Solving all the wrong problems

Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are they succeeding?

Here is just a sampling of the products, apps and services that have come across on my radar in the last few weeks:

A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas.

A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park your car.

A service that will film anything with a drone.

A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually.

A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three months.

A sensor placed in your child’s nappy that sends you an alert when the diaper needs changing.

An app that lets us brew your coffee from anywhere.

An app to locate rentable driveways for parking.

An app to locate rentable yachts.

We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.

He was joking — sort of — but his comment made me think hard about who is served by this stuff. Too many well-funded entrepreneurial offerings turn out to promise more than they can deliver.

When everything is characterised as “world-changing”, is anything? The impulse to conflate toothbrush delivery with Nobel Prize-worthy good works is not just a bit cultish, it’s currently a wildfire burning through the so-called innovation sector. Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (aka bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C.Z. Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting”.

If the most fundamental definition of design is to solve problems, why are so many people devoting so much energy to solving problems that don’t really exist? How can we get more people to look beyond their own lived experience?

In Design: The Invention of Desire, a thoughtful and necessary new book by designer and theorist Jessica Helfand, the author brings to light an amazing kernel: “hack,” a term so beloved in Silicon Valley that it’s painted on the courtyard of the Facebook campus and is visible from planes flying overhead.

To “hack” is to cut, to gash, to break. It proceeds from the belief that nothing is worth saving, that everything needs fixing. But is that really the case? Are we fixing the right things? Are we breaking the wrong ones?

Missing ingredients

Empathy, humility, compassion, conscience: These are the key ingredients missing in the pursuit of innovation, Helfand argues, and in her book she explores design, and by extension innovation, as an intrinsically human discipline — albeit one that seems to have lost its way. Helfand argues that innovation is now predicated less on creating and more on the undoing of the work of others.

In this way, innovation is very much mirroring the larger public discourse: a distrust of institutions combined with unabashed confidence in one’s own judgment shifts solutions away from fixing, repairing or improving and shoves them toward destruction for its own sake. Perhaps the main reason these frivolous products and services frustrate me is because of their creators’ insistence that changing lives for the better is their reason for being. To wit, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has invested in companies like Airbnb and Twitter, tweeted last week: “The perpetually missing headline: ‘Capitalism worked okay again today and most people in the world got a little better off’.”

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where such companies are based, the income gap between the rich and poor has been growing faster than in any other city in the nation and a minimum salary of $254,000 is required to afford an average-priced home. Who exactly is better off?

Helfand calls for a deeper embrace of personal vigilance: “Design may provide the map, but the moral compass that guides our personal choices resides permanently within us all.”

Can we reset that moral compass? Maybe we can start by not being a bunch of hacks.

— New York Times News Service

Allison Arieff is a writer on architecture and design.