Feedback already defines the world we live in today. For example, we tend to assume that the internet's great revolution was connecting people. That's partly true. But consider the birth of buyer/seller feedback. eBay was an unknown startup until it rolled out a feature in which buyers and sellers could rate one another. Today, buyer/seller feedback is what has made us comfortable with the online economy-from buying products that we've never seen before on Amazon to staying in the homes of people we've never met, through Airbnb. In a previous era, we used brands to create trust-when you saw a toothpaste stamped with Colgate, you knew it was the product of a big, stable company whose long-term success depended on good products. Today, we have feedback from people who've tried out something we might like, even
But when those references gel in just the right way, a product can become iconic, able to represent not only its own histories but others.
In the user-friendly world, beauty is a tool that transforms something that's easy to use into something we want to use. Beauty pulls us in and makes us want to touch something, to own it, then use it. But beauty works associatively, necessarily referencing what we've found beautiful elsewhere.
People will usually tell you what they want, but not what they need.
The most important problems to solve were those that weren't being expressed. The most important questions to ask were those that people never thought to ask themselves.