Some of these new devices offer what Gardner calls “defeaturing”: a design that strips a product back to its original, traditional purpose.

The “dumbphone” is a perfect example. British designer Jasper Morrison recently launched the telephone in collaboration with Swiss tech company Punkt. The stripped-back mobile handset makes calls and accepts voice mail. That’s it.

Defeaturing: The most important of these principles, which we called the process of "ditching the junk DNA".

Her solution: Defeature devices. Make them more generic. Make the overall cost go down. Providers are dealing with enormous financial pressure — so if there’s a simplified version of a device that can still lead to equal clinical outcomes, she argued, why not go with that?

This may seem obvious today but at the time all the mp3 player manufactures were competing on how to get more features into the player, which was a losing proposition. In the case of the Nike+, they’ve taken the idea of defeaturing the device even further. The device itself has no display and no interactions. You simply put it in your shoe.