The German-born American philosopher Albert Borgmann (1937-2023) described two contrasting phenomena: devices and focal things that were based on Martin Heidegger’s concept of Gestell (or enframing as it is known in English).
Borgmann uses an old hearth as an example of a focal thing. A hearth is designed to heat a building, but it also functions as a place for people to gather – to focus their energy and attention. In contrast, the technology of central heating warms a building and then … nothing. This is the device paradigm in which the mechanism for the delivery of a commodity (in this case heat) is hidden.
The other thing about focal things is that Borgmann suggests they are a burden and take effort. Yet focal things are also practices that give meaning to our lives, and that when developed in scale, become the basis of community and community celebration. Here’s the technology writer L. M. Sarcasas:
Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design. “The experience of a [focal] thing,” Borgmann also notes, “is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.” There are, in other words, embodied and communal dimensions to the use of a focal thing. They involve our bodies, and they involve us in relationships to a degree that devices do not.
I understand this place – that at this moment we are calling Abà – to be a focal thing. It demands something of us and in doing so we become part of its world.