A cult classic was released on February 22, 1983. The band Styx released their rock opera Kilroy Was Here. Mr. Roboto, the first song on the record, is “a tale of a non-conformist trying to escape from domineering, small-minded authorities who use robots to assert their power,” says Jim Beviglia in his article The Meaning Behind “Mr. Roboto” by Styx published on americansogwriter.com.
The lyrics start:
- Dennis DeYoung, Styx
To paraphrase, a man is pretending to be a robot to conform to society. He doesn’t like that he’s can’t be himself so he try to break free. There are early 1980’s warnings about how technology will take over society and control people.
He wasn’t too far off from over forty years ago.
I write this on technology that is operating at speeds unimaginable four decades ago. I have multiple screens functioning all at the same time. In my pocket is smarter and more powerful than anything in 1983.
As a member of a generation alive when this song came out it is often an easy excuse to blame technology for the world’s problems. I see it every generation. It was rock music, then it was heavy metal, MTV was rotting brains, then rap music, movies and video games were the issue, and now it’s how much technology we have at our disposal.
Technology is advancing so fast I can’t even imagine where we will be in five years and how fast devices will be. With the help of design sprints the pace is accelerated.
In Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz, they write, “Thursday is about illusion. You’ve got an idea for a great solution. Instead of taking weeks, months, or, heck, even years building that solution, you’re going to fake it. In one day, you’ll make a prototype that appears real.”
Cindy R writes in her blog Design Sprint. Day4. Published on medium.com, “The fidelity of the prototype is important but more important is to assess that the assumptions your team might have and the journey that was determined in the decision day can be accurately validated. For this, you might need to make sure an area of the prototype has mock data or dummy data and that it functions almost like the real end product. For other cases, you might even be able to use a paper prototype.”
“For FitStar, success in the market depended on quality. But in their spring, success depended only on being real enough to answer their key questions. They got the information they needed to identify the right solutions – and shut down the wrong ones – with a prototype that only took seven hours to build,” writes Knapp, Zeratsky, and Kowitz.
1983 needed synthesizers to represent the future and technology. Now we’re using other technologies to replicate the solutions we think will answer questions that push technology further along.
The time has come at last (secret, secret, I’ve got a secret)
To throw away this mask (secret, secret, I’ve got a secret)
Now everyone can see (secret, secret, I’ve got a secret)
My true identity…
I’m a sprinter.
JD Photography 
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