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Last week, I gave a presentation on the Future Flip Book (in English and in German) in Hamburg. While preparing for the presentation, I asked myself: Why am I doing what I am doing? What motivated me working on sustainable innovation, what was the driver for my work on the Future Flip Book?

I put it in bold on one of the slides: I do not want to surrender to a gloomy future. That is simply it. I strongly feel that we can do something about the dreary future ahead of us. I am convinced that innovation plays a role here. Of course, I am not naive. We cannot continue as we have, and hope that we innovate ourselves out of this mess. We have to change attitudes, mindsets, and behavior, too.

If we were doing a Polak Game (https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/01ThePolakGame.pdf), I would certainly be on the right side of the room. I am certainly not fully in the front or the back of the room. I am somewhere in the middle.

At times I feel outraged and at time I feel optimistic. For everybody, who feels the same the podcast Outrage & Optimism is a must (https://www.outrageandoptimism.org).

The term creative destruction was coined by Joseph Alois Schumpeter as an essential dynamic property of capitalism. In short, it constantly creates new products and processes that make existing products and processes obsolete, they vanish.

This dynamic process of the new replacing the old changes our environment dramatically, of course depending on where we are. It affects what we see – have you recently seen a donkey cart? It affects what we smell – have you recently smelled exhaust fumes of a two stroke engine out in the streets? And it affects what we hear – have you heard the beeping sound of a modem recently?

Let us call label sounds that vanish due to technological progress as sounds of extinction.

A great example of sounds of extinction is the sound of a mechanical shutter of a camera. Here you find the shutter sound of 18 cameras recorded by photographer Sails Chong.

Really lovely, especially the old Polaroid X70 and the good old Rolleiflex 3003.

It is probably an intricate design question whether a photo app on a smartphone really needs to have a shutter sound that pretends that something mechanical is inside the camera. Do you really need to convey a message through a sound that suggests something that is not there? This reminds me of the discussion about whether or not the early iPad really needed a bookshelf app designed like a wooden bookshelf.