what will pens be like in 100 years?
TRANSCRIPT
What Will pens Be Like in 100 Years?
Pentel, that very famous pen manufacturer, has recently started a campaign called “Save the pen” and in their own words:
“#SaveThePen is a tongue-in-cheek riposte to the notion that, in an age of smart phones and tablets, the importance of the pen is diminished.”
You can see why they’re doing this – pens don’t seem to be held in such regard anymore. As we move more towards texting, messaging and emails, we have lost the art of ending with a flourish.
In fact, when buying pens, we no longer have to check that they “suit us” and that they will sit in our hands for hours on end because, well, we don’t write for hours on end anymore.
I remember in my first office job I had a whole pot of pens to choose from and I’d go through them like crazy. I could never find the correct pen, the one that would sit perfectly in my fingers all day and so when I found one close, I guarded it.
I kept that pen somewhere secret so that nobody could steal it and ruin it with their heavy-handed scrawls. Pens were possessions to be savoured.
Now, we have computers. We bang away at the keyboard for hours on end (usually with just two fingers) and we do most of our communication electronically.
There’s no need for a pen.
For a short time a few years back the pen nearly made a comeback as the tool of choice when writing on electronic tablets. However, technology moved on quickly and now we just use our finger.
So where will we go? Will we even have pens in 100 years’ time? Will the pen be relegated to the museum as an oddity, a relic from a sepia-coloured past that we pine for each Christmas?
In short, I don’t believe so. Pens are still pretty useful implements, the problem is their role has been diminished so much that we only use them occasionally.
For one, I know that my handwriting has deteriorated greatly because I just don’t write that much anymore.
However, they will continue to evolve. Although we’ve got the ergonomics pretty well sorted, we could still see some advances, such as pens that record what you’re writing and stores it electronically.
The Livescribe for example has a camera embedded in it which when paired with special paper can record everything you write or draw. This can then be saved to the cloud, printed as PDF etc.
Other companies are competing to try to find a way of doing this that doesn’t require the paper with the special dot patterns on it, and given a few years you can expect them to get there.
It’s strange that it’s only recently that this has been done, the pen has been pretty much a ubiquitous part of our lives, without much change, for hundreds of years.
Who knows what could come next. All we know is that the pen isn’t dead
quite yet and in fact, it could make a comeback as technology evolves.
