Heidegger was an early product thinker
I am watching Hubert Dreyfus’s lecture on Heidegger and Being and Time, where he describes two modes of being for objects.
1. Readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit): When tools are ready-to-hand, they smoothly integrate into our actions, and our focus rests on the task rather than the object.
2. Presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit): When something ready-to-hand breaks or malfunctions, it shifts into presence-at-hand. Our attention moves to the object’s physical properties rather than its use in context.
Dreyfus illustrates this with a hammer. Focusing on its material, shape, color, and other attributes is to take an interest in its presence-at-hand. Whereas thinking about the nail, the wood, the task, the carpenter, and the wider practice is to consider its readiness-to-hand.
This way of looking at tools is especially important for product designers, as we also aim to design tools that become transparent—allowing people to enter a state of flow. We don’t want the tool to malfunction and disrupt the flow by becoming the center of attention.
Similarly, when marketing a tool, this distinction becomes important. Speaking about features foregrounds the tool's presence-at-hand properties, whereas speaking about jobs to be done highlights its readiness-to-hand qualities and the environment it naturally fits into. Modern marketing often prefers the latter.
