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.

The car team focused on the early Ford models. Students were surprised to find that Ford had teamed with Thomas Edison to develop an electric car, the Baker Electric. It could travel 240 miles on a single charge, at over 20mph. It was also much quieter than contemporary gas-powered Fords. For that and other reasons Ford and Edison decided to make it a “woman’s car,” with built-in makeup cases, vases, plush seats and simple steering. The Baker was a commercial failure—but not a technological one. If you’re in LA, you might see Jay Leno driving his around.

The phone team traced the history of the phone, focusing on newer cell phones. Again it was instinctive to think of the iPhone as the culmination of phone technology—but really there are many different kinds of phones in existence and operation, including the iconic Nokias of the late 90s, which were once fashionable but are now the workhorse cellphones for most of the world’s population. They also found many phones that look like curious side-developments now—like a goofy-looking Nokia 3 phone shaped like an angular hockey puck—but were serious contenders for “phone of the future” at the time.

Another team went all the way back to Greek mythology to find the roots of flight. They showed two different trajectories: lighter than air and heavier. They pointed out that blimps, descendants of the zeppelins, are still used today. So are propeller planes, even though they were supposedly “superseded” by jets at the end of World War II. Wars have been very good for the development of airplanes: there’s no substitute for the threat of getting shot down to figure out what kind of a plane you really want.

The computer team also was able to show how different groups and demands for technologies shaped the development of the personal computer, by focusing on Apple. Fashion, features, size, and power have appealed to different groups at different times.