Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes smartphones and the like only come in one color. There is more to adding colors than meets the eye.

I used to work for an organization that built little gadgets. Every little gadget came in the same color: black.

One year I worked on a project where I thought I was going to change the color of the gadget. In this case, I was powerless. This gadget ran hot — literally hot. You could boil water on its surface. The black coating pulled the heat from the gadget and radiated it to the atmosphere better than any other color of coating.

It was black for a technical reason.

I don’t work inside the companies that make tablets and smartphones and all of today’s wondrous consumer gadgets. I would like to see them all offered in a rainbow of colors. Perhaps there is a technical reason why they are not.