Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are they succeeding?每一天，那些创意公司都在允诺着要让世界显得更加幸福。他们做了吗？Here is just a sampling of the products, apps and services that have come across my radar in the last few weeks:下面是几个产品、手机应用于和服务的例子，都是最近几个星期我注意到的。A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas.让别人来老大你汽油油的服务。A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park your car.在任何地方叫代泊车服务员踩着滑板车来老大你行驶的服务。

A service that will film anything you desire with a drone.用无人机老大你为任何东西摄像机的服务。A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually.老大你离去行李的服务——虚拟世界的。A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three months.每三个月把新的牙刷头寄给你邮箱里的服务。

A service that delivers your beer right to your door.送来啤酒上门的服务。An app that analyzes the quality of your French kissing.分析你法国式亲吻水平的手机应用于。

A “smart” button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down.裤子拉链没拉上时会警告你的“智能”纽扣和拉链。An app with speaker that plays music from within a mother’s vaginal walls to her unborn baby.可以通过扬声器，在孕妇的阴道内给胎儿播出音乐的手机应用于。

A sensor placed in your child’s diaper that sends you an alert when the diaper needs changing.放到内衣上的传感器，该换尿布时发送到警告。An app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere.在任何地点都可以熬咖啡的手机应用于。A refrigerator advertised as “the Family Hub” that promises to act as a personal assistant, message board, stereo and photo album.一种在广告宣传中被定义为“家庭中枢车站”的冰箱，允诺当作私人助理、信息板、单声道音箱和Blogger。An app to locate rentable driveways for parking.找寻可可供租给的私人停车位的手机应用于。

An app to locate rentable yachts.找寻租赁游艇的手机应用于。An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.”老大你理解“人生因果”的手机应用于。

An app that guides mindful meditation.指导冥想的手机应用于。An app that imparts wisdom.传送智慧的手机应用于。

And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings.最近还有人建议研发一种用来杜绝警员杀人的手机应用于。We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.每一天，我们都被各种允诺要让生活更加幸福的新发现、新的专利和新发明所水淹，但是对于大部分人来说，更加幸福的生活没来临。只不过在上面的单子里，大部分项目都是针对一个特定（而且较小！）的人群。

最近一个科技领域的同事向我说明说道，对于大多数研发这类项目的人来说，他们的目标基本上就是为自己获取各种妈妈仍然为他们做到的事情。He was joking — sort of — but his comment made me think hard about who is served by this stuff. I’m concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will reduce us all to those characters in “Wall-E,” bound to their recliners, Big Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes.或许上，他是在打趣，但是他的话灵感我去了解思维那些用于这些服务的人们。我担忧，这样注目便利舒适度和即时的满足感，不会把我们都变为《机器人瓦力》(Wall-E)里的人，整日躺在在躺椅上，拿着大杯饮料，只靠遥控器和世界对话。

Too many well-funded entrepreneurial efforts turn out to promise more than they can deliver (i.e., Theranos’ finger-prick blood test) or read as parody (but, sadly, are not — such as the $99 “vessel” that monitors your water intake and tells you when you should drink more water).众多资金雄厚的企业项目最后都被证明无法构建自己的允诺（比如Theranos的指血检测技术），或者看起来看起来笑话（不过悲伤的是，事实并非如此，比如价值99美元的“容器”，用来监控你摄取了多少水，告诉他你何时应当再行睡觉了）。When everything is characterized as “world-changing,” is anything?当一切都被印上“转变世界”的标签，究竟有什么东西真能正转变世界？Clay Tarver, a writer and producer for the painfully on-point HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” said in a recent New Yorker article: “I’ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly. So I guess, at the very least, we’re making the world a better place by making these people stop saying they’re making the world a better place.”作家克莱·塔弗(Clay Tarver)是一针见血的HBO喜剧《硅谷》(SiliconValley)的编剧。

他最近在《纽约客》(New Yorker)的一篇文章中说道：“我被告诉，在某些大公司里，公关部门拒绝雇员不要再说‘我们在让世界显得更加幸福’这句话，主要是因为我们拿这句话打趣进得太狠了。所以我想要，通过让这些人暂停说道‘我们让世界显得更加幸福’，我们让世界显得更加幸福了。

”O.K., that’s a start. But the impulse to conflate toothbrush delivery with Nobel Prize-worthy good works is not just a bit cultish, it’s currently a wildfire burning through the so-called innovation sector. Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (a.k.a. bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C. Z. Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”好吧，这是个开始。但是，把寄出牙刷和诺贝尔奖级别的杰作混为一谈的冲动，不只是一种宗教疯狂，而是像燎原野火般拿下所谓的创意产业。很多产品和服务都是目的“妨碍”市场区分（换言之，就是把显然没有人必须的东西推向市场），而不是用来解决问题确实的问题，特别是在无法解决问题那些被作家C·Z·纳埃梅卡(C. Z. Nnaemeka)称作“奇怪的下层社会”所面对的问题——就是那些单亲妈妈、乡村贫困白人、老兵、年过50的失业美国人——她说明说道，他们“很意外，过于有意思”。If the most fundamental definition of design is to solve problems, why are so many people devoting so much energy to solving problems that don’t really exist? How can we get more people to look beyond their own lived experience?如果设计的最基本定义是用来解决问题，为什么那么多人投放那么多精力，去解决问题显然不不存在的问题？我们该怎样让更加多人看见打破自身生活体验之外的东西？In “Design: The Invention of Desire,” a thoughtful and necessary new book by the designer and theorist Jessica Helfand, the author brings to light an amazing kernel: “hack,” a term so beloved in Silicon Valley that it’s painted on the courtyard of the Facebook campus and is visible from planes flying overhead, is also prison slang for “horse’s ass carrying keys.”《设计：性欲的发明者》(Design: The Invention of Desire)是一本深思熟虑又十分简单的新书，作者是设计师兼任理论家杰西卡·赫尔方(Jessica Helfand)。

她说明了那个难以置信的内核“骇客”(hack)，这个词为硅谷所爱人，被所画在Facebook园区的院子里，从飞机上都能看到。在监狱里，它是用来指代“狱警”的俚语。To “hack” is to cut, to gash, to break. It proceeds from the belief that nothing is worth saving, that everything needs fixing. But is that really the case? Are we fixing the right things? Are we breaking the wrong ones? Is it necessary to start from scratch every time?做到“骇客”就意味著紧贴、突击，超越。

它源于那种没任何事物有一点保有，一切都必须被维修的信念。但是事实知道如此吗？我们是在维修必须维修的东西吗？我们是不是超越了不应超越的东西？每次都必须从零开始吗？Empathy, humility, compassion, conscience: These are the key ingredients missing in the pursuit of innovation, Ms. Helfand argues, and in her book she explores design, and by extension innovation, as an intrinsically human discipline — albeit one that seems to have lost its way. Ms. Helfand argues that innovation is now predicated less on creating and more on the undoing of the work of others.赫尔方认为，共情、顺服、同情、怜悯：这些关键成分都是执着创意的过程中所缺陷的。她在书中把设计，乃至创意，从本质上作为一个人文学科来探究——尽管这个学科或许早已艾米了的方向。赫尔方指出，如今，创意更好是基于烧掉别人的工作，而不是基于建构。

“In this humility-poor environment, the idea of disruption appeals as a kind of subversive provocation,” she writes. “Too many designers think they are innovating when they are merely breaking and entering.”“在这样一个缺少顺服的环境下，‘妨碍’的概念变得看起来一种颠覆性的激怒，”她写到。“过于多的设计师实在他们是在创意，只不过他们只是在毁坏和闯进。”In this way, innovation is very much mirroring the larger public discourse: a distrust of institutions combined with unabashed confidence in one’s own judgment shifts solutions away from fixing, repairing or improving and shoves them toward destruction for its own sake. (Sound like a certain presidential candidate? Or Brexit?)在这层意义上，创意出了一段更加宏伟的公共话语的缩影：对制度的不信任，再加对自我辨别的自以为是，让解决方案背离了修复、修正或提高的目的，变为了为毁坏而毁坏（听得上去像不像某位总统候选人？或者英国干欧？）Perhaps the main reason these frivolous products and services frustrate me is because of their creators’ insistence that changing lives for the better is their reason for being. To wit, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has invested in companies like Airbnb and Twitter but also in services such as LikeALittle (which started out as a flirting tool among college students) and Soylent (a sort of SlimFast concoction for tech geeks), tweeted last week: “The perpetually missing headline: ‘Capitalism worked okay again today and most people in the world got a little better off.’ ”也许这些微不足道的产品与服务令其我苦恼的主要原因，是因为它们的创造者坚决指出，它们的不存在就是为了让生活显得更佳。

马克·安德烈森(Marc Andreessen)上星期在Twitter上的言论也传达了这个意思：“你总有一天看到的新闻：‘今天资本主义再度运营较好，世界上的大多数人生活获得提高’。”这位风险投资资本家曾多次给Arirbnb和Twitter等公司投资，但也给LikeALittle（一开始是个大学生调情的工具）和Soylent（面向技术极客们的SlimFast类节食食谱工具）等服务投资。Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where such companies are based, sea level rise is ominous, the income gap between rich and poor has been growing faster than in any other city in the nation, a higher percentage of people send their kids to private school than in almost any other city, and a minimum salary of $254,000 is required to afford an average-priced home. Who exactly is better off?与此同时，在旧金山，很多这类公司的所在地，海平面以危险性的势头下降，社会阶层之间的收益鸿沟快速增长得比这个国家的任何城市更加慢，送来孩子去私立学校的人比例比任何城市都更高。

必须最少25.4万的年薪才能寄居得起普通价格水平的房子。究竟谁过得更佳了？Ms. Helfand calls for a deeper embrace of personal vigilance: “Design may provide the map,” she writes, “but the moral compass that guides our personal choices resides permanently within us all.”赫尔方敦促更好的个人警觉：“设计也许需要获取地图，”她写到，“但是需要提示个人自由选择的道德罗盘却总有一天不存在于我们每个人的内心。”Can we reset that moral compass? Maybe we can start by not being a bunch of hacks.我们能新的校准我们的道德罗盘吗？也许我们应当从来不做到骇客开始。

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