From the Samsung Frame to transparent screens, Americans are embracing 'disguised' TVs
Screens "have become home infrastructure, like pipes or cables,” one expert said. That's popularized a new generation of TVs that don't look like televisions.
Living room designs of the past 60 years have revolved around one sacrosanct, inalienable axis: the centrality of the television screen — the biggest and brightest one you can get.
That one thing you must remember, or nothing that follows will seem wondrous. For at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, several manufacturers debuted TVs designed to blend peaceably with their backgrounds: two transparent televisions, from Samsung and LG, plus a bevy of new high-res projectors, plus off-brand copycats of the Samsung Frame, which disguises your TV as a wall-mounted picture.
These TVs, to be clear, are one defiant speck in a culture that still loves giant, obtrusive screens. Since the late ‘90s, the size of the average American TV has more than doubled, hogging as much as eight square feet of wall space in its most egregious varieties. Our televisions are a status symbol — a pastime — even a personality. (Think of the man in your life with the biggest television, and you’ll know exactly what I mean.)
And yet, demand for these TVs-that-don’t-look-like-TVs also continues unabated. In January, an executive at Samsung told Fast Company that the runaway success of its Frame TV is prompting the company to expand into other disguised products. You can now purchase smart speakers that look like lamps and MacBook cases that look like books. Pricey laptops and speakers historically signaled your taste and savvy and financial success … but now some portion of their buyers actually hope to hide them.
Intrigued, I put that apparent paradox to the researcher Paul Coulton, the chair of Speculative and Game Design at Lancaster University in the U.K. Coulton has, among other interesting projects, worked on efforts to imagine how future living rooms will incorporate technology.
“Screens and internet, etc., have become home infrastructure like pipes or cables,” he told me via email. “And therefore, as with those, there is a tendency to want them to disappear so we focus on [the] task, not the toll.”
This is fascinating to me, and not only because I own a Frame TV myself. At the time, we justified the purchase because our 110-year-old living room did not include a continuous blank wall appropriate for hanging a normal television. (For more on how the advent of the TV changed home design, check out this blog post by a Seattle-based architect.)
But yeah, also, as screens have become endemic around my house and on my person, I have perhaps felt a desire to see fewer of them. For me — and I suspect, for many others — that desire only deepened in the pandemic. Suddenly, we had even more time on our screens. And suddenly, our living rooms had to multitask: The TV room now doubled (or tripled) as a classroom, a home gym, a workshop, an office.
Predictably, a lot of people bought new TVs during the pandemic. And a lot of people bought Frame TVs, in particular: Samsung sold 1 million of them in the first 11 months of 2021 — more than it had sold in total in the four years prior.
Where will this trend toward hidden tech take us next? These sorts of predictions never age well. (Though I will note that Disney’s famous “House of the Future” did include a flat, wall-mounted TV that looked a bit like an art item.) In 2018, Coulton and a team of other researchers mocked up an immersive living room of the future, in which even mundane objects (a coaster, window blinds, a coffee table) connected to the internet and customized the program playing on a (large, not-at-all-hidden) television.
A similar thought experiment the next year by researchers in Greece hypothesized that many home surfaces — walls, coffee tables — will one day become screens, as well. It’s enough to make you wonder if we’re truly disguising our screens as analog objects … or normalizing the “screenification” of everything else.
I’m not worried about that yet, though. I love my Frame TV. That said, I feel no compulsion whatsoever to upgrade beyond my 50-inch screen.
Caitlin Dewey is a reporter and essayist based in Buffalo, N.Y. She was the first digital culture critic at the Washington Post and has hired fake boyfriends, mucked out cow barns and braved online mobs in pursuit of stories for outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Cut, Elle, Slate and Cosmopolitan.