Need For Needs

There’s a saying that when the heavens want to punish us, they give us what we want. As you may have begun to imagine, organisations and societies of the future are well advised to focus their energies on meeting shared human needs over supporting a selfish expression of individual wants. Needs unite humanity, whereas wants convince us that such unity is illusionary. Disagree as you may, I have yet to meet a sizeable number of people who attained happiness by pursuing their every want; but I personally have experienced the liberation of reflecting on the often simple human needs that make us human. In Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek diagnoses the modern world (at the time of writing, this meant 1970s America) with an unhealthy obsession for concentrating industrial-economic resources on making the superfluous look pretty. Designing for the 1% as opposed to solving real-world problems and extending the benefits of solutions to the remaining 99% was already an issue a half century ago. Technology innovation has made many everyday luxuries (such as air travel) dramatically more affordable since, but the observations still hold in principle…