Visual Evolution
by Saeed on November 4th, 2010 in Alternate Worlds, Science Fiction
Normally, when we think about the history of a technology, it’s in a straight timeline, and the important points are the first inventions. But this studio is all about how technology doesn’t move in an inevitable straight line. “Progress” is misleading: different groups of people have different desires and interests and make choices about what they want, choices that affect how technologies evolve, just as organisms adapt to their environments.
The challenge of the day was to use visual representations to show the evolution of particular technologies or products under social influences. The music player team originally started with a straightforward timeline that had the original iPod culminating in the latest Nano. But over the course of the day they developed a chart showing how a product line diversified to meet the needs of different groups—kids, businesspeople, athletes, trendsetters—and how not even this was inevitable, as Apple added and removed features as it experimented with what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes what worked was very old: Apple took their inspiration from the Regency TR-1, a small transistor radio that was many decades old.
