alt Hacker NewsI really dislike attitudes like the author's. I think it's great and important that people and companies spend considerable amounts of their time and money exploring the limits of design and what's possible, even if the concepts produced have little direct, practical use today. That kind of speculative R&D can lead to great things and who knows, maybe in 20 years it will lead to something amazing that will benefit a great deal of people.
Trying to pooh-pooh the ideas of tomorrow because they don't immediately solve all the problems of today is just terrible, short-sighted thinking.
And on a more pedantic note, obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all. What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".
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And a crab chair is a pretty good idea honestly. Sure wheels are cheaper and easier, but you can’t go many places with wheels. The crab chair could take you up normal stairs, lift you up to your bed, walk on sand or rough terrain.
> obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all
That is giving too much credit to the myth of consumer agency and free choice in the marketplace.
The truth is more complex than that: while consumers can ask for stuff and demand changes and make stuff happen sometimes, companies will usually be the ones making markets, and creating a brand image, around things that are profitable and realistic for them to make.
I was telling my parents the other day, that probably most cosmetics were started when a trader got 3 cartloads of some industrial chemical that he couldn't unload on the buyers anymore. Like "oh gosh all this powdered lead will go to waste, unless I convince all the patrician Roman women to smear it on their eyelids!!" Or, "subsidized corn gave us so much cornstarch capacity that we need to villainize talc, which was originally a useless byproduct of mining minerals like uranium and gold!"
And it is really true, at least in a minority of documented case studies, because if you go look up the history of Heathkit and the D.I.Y. electronics industry, it turns out that Heathkit was founded when several train cars were loaded with military-surplus electronics parts. And they were assorted parts that couldn't meaningfully be assembled into commercial products, and the seller couldn't unload all this postwar surplus, so the guy owning the cargo came up with the D.I.Y. idea really fast. And he put in work to write educational instruction manuals and make a market to veterans and young men who aspired to a career in electronics and E.E., like my father, (just a hobbyist).
So I believe there are opportunistic elements to market-making and there are ways for companies to sort of "simulate" consumer demand for things we didn't know we wanted. There are things we want that aren't on the market today. There are features we want that aren't in software. Look all around. The products serve the makers, ultimately, and as for consumers, we'll need to do what we're told.
Agreed. Just goes to show that people have no idea how R&D works. You have to build the thing before you can discover if it's possible or not. If no one built stuff like this, you would never get improvements to your existing consumer-grade mobility devices. All breakthroughs look like longshots before they're real.
Could not agree more. Attitudes like the authors are incredibly destructive to society. Essentially all gains to human life satisfaction have come from tech innovation.