A little bit of naivety is a good thing

When the video for Phonebloks, a concept for a modular smart phone, appeared on the web last week, a lot of people got very excited about it,turning the idea and the video into one of the most talked about things in recent times; and by recent times I mean in the last few days.

Not everyone liked it though. Eventually people who really know about such things – industrial designers and the like – relayed why it wasn’t such a great idea and how it would actually be more costly and ironically waste much more of the earth’s resources than conventional smart phones would. That’s not to mention the technical challenges of getting all these things to work together in a way we’ve all become used to, or at least expect.

But none of that actually matters.

Well OK, yes it matters if you’re trying to make it, but this was a concept, a design fiction, something that would cause a disruption and spark debate and maybe get people to look at things in a different way, born from a lovely thing called naivety.

I’m a big fan of a bit of naivety. With naivety you have no idea of “how things are meant to be” or constrained by what has gone before. From naivety new things can spring forth. Yes those things might be completely rediculous, stupid, impractical and impossible. Or occasionally they might just make people go “you know what, I think there’s something in that”. It’s then at that point you bring in the experts, the crafts people and you work hard to learn new things, realise the flaws, find workarounds but eventually make and ship that new thing, a thing that was only possible because in the beginning you didn’t know any different.