Science Friday - Are Physical Buttons And Knobs Making A Comeback?

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

In recent years, digital touchscreens have replaced many of the buttons and knobs that control various functions in cars. But when Host Ira Flatow went shopping for a new car, he noticed that physical controls seemed to be making a comeback. But will the rise of technologies like voice recognition and automation make cars more button-centric, or less? Ira talks with car ergonomics engineer James Forbes and buttonologist Rachel Plotnick about the advantages and disadvantages of the physical button or knob, and what might lead an automaker to choose one type of control over another.Guests: James Forbes, professor of practice in the department of automotive engineering at Clemson University.Rachel Plotnick, author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing (The MIT Press, 2018).Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey there, it's Ira Flato, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the podcast, why knobs and push buttons are making a comeback on your car's dashboard. Buttons can seem kind of maddeningly simple. Anyone can push them. They're very sort of democratic. But on the other hand, I think there is a tremendous amount of complexity to buttons that we often don't think about. I've been shopping for a new car, no longer wishing to own my current EV. So I've been test driving others. You know what I've noticed? The maddening glass touchscreen, which still annoys me after seven years of driving, is giving way in some newer EVs to buttons.

Yes, actual knobs that turn buttons that click. It is back to the future. Now, I don't expect to see my old push button car radio return, but this is close enough. So why are some car companies turning back from the touchscreen? Does it have anything to do somehow with our brains? liking to connect to that kind of physical movement, the touch, the feel. Well, here to talk about it are a couple of folks who think about these things. James Forbes is a professor of practice in the

Department of Automotive Engineering at Clemson University and was formerly, who I spent many decades with Ford Motor Company. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Rachel Plotnick is an associate professor in the media school at Indiana University in Bloomington, and author of Power Button, history of pleasure, panic, and the politics of pushing. Welcome to Science Friday, Rachel. Thank you. Glad to be here. You're welcome. James, am I right in feeling that there's a trend back towards buttons, or is it just in the cars I'm happening to look at? Well, there's been increasing buzz in the media about it. I think that there's this inherent tension that when you load a vehicle up with tons and tons of features, you end up needing to move away from physical

buttons towards a more reconfigurable touchscreen interface. So I think it depends on the segment of the vehicle you're looking at. I think you'll have some of the high-end EVs will continue to have screens, but scout motors, slate, a couple other new vehicles out there are proposing heavy button interfaces, really. Is it a fashion thing? Or you say it's more than that. It's more ergonomics than just fashion? Well, I would say that ergonomics. There's ample data out there to say the physical controls are better. European regulators would agree with that. And just this learned muscle memory of I reach out, I grab something, I twist it.

I have the haptic feedback to know what I'm doing. That's always going to be less distracting and more certain with the control. The problem is if I have 100 features in the vehicle, then I can't have a physical control for all of them. So if I have to nest the features, then that's where we end up with touchscreens. There are some European countries that have language laws so that if I have a touchscreen, I can translate the controls to the language of your choice. And I can also get away from some of the cryptic symbols that we put on some of the buttons just due to the size.

But in general, I think that ergonomically, it's clear that physical controls are better. Rachel, what is it that people find appealing about buttons? I think there are a lot of things. One aspect is that touchscreens are very flat. and everything feels the same, no matter what kind of a push you make. So I often joke that people will tell me they can't rage poke a touchscreen, right? It always just feels the same. And as James was mentioning, I think that haptic feedback and being able to feel around and have different kinds of textures, touches and pushes is very appealing.

And additionally to that, when we think about a touchscreen, it really is a visual device. And so when we're thinking about cars specifically, what do you need to operate a touchscreen? You need your eyes. And that becomes really problematic on the road. and that it's not just about your fingers. It's really about taking your eyes off of the road. You know, I can relate to that because I remember when I was studying industrial engineering in college, I recall a class about knobs and buttons.

And how important it was to vary the shape and the feel of the buttons so you don't have to take your eyes off the road or the landing strip. And you could feel them with your fingers, right, James? Absolutely. And there's certain very well-established paradigms that if I want to increase temperature, increase volume. It's a very common paradigm to grab something round and twist it clockwise. It's very intuitive, very low mental energy required to do that. And you knew, Rachel, that you could have a button within a button, like, right? Concentric buttons, you knew when

the outside button was for something and the inside button was for something else. Exactly. And I think that speaks to kind of muscle memory that we develop over time, too, that people come to know a car. I mean, we've all had that feeling of getting in a rental car and feeling like a strange in a strange land where you're sort of feeling around trying to figure out the vehicle. But over time, if you get used to that interface, it becomes just kind of second nature. And I think people know, okay, press this twice, press this once, turn this dial, the same way that you go in your bathroom in the dark in the middle of the night, you can feel around without ever turning a light on.

So I think that variation in button, texture, size, pressure, all of those things, you know, really play into a kind of feeling of familiarity with buttons. When you were at Ford, did you spend a lot of time thinking about it? these things, James? Did people get feedback from the customers? We did, yes. And what we found was that it really depends on the specific target customer for a given vehicle. And Ford had quite the range of target customers. If you're an F-150 driver, then you'd value more of a traditional haptic physical interface. So we'd have a lot of hard controls in an F-series. And if you were looking for a more modern, more complex vehicle than maybe like a Ford Machie would rely more on a touchstream.

Rachel, your book is subtitled, A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. What do you mean by all of that? It's a lot of peas. You know, when I wrote the book, I was really interested in the fact that we often tend to talk about buttons in two ways. One, that the pleasure part of it, which is that they tend to be associated with instant gratification and getting whatever we want, whether that's pushing app buttons on our phones or social media or pushing a button to get coffee or turn on your TV. So there's a lot of kind of pleasure

associated with that. Or there's a panic that's commonly thought of about them. You know, think of the self-destruct or the do not push big red button. People are afraid it's going to blow up the world or do something terrible. So I found that there was this really long history of kind of social and cultural ideas about pushing a button and that we've had a lot of anxieties and hopes at the same time about, you know, something that seems on its surface like a very simple technology, but is actually quite complex. Is it something that people intuitively understand or is something that you really need to learn to use? It's a funny dichotomy, I think. On the one hand, you know, my kids are great at pushing buttons, my buttons, and also physical buttons, right?

But, you know, we've all seen children who love to open and close the garage door, press every button on the elevator. So in that sense, buttons can seem kind of maddeningly simple. Anyone can push them. They're very sort of democratic. But on the other hand, I think there is a tremendous amount of complexity to buttons that we often don't think about, you know, think about operating a cockpit of an airplane or DJs who are playing digital music or having to know the right codes to operate something. So I do think that we tend to talk about buttons in a way that's overly simplistic because we've all had that moment of feeling, I don't know which button to push or I don't know what this button does, and that can be really frustrating as well.

You know what I have noticed? You talked about elevators, Rachel. I have not seen a glass button in an elevator yet. Yeah, I think what's started to happen, there have been some elevators where they're doing basically a control panel on the outside of the elevator, and you'll call your floor, you know, basically queues up a lot of people outside the elevator, and then you'll get in that elevator, it won't have any buttons at all. You'll just be inside an empty steel box.

and reports that I've seen have suggested, people get very anxious about that because there's this feeling of loss of agency. Oh my gosh, I'm in this box and I can't control it. But I haven't seen much of a move toward touchscreens and elevators. I think you're right. Yeah, I'm thinking that people really want that tactile feel of that button press. It seems to be something that people really relate to. And in all the work I've done and all the interviews I've given, it's amazing how many people will write to me and say, I'm so excited to hear that they're bringing back buttons, right? That seems to be a very common sentiment. James, you touched on this earlier. How much do car makers know about the usability of touchscreens versus other kinds of controls? They keep in close track of this? Yeah, there's a lot of literature out there that you useability of touchscreens and physical controls. There's technical papers. There's in Europe, there's a European new car assessment program that's an industry trade group that has

done a lot of their own research. They're now specifying that vehicles must have hard controls for certain features. And again, that's not regulatory, but it's near regulatory if you want a good score on your Euroincap test. And then, of course, we now have in some of our modern cars voice commands that sometimes work, right? Rachel, do you think that people are going to fight back against voice commands? They still want these buttons to touch? That's a good question. I think I see a mixture you know, increasingly voice technologies have taken hold on our phones and Alexa, Siri, things like that. So it's becoming a more common technology, but there are plenty of instances that show it's just not the best way to do things. We especially run into problems when we're thinking about people's accents or if you have a stutter or you don't want to have to speak out loud for a particular reason.

So to me, it's always a mix of controls. You know, I always say to people, I'm not a button evangelist per se, right? I don't romanticize the button as being the right solution for all things. I think it is very context dependent, as James mentioned. And I think, you know, my guess is that we're always going to see buttons playing a role in some kind of controls, even though people have been imagining the death of the button for the past couple of decades. James, there's an idea called cognitive load, sort of how much thought effort it takes to do something. Sure.

Where are buttons and dials on the cognitive load scale? Well, because you learn a behavior and you have the tactile feedback, it's, is a very low cognitive load for a physical button. Whereas if you have a reconfigurable touchscreen, then the first thing you have to do is figure out where you are, and then you have to figure out where you want to be, and then you have to get to that new screen. So that's a higher cognitive load. So if there's research saying that a knobber button is more usable, it's easier to deal with

mentally, why do manufacturer still try the screens? I mean, they know this, right? Yeah, I think it's that there are a lot of consumers that want more. and more content in the vehicle. And at some point, you get to the, you just run out of real estate for buttons. So you need this reconfigurable screen. And like I said, that you can change the language.

You can change the layout of the screen. You can have over-the-air updates. You can do a lot of, there are some nice things with screens theoretically at least. However, you can imagine if you're going to a big interview and you get in your car in the morning and they've decided to reconfigure all your screens, you're probably not very happy because you're stressed out already.

We have to take a quick break, but don't go away. More on this when we come back. Rachel, is it possible to go back in history and to decide where the first button was? I spent so much time to answer that question. I really wanted to get to that answer. Did you? I never quite got there. I was all the way deep down into belly buttons and clothing buttons.

And, you know, I never got quite to that very first button that was ever pushed. But we do see, you know, starting in the late 1800s around electrification and industrialization, but that's when the idea of pushing a button and completing an electrical circuit became common. So some of the earliest buttons involved doorbells, ringing a bell for a servant. And then a little bit later thinking about elevators and camera buttons and some of the buttons that we're still very familiar with today. So I wish I could give you a great answer on that. But I do think that the association between electricity and buttons became important in that now

we're thinking about, you know, electricity. People talked of it as this kind of servant that was going to do magical things, which was probably pretty overblown. But we can think of all the conveniences associated with pushing a button and getting what we want today. So those hopes, even back then, I think, were pretty founded in where we are today. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, we're talking about physical control buttons in cars and other places.

Is this an accessibility issue? I mean, are physical controls better for an aging population or people with disabilities? I think James may have a better answer than me, but I do think it does depend a lot, again, on the specific users and depending on disabilities or impairments that a person is facing. In one of my classes, we were learning about video game controls and how a lot of buttons are unpressable for people who don't have full use of their hands or only use of one hand. But obviously different kinds of visual impairments or other things may require different solutions. So it doesn't seem like there's ever going to be a one-size-fits-all interface. You really do need that kind of configurability. Yeah, and I think that with age can come peripheral neuropathy

and things that make interacting with the touchscreen a little more difficult. It's a little easier to grab something physically and twist it or push it. So, Rachel, James, you don't ever think we're never going to see a button. They're not really ever going away, are they? Well, I think that the greatest threat to physical controls may be automated. right? So for instance, there are some car makers that would put the wind shoe wiper controls in the touchscreen. And that would be fine if the wipers worked completely automatically. And whenever you needed them to wipe, they would wipe. And whenever you didn't want them to wipe, they wouldn't. But in reality, we don't have the automation down quite to that level yet. So you'll go through a car wash. You'll do things and you'll want to turn, you'll want to override the automation.

Yeah, my wipers like to go on even when it's not raining every now and then. Right. And I think that's, you know, an interesting facet, too, as we see artificial intelligence and automation coming to cars, that one thing I've noticed is that people in some ways might become even hungrier for buttons to that point of, I want that agency. Hey, if I'm going to let this car drive me around, then you better believe I want some big red button. I can push to stop the car if I want to. And so there may actually be this kind of paradoxical effect where buttons will become even more important as we become.

more reliant on these automated features. James, is there a car ergonomics decision you just don't get? Something you wish you could change. Boy, it's because the lineup of vehicles within any manufacturer is so broad, we win some battles, we lose other battles. So I don't know if you can categorically say there's a decision that we always lose and we want to win. But I do definitely see the trend towards more of a nostalgic or more of a traditional, more of a driving experience type vehicle that would be focused more on hard controls. And I think that would be positive ergonomically. There does seem to be this very interesting kind of pendulum swing in terms of what is fashionable over time. And I think you're absolutely right that nostalgia is a big factor right now,

return to these kind of older materials. And it's funny with cars, you know, buttons have been super in vogue, you know, following World War II, the 1950s and 60s. push-button start was the coolest thing you could have, and then that totally died out and fell out of fashion. And, you know, we moved to this kind of touchscreen mania in the early 2000s. So I do think beyond function, there are these kind of aesthetic and generational things that happen that make different interfaces seem really either very attractive or very out of style. Thank you, Rachel, Rachel Plotnick, Associate Professor in the Media School at Indiana University in Bloomington, author of...

Power Button, a history of pleasure, panic, and the politics of pushing. Also, James, thank you for taking time to be with us today. It was a pleasure. Thank you. James Forbes is a professor of practice in the Department of Automotive Engineering at Clemson University and formerly with Ford Motor Company. Hey, Flora here with a little addendum to this hot button conversation. I have senior producer Charles Berkwest with me who produced this segment. Hey, Flora. Hey, Charles. So we were wondering, you know, And with the amount of tech in our lives just constantly increasing, is the humble button coming back. So we asked our listeners about the button that they just could not do without, and the phones lit up.

Yes, we had some diehard button stands call in. Hey, my name is Sam. I'm calling from Brooklyn, New York. I've always been a supporter of the button. I've never supported the touchscreen. In fact, I'm calling you right now on a BlackBerry built in the year 2017. It still works fine. There is a lot of love for the usual button suspects. Joe Roberts from Virginia Beach.

The button that makes my life easier, the little button on top of the Nisrest. You know what else was big remote buttons? The button I can't do without is the button on my fire stick, where I can just say, play White Lotus. I have no idea what streaming service anything's on anymore. because they just plays. And then there were some buttons I've never had the pleasure of pushing. Hi, this is Kate Malmborg in Chappach, Rhode Island.

And the button I could not do away with is the red horn button on my cabota tractor. It makes the most delightful sound, and it's very satisfying to push that button when you're trying to get someone's attention. Yeah, so do you have a favorite button, Flora? It's so hard to choose. You know, radio studios are still so tactile that it's. I think some of my favorite buttons live in the radio studio. The cough button, the talk to you button that we have, they light up when you press them, too. So it feels like a full sensory experience.

What about you? Yeah, I mean, it's also a studio button. I really like the start, stop button on the studio timer. There's something really satisfying about pushing it and seeing the numbers immediately start counting up or down. And it also makes a good little click. Absolutely. On that note, we're out of time. Thank you to everyone who called.

We loved hearing from you. And now hit that music button. That's about all the time we have for now. A lot of people help make this show happen. Shoshana Buxbaum. Beth Rami. Danielle Johnson. Jackie Hirschfeld.

I'm Ira Flato. Thanks for listening.