NEED FOR NEEDS

Philipp Kristian Diekhöner

Chapter 11 in RESET:Rethinking Our World and Creating a Different Future, 2021, pp 143-151 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: 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…

Keywords: Innovation; Future of Work; Future; Futurism; Trends; Transformation; Corporate Innovation; Digital Transformation; Trust Economy; Sharing Economy; Deep Technology; Future Economy; Startups; Digital Trust; Digital Economy; Digitisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G34 L2 L26 M1 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789811227554_0011 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811227554_0011 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789811227554_0011

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().