add to the carâs resale value? Whatever you put together, Iâm sure your mechanic appreciates the effort.
This weekâs nudge sends us to a new place on the creative map; from the personalized and disorganized to its opposite: the universal, perfectly ordered barcode. I chose the barcode because it is ubiquitous on all our products, an easy nudge to find indoors or out. I bet a few are literally within reach of your hand, or your phoneâs camera right now.
While barcodes aid smooth transactions and erase obstacles, I wonder if theyâve made life too smooth, removing not just friction, but meaningful human interaction and problem solving. When we are grabbing, scanning, and moving along, what small moments of connection or critical thought are we losing?
The simple black and white lines of a barcode represent a shortcut, a fast, efficient way to identify and process information with minimal human oversight. Scanning (poorly) my own groceries recently, my thoughts turned to how the barcode had brought me here. How did the efficiency of the barcode âempowerâ me to unpack, scan, and repack my own groceries?
Might the extreme efficiency of the barcode limit human endeavor and freedom? Might this be another technical wonder that leaves me wondering how this marvel helps me? It is great for control and bean counting, but utterly useless for judging beauty, facilitating emotion, or signaling intrinsic value.
By making this control freak into a muse for several minutes of our creative considerations, I believe it is possible to repurpose the barcode to our benefit. Put that scanner down and pick up on some creative vibes with one or more of these endcap worthy exercises:
Item Not Found: Identify one or two things in your life that can never be meaningfully assigned a barcode (e.g., a memory, a feeling of awe, the scent of rain, a complex ambition). Write a one-paragraph description for each, perhaps explain why its essence defies quick, scannable categorization.
Price Check: Instead of scanning for ones and zeros, assign a narrative meaning to the bars and spaces. For instance, let the wide bars represent "long waits" and the thin bars represent "quick thoughts." Design a new, non-commercial idea (e.g., "The Morning Routine," or "The Feeling of Thursday") and express it entirely using only black lines and white spaces using markers or paints.
Sounds Like Itâs Working: The scanned barcode has a distinct sound. Write a short musical score or a rhythmic poem that uses this sound as its base. What does a "joyful" beep sound like? What does a "conflicted" beep sound like? Use rhythm and silence to convey transactional relationships, the exchange, the rapid processing of information.
Your Human Side: Choose a product with a barcode. Write a short piece of fiction about the person whose hands touched this product before it reached the checkout. Focus on the human interaction, effort, or love that the barcode efficiently erases. Give a voice to the shelf stocker, the designer, or the person who packaged the item.
Code Thyself: If your core values or goals were to be expressed as a barcode, what would the code represent? Choose a sequence of numbers (e.g., "47592") and assign one number to a personal trait (4 = "Patience," 7 = "Humor," etc.). Use the visual pattern of a real barcode as a framework, and then write an encoded mission statement for yourself or other cleaver idea you really want to keep to yourself.
The barcode can be so much more for us than just an aid for commerce; it is a part of our culture too, reflective of our fetishization of speed and systemization. While it offers efficiency, it also challenges us to actively seek out and preserve those parts of our creative endeavors that resist simple encodingâthe ambiguity, the emotion, and the profound, slow process of creation.
We cannot abolish the barcode, but we can learn a lesson from its universal adoption. This nudge is an invitation to be intentional about our transitions and transactions. If the machines keep doing more for us and to us, it's our creative duty to produce things and ideas that require a human being to stop, look closely, and feel.
This column was written with the help of Googleâs Gemini Advanced, a powerful generative AI writing tool.
