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. With In The New York Times Magazine: Green Cell
DREAMING IN GREEN:
The value of a hypothetical, maybe even impractical, and unrealistic, product
If something similar had originated in the skunk works of a big company, or even at a start-up angling for venture capital, it most likely wouldn’t get far. But that, in fact, is the point: the nonmarketplace context of hypothetical products frees the designer to leapfrog practical-minded meetings about market share and profit margins and the like and to land at the bigger questions: is this something companies should do — or must do?
Read the column in the April 20, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
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Reader Comments
“..is this something companies should do — or must do? Or maybe even be legislated to do?”
I don’t see why “even” is a necessary modifier here. After a couple of centuries of capitalism and liberal democracies, there’s a pretty clear set of things that the market is good for, and a set of things that government is good for. Among them, and pertinent to this discussion: the market innovates and designs products very well – the government does not do that. Conversely, the government does solves collective action problems well, whereas the market seems mostly to be good at creating collective action problems. This is a case where there’s a clear collective-action problem through which solution the interests of citizens/users/consumers would be extremely well-served. Indeed, only electronics producers would seem to “benefit” from the profusion of different battery standards, but it’s not clear to me why settling on a common standard wouldn’t in fact result in more innovation: see portable memory, where the mostly-standardization of the mini/micro/SD format has led not to a stifling of products but a profusion of them.