In 2005 everyone in the interaction design world knew phones were garbage. Remember scrolling through a 4-line screen? I was in design school at the time and w

In 2005 everyone in the interaction design world knew phones were garbage. Remember scrolling through a 4-line screen? I was in design school at the time and we did an exercise to redesign the phone and we ended up describing something almost exactly like the iPhone. It follows naturally from "mobile phones exist" + "laptops exist" + "interaction design makes things better". It's just that Apple was the only company that really believed in all three of those things, and was willing to put billions of dollars behind getting it into production. But to say it couldn't have been predicted was wrong. Conventional wisdom amongst business people at the time was that design doesn't matter, except to make your product pretty after it is specced. But the design community knew. We were just having a hard time convincing anyone to listen to us. Do you remember that at the time most tech companies weren't even hiring interaction designers? You had to convince a company that they even needed you. "Why do we need you? The programmers write the code and the graphic designer makes it look good."