How the Walkman made us who we are and why we need to redesign desires beyond tech
Do you remember the futures that shaped the contemporary smartphone-driven culture and corporate mindsets back in the 80s ? 🎧 The ‘revolution’ didn’t start in the streets but instead in a first-class cabin…
With more than 400 million units sold, the almost 40-year old Walkman changed our relationship with technology forever. The solitary concept of private portable personal music shaped the era of personal computers which then evolved into the smartphone revolution, reached billions. Today there are not only more smartphones than people, but also more humans have access to smartphones than to running water, as this report claims.
According to Sony’s corporate tale, the Walkman idea comes from co-founder Masaru Ibuka’s desire to be able to carry his favorite music with him on airplanes, an early manifestation of the influential narcissism of the 80s. By fostering isolation and creating an oasis of privacy in public spaces, the Walkman bred the contemporary and paradoxical desire of tech-driven bubbles where we can be ‘alone, together’.
On an environmental scale, the built-in obsolescence of most consumer-tech has a devastating impact on the planet as more than 20 million tonnes of e-waste is produced every year, according to iFixit. But unfortunately the unintended consequences of the growing scale of our market-driven desires are not limited to consumer technology.
Let’s think about fashion, food or sex where we are dealing today with the social, ecological and political consequences of fast-fashion, fast-food and porn. By understanding humans only as consumers, most corporations are not only abstracting away the moral complexity of buying cheap clothes, eating animals or ignoring how most kids get their sex education. They are also actively designing desires at scale without ethical layers leading to the unsustainable, unhealthy and toxic narratives that led us to give power to people like Trump or Weinstein.
This is why the innovation approach of ‘human-centered design’, the philosophy behind most products in the market today, needs to be questioned, subverted and above all decentralized. This anthropocentric way of solving problems has been great to address market needs, but fails to deal with the complexity of environmental needs, because it comes from a selfish mindset where the human is the center of everything and where everything should be easy to use, convenient and intuitive, at any cost and as fast as possible.
This is often achieved through rapid prototyping and agile approaches, oversimplifying and perpetuating the savage cycle of consumption and waste. The final products, consumed in an unconscious way due to their false simplicity, end up reflecting our market-driven desires rather than our actual needs, having a long term impact not only on billions of humans but also on the planet.
Moving beyond the idea of putting the ‘human/consumer’ as the center of everything else, which is not only deeply political but also anti-ecological, is not only an epic challenge for business but also a fascinating opportunity to rethink, redesign and reinvent how everything works. One clear example is how the diverse implementations of blockchain, and its embedded decentralised philosophies, are already opening new perspectives across categories, from banking and supply-chain management to governance and healthcare.
Even Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo (and probably the most influential advocate of human-centered design) has been promoting circular design as an imperative alternative, shifting from the isolation of solitary user experiences to embracing the complexity of interconnected systems, where context is king and the simplicity of linear approaches becomes obsolete.
By redesigning the desires linked to the devices we use every day to how we dress, the food we eat and the power narratives embedded in the porn industry, we can start looking at the issues of scale, addressing the emerging ethical questions and implications of understanding that beyond physical and mental borders the planet is our shared home, not just a source of capital.
The time is now to go beyond the polarizing ethical dualism of “us” (consumers) and “them” (corporations) and foster a collective empowerment and shared understanding that protects us from letting selfish desires shape our futures. There is hope in the generational shift happening across industries as emerging transdisciplinary leaders and holistic thinkers raised in the internet age are gaining seniority in companies, schools and institutions, while embedding the planetary consciousness that social, human and technological networks enable. A set of interconnected mindsets that are not compatible with a narrow, centralized and singular design ideology.
Take off your headphones and as Kanye said once: “listen to the kids, bro”. The answers have been there all along. We just have not been listening.
—
Learn more about the ideas behind and beyond ‘The Subversion of Paradoxes’ in Barcelona during IAM Weekend 18 (April 27–29, 2018)
