Design in Society

I am going to go out on a limb and state that the camera is the most Utopian designed object of the modern era.  The camera has been designed to create better and better images of everyday life, capturing everything from the snapshot to the extraordinary landscape in places most humans will never explore.  Cameras have been redesigned so many times and improved upon all the way back from the box camera to digital cameras such as the impressive Hassleblad H3DII-50 shown here.

The camera is such a Utopian design because of its ability to precisely capture everything in it's entirety.  Before cameras were around, painting was the most common form of reproducing what we saw.  The biggest problem with painting was that painters often did not have a Gestalt approach to what they painted and instead of painting a frame of literally what the saw exactly how they saw it, they painted it how they wished.  For example, if they were painting a portrait of a king, they would sit him in a chair and paint him, not him with an ugly background of what was around him.  This difference in the camera forced pictures to capture everything in its reality, even the wrinkles on your aging leathery face or your crooked decaying teeth or your weary look as you sit painfully in your chair.  Photography in this way made the camera into a weapon of sorts.  It could capture a true feeling and eventually would become a force, both in politics and society alike.  

Now with the number of cameras we have in todays world, people are ever more concerned with their image.  We must be ready at all times to have our image captured whether it is just by the passerby sneaking a peak with his camera phone, or the surveillance cameras stealing our personalities and watching our every move, ready to criticize.  If this object can push us to forever strive to become more and more perfect, whether this is or isn't a true perfection we are reaching, how can we not call it the most Utopian design?