Reading Response #2

to Artful Design • Chapter 2: “Designing Expressive Toys”

Huijun Mao

Oct 3, 2026

Music 256A / CS 476a, Stanford University

Reading Response#2: More than Technology

From this week’s reading, I’d like to respond to Artful Design Principle 2.5, which states:

Principle 2.5: Design with technology to transcend technology

Before diving into design, I want to say: of all the people I might have expected to see in this book, Guolun Huang was certainly not one of them! Having been a big fan of Taiwanese singers and TV shows, Guolun is one of those faces that feel instantly familiar to me and seeing him in an academic textbook was quite a surprise. 

Before reading this chapter, my understanding of design is to create something pretty and playful. When I read about the examples of Sonic Lighter and Ocarina, my first thought was yeah, these things certainly fit into the definition of design we learned in this book: surprising, useless, but fun. Both apps have used modern technology to reimagine physical objects in digital forms. The digital lighter simulates everything about the physical lighter, including the sound, the form, and how it reacts to outside disturbances, with only the fact that it can’t light anything aflame as a physical lighter. I really love the irony at play for this design as it’s so real and so faithful to the original object, but ignore the single most important function the lighter exists for. The Ocarina also strikes me initially as a very intricate design to recreate a traditional musical instrument using the phone itself through computer music technology. Both creations internalize something from their old forms while bringing in new innovations enabled by the digital technology to foster a completely different experience for the users.

However, design is not just that. I realized design doesn’t stop at the invention of an interesting toy that people can use and have fun with. Both the Sonic Lighter and Ocarina go into directions that are more profound, that they are not merely standalone toys for individual enjoyment; these apps carry a global, social dimension aiming at connecting users around the world. At first, it might feel foolish to even think towards that direction because why would we want to connect users who are playing with just a digital lighter? Would users even be interested in that, just to know who else in the world is using the useless lighter?

However, reading about the stories with both apps becomes an eye-opening experience for me. With Sonic Lighter, users can track the number and locations of ignitions around the world. It becomes a global ignition map. One user even used their tracks to send messages. With Ocarina, users will be able to see and hear music generated by other users at a different time in a different space. Technology is just the medium here to transcend time and space.

I think the message rooted in this design principle is that we can use technology to do great design, but those designs are not technology. The Sonic Lighter and Ocarina are not just fancy computer music apps that people can play with, they carry “something human that isn’t about technology at all.” Indeed, technology has influenced the way we experience music by shifting the medium, types, or our interactions with music, but without design, we won’t be able to generate this universal feeling that “makes you feel lonely and connected at the same time,” as quoted in the book.

Thus, we want to design for play and delight but we shouldn’t just stop there. We should always ask what’s more, what are something human we can do with this toy, thus moving forward to pursuing something more profound and fundamental in human experience—the sublime.