The market decides what is popular, to a point. They don't get to decide what is launched. I don't think designers really get to decide that either though. I'd

The market decides what is popular, to a point. They don't get to decide what is launched. I don't think designers really get to decide that either though. I'd disagree that change is slow and conservative. In the smartphone biz they're coming out with half baked ideas all the time. I'd agree progress is slow for certain things, but then its astonishingly fast in other ways. Trying to identify what we actually disagree about here, it seems you see a lot more order in the process? I made the point in another reply in this subthread that I see it more like evolution. Its messy, with lots of dead ends, and as soon as you start trying to generalise, the Duck billed Platypus says hello. For every product that has gone through user testing, we have Samsung coming out with one that evidently hasn't.