Think of the crackberry crowd, and the obsessive gear personalization that goes on in that scene.  Those people don’t all start out thinking that they want their cell phone to run their blenders and light schedule in their fish tanks…they start out wanting a case for it, or a belt clip, but the ones with underlying aptitude or interest get sucked much deeper into the scene than they intended.

Maybe another vector of attack on the pervasive “magic box” consumer mentality is staring us all in the face.  Perhaps we need to start with the outside of the machine, skins, clips, etc.  Take the blandest widget you can find and put it into something ridiculous, like the million dollar diamond encrusted cellphone.  In practice it’s a stupid object, clearly, but so are the vast majority of protective skins for phones…they’re not water proof or shock proof, provide no value other than aesthetic, but they get people (at least the ones with the aptitude) to start thinking. 

Anyway, just rambling.

Cheers,

-aboniks

There's nothing wrong with wanting to have money to do the things you want, but greed's a step beyond that. It's accumulation for accumulation's sake, with no care for effects on others. The meme that greed is virtuous is peculiarly western and wrong, IMGO. It's important, though, to note that I'm talking about the extreme, not the moderate sort of desire for money. Capitalism works wonderfully as a means for distributing wealth efficiently, but it fails when a greedy minority manipulate the vulnerabilities of the technological and sociological context in which it operates in order to concentrate that wealth in their own hands.

As for the designers motivated by money and other people supported by instituations derived from incentivized innovation, I think you missed my point in the first paragraph about there being a balance. Economic incentives definitely spur innovation, and that is a good thing, for the reasons you list, and more. I'm not talking about that – I'm talking about abusive corporatism, which is distinctly different from capitalism. Incidentally, an open marketplace is far more competitive and offers far more diverse opportunities than a closed one, so if you agree that innovation is a good thing, you're either automatically agreeing with the open position or doubting one of the premisses.

It sounds like you're misreading me as a hippie of some kind, which I'm definitely not :)

So what happens to the designers that are motivated by the tangible rewards of the market? What happens to the non-designers that also receive the tangible rewards of the market… the fellow working in the Apple Store, the shipping clerk, the folks in marketing? What about Justin Long?