There is a curve in your pocket right now.
Run your thumb along the edge of your phone and you will feel it: the slight roundness at the corners, the gentle taper where the glass meets the frame, the way the whole object seems to have been shaped less by engineering than by seduction.
Nobody had to tell you to like it. You just do.
A professor at Coventry University once handed me a title and left me to wrestle with it: The Sexiness of Technology.
She had noticed something in passing, an observation about design and desire.
I took the thought further than she intended, and it has stayed with me since, resurfacing every time I hold a new device, sit in a new car, or watch a machine try to convince me it is alive.
The Slickness We Did Not Ask For
Look closely at the objects that surround modern life and a pattern emerges. The sharp edges have been sanded away.
The right angles have softened into arcs. What used to be boxy and utilitarian, a radio, a computer, a kettle, has been groomed into something smoother, glossier, more yielding to the eye.
This is not decoration. It is a language, and the language is unmistakably erotic.
Psychologists have spent a century confirming what artists and designers already knew by instinct: human beings, across cultures, across age groups, even across species closely related to us, prefer curved forms to angular ones. Infants only months old already reach for the rounded shape over the sharp one.
The preference is not trained into us by advertising. It is closer to the bone than that, wired into how we assess safety, comfort, and pleasure before we have words for any of it.
But safety is only half the story, and it is the smaller half.
A curve does not merely tell the body it will not be cut. It tells the body something older and warmer: that it resembles the shapes the body already knows and already loves.
The hip, the shoulder, the small of the back. French curves are not called that by accident. Long before they described the sweep of a car door or the shell of a smartphone, they described the outline of a woman’s form, borrowed by draftsmen because it was already understood as the standard for beauty made visible.
When a designer softens a corner today, they are, whether they know it or not, quoting that older vocabulary.
Function Wearing the Costume of Desire
I want to be careful here, because there is a genuine engineering case for the curve, and it deserves its own investigation elsewhere.
Rounded edges reduce stress concentration in materials, which is part of why they resist cracking and last longer under strain.
Aerodynamics rewards the smooth line over the jagged one, which is why an aircraft, a bullet train, and a sports car all converge on similar silhouettes despite having nothing else in common.
Function has its own reasons for the curve.
But function alone cannot explain why so much of contemporary design goes further than function requires.
It cannot explain why a company will spend a fortune shaving a millimetre of unnecessary roundness into a device that would have worked identically without it.
Somewhere past the point of structural necessity, the curve stops being an engineering decision and becomes a courtship. The technology is not just working. It is flirting.
This is the sleight of hand of modern branding. The old style of selling desire was blunt: undress the product, or undress someone standing next to it, and let the association do the work.
The newer style is quieter and, I would argue, more effective, because it does not ask you to notice it at all. Symmetry does the work skin used to do. Groove replaces flesh.
The brands fluent in this language do not need to show you a body. They have built the body into the object itself, and you respond to it the same way you would respond to a person walking into a room with good posture and a warm smile.
You cannot always say why you are drawn. You just are.
When the Object Starts to Feel Like a Someone
The story does not end at the surface. Underneath the aesthetic argument sits a psychological one, and it is stranger than the shape of a phone case.
Research into what scholars now call techno-affection, the emotional bonding humans form with their digital devices, shows that people increasingly relate to their phones the way they once related to companions rather than tools.
Studies on smartphone anthropomorphism find that the more a device is perceived to carry human-like qualities, the more likely its owner is to develop dependence and genuine emotional attachment toward it, sometimes as compensation for loneliness, sometimes simply because the device has become fluent in reading and mirroring its owner back to themselves.
This is not a fringe finding. It shows up across cultures, across age groups, in populations as different as lonely university students and adults with anxious attachment styles who form disproportionately strong bonds with the devices in their hands.
We are, in other words, already living downstream of the sexiness of technology, and the current has been moving in one direction for some time.
First we made devices smooth so the eye would love them.
Then we made devices responsive so the mind would trust them. Now we are making devices humanlike so the heart will attach to them.
The robot in the research lab and the assistant in your phone are two points on the same line. We did not simply humanize the machine.
We built machines capable of receiving the affection we once reserved only for people, and in doing so, we opened a door that will be very difficult to close again.
The Cybertruck Interruption
Every rule invites its rebellion, and the Tesla Cybertruck is the clearest recent one.
It arrived built entirely of flat planes and hard angles, a direct refusal of the sleekness that had become the unspoken uniform of every serious piece of modern technology.
Whatever one thinks of the vehicle, its design was an argument. It said that dominance and disruption could be expressed through the very angularity that decades of design consensus had trained us to reject.
That the vehicle still provoked such strong reaction, admiration from some, discomfort from others, tells you the curve had become a norm strong enough to be worth breaking.
You do not get a counter-cultural gesture unless there was a culture firmly in place to counter.
The Cybertruck did not disprove the sexiness of technology. It confirmed how deeply that sexiness had settled into expectation, deep enough that its absence felt like a provocation rather than a neutral choice.
Beyond the Body, Into the Signal
Push the thought further, toward the spacecraft on the drawing board and the robots we are still teaching to walk among us, and the pattern holds its shape even off the earth.
Whatever we build to represent our furthest reach still tends to arrive dressed in the same smooth, symmetrical, almost bodily language we gave the phone in your pocket.
It seems we cannot build an ambitious future without first giving it a familiar and desirable form.
And this, finally, is the door the sexiness of technology has quietly opened.
Once an object can be found attractive, once it can be bonded with, once it can be trusted with the kind of intimacy we once reserved for other people, the line between tool and companion begins to blur in ways our institutions and our language have not yet caught up with.
The digital transactions of affection, attention, and identity now moving through our devices are not a strange new appendage to human life.
They are the logical continuation of a design philosophy that has, for decades, been quietly teaching the eye and the hand to desire the machine before the mind was ever asked to consent.
I wrote once, in The Phantom Limb, about the way a device becomes an extension of the self, so integrated into daily motion and identity that its absence is felt the way an amputee feels a limb no longer there.
The sexiness of technology is the other half of that same observation. We did not just extend ourselves into our devices. We made sure, at every curve and every gloss, that we would want to.
Nia’Bari Fakae
www.fabadora.com