Some of the best designed objects get better over time: antique furniture, a leather briefcase, jeans. There is something about the human touch that tells a story, how it was used, and what was important. But in the digital age, everything is in ones and zeros; it never fades.

It may seem obvious, but this physical vs digital juxtaposition had never struck me until watching Objectified, a documentary about design. The film features Jonathan Ive, Tim Brown (and a bunch of other people from IDEO), Karim Rashid, and a several others. I thought it was great, but it was all about the physical space, things you could actually touch.

And this thought goes beyond product design. If you’ve ever played an old record, or read a birthday card from a deceased grandparent, you know what I’m talking about. It tells a story. You can hear someones voice through their handwriting, something that doesn’t translate quite as well with helvetica.

In some ways this is great. We can easily archive every picture we take and every song we download. We can hold on to files and back them up on hard drives. I’m sitting next to two external drives that contain most of the last twelve years of my life. If there was a fire, I’d probably grab them, knowing that every bit of data was stored just the way I left it.

Perhaps the problem is that it lacks the element or idea of time. Music today will never need to be remastered, photos won’t need to be restored. Nothing requires extra care to preserve. It all gets filed away in a catalogue of memories that is stored on a disk or drive we trust to keep our data safe.

So my question is, how can we design the digital space so that content created today can wear better over time? So that it becomes more special as it spends time living on the internet. Is the human touch simply a list of comments and responses from our friends? Or is there something more we can do?

I’m just thinking that 40 years from now, I will have amassed so much personal content that it might be overwhelming, and I don’t think I’ll be satisfied with some sort of infographic to look back on life.