Judy Wajcman’s Who’s to blame for the digital time deficit? starts off like many similar articles as she ponders the role smart phones play in making us feel time-starved. But then she takes an unexpected and well-reasoned turn:

If technology is going to contribute to a better world, people must think about the world in which they want to live. Put simply, it means thinking about social problems first and then thinking of technological solutions, rather than inventing technologies and trying to find problems they might solve.

We can’t do this while the people who design our technology and decide what is made are so unrepresentative of society. The most powerful companies in the world today—such as Microsoft, Apple and Google—are basically engineering companies and, whether in the US or Japan, they employ few women, minorities or people over 40. […] Such skewed organisational demographics inevitably influence the kind of technology produced.

And later on:

If we want technology to bring us a better future, we must contest the imperative of speed and democratise engineering. We must bring more imagination to the field of technological innovation. Most of all, we must ask bigger questions about what kind of society we want. Technology will follow, as it usually does.