Folks, today I’m kicking off a series of occasional interviews with designers-turned-entrepreneurs. The first installment features Charles Adler, who co-founded Kickstarter with Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler. Kickstarter, of course, is the crowdfunding phenomenon that has upended seed economics for new products and projects — the verb “to kickstart” has become practically synonymous with the wildly successful campaigns that the company hosts. To me, one of the many fascinating aspects of Kickstarter is how they’ve leveraged design on many levels to produce increasingly disruptive, real world results.

Charles and I have become friendly over the past year, being both New Yorkers and even neighbors in Brooklyn — we frequently run into one another at Ft. Greene Park when he’s walking his ten-year old mutt Buster and I’m walking my ten-year old mutt Mister President. In this email interview, he talks about the origins of his interests in design and entrepreneurship, and how the two have meshed together in his role at Kickstarter.

The response to my post yesterday about the durability of Apple’s products has been much more robust than I expected.

A lot of people have challenged me to name at least a few modern electronic devices that age well in the manner I’m describing. I admit: it’s very difficult to do that. Many people have cited Moore’s Law, the principle that guides every digital product’s life cycle, as being so thoroughly in opposition to designing and building products that last that it renders my argument inherently flawed. You just can’t build digital devices for the long haul, they say, because “planned obsolesence” will always do these devices in, make them irrelevant even if they do survive the ravages of time.

This is true to some extent. As I said above, I’m certainly not advising Apple on a purely business level that it would be a good idea to reverse course and make new devices user-upgradeable and repairable.

But I would say that just because these devices might no longer be wanted in their eighth, ninth, tenth years of their lives and so on, that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to build them more ruggedly, and it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t be built so that they acquire an emotionally appealing patina as they age, increasing their desirability if only to a select few.

There’s very little keeping Apple from making an iPod or iPhone or iPad that would last for a decade or more, even if to do so would mean its software could no longer be practically updated at some point (in fact that already happens, which is totally fair, but almost invariably, the hardware begins to break down at that point too). And there’s very little keeping Apple from engineering their devices in such a way that they get better looking over time. Their margins are certainly healthy enough to impose this kind of challenge upon themselves.

It’s true, there’s not necessarily a business case to do this, but that is not the only thing Apple will be judged on in the decades to come. And that’s what I’m talking about here: how will future generations look back at Apple, and by extension its customers? Did we all live our lives by more than just the bottom line? Or were the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the decades in which we irrevocably decided that everything should be disposable (or even recyclable) after just two or three years?

It may sound like I’m picking on Apple, but I think that’s a specious criticism, too. Apple regularly claims exceptionalism in the kinds of products they build; it’s fair game then to at least raise the issue of doing things their peers clearly won’t. This is the brand they built: a company that makes truly great products, products that make a dent in the universe. To me, doing even a little bit to counter the notion that everything is disposable is right in line with that.

Not long after its announcement last week, Kyle Wiens of iFixIt disassembled one of Apple’s new Retina MacBook Pros and wrote at Wired.com that “the display is fused to the glass, which means replacing the LCD requires buying an expensive display assembly. The RAM is now soldered to the logic board — making future memory upgrades impossible. And the battery is glued to the case.” His conclusion was that it’s “the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart.”

This has sparked some debate on both the customer friendliness and environmental responsibility of this kind of manufacturing, There’s no denying that the Retina MacBook Pro is clearly not built for user-serviceable repair or upgrade. Obviously, it follows the same path that Apple has taken with its products over the past decade-plus; from the iPod to the iPhone to the MacBook Air to the iPad, Apple hardware has become less and less accessible over time.

Aaron Sorkin’s script for “The Social Network” won him an Oscar, but it drew the ire of at least a few tech pundits who felt that it took too many liberties for dramatic effect. Now Sorkin is writing a screenplay about Steve Jobs. In an interview with The New York Times last week, here’s what he had to say about his thinking on the project.

“At the moment I’m at roughly the same place I was when I decided to write “The Social Network” — which is to say I don’t know what the movie’s about yet. I know it won’t be a biography as it’s very hard to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biopic. I know that Jobs was a very complicated and dynamic genius who fought a number of dramatic battles. I know that like Edison, Marconi (and Philo Farnsworth), he invented something we love. I think that has a lot to do with our love affair with him. We’re told every day that America’s future is basically in service but our history is in building things — railroads and cars and cities — but Steve Jobs, in building something that’s taking us to our future, has also taken us to one of the best parts of our past. Now all I have to do is turn that into three acts with an intention, obstacle, exposition, inciting action, reversal, climax and denouement and make it funny and emotional and I’ll be in business.”

What’s interesting to me about these early thoughts is that they make no mention of historical accuracy. Instead, they’re focused on teasing out the dramatic core of Jobs’ story. Sorkin is looking to understand the idea of Steve Jobs, rather than the person himself.

Apple had a pretty big slate of announcements at today’s World Wide Developers Conference Keynote. For me, the hardware products and software features that debuted today are evidence that the Tim Cook-led Apple is not missing a beat; everything looks great.

Except for one thing: Apple’s product videos remain trapped in time, following the same format that their videos from the last decade followed: talking head shots of Apple executives as they wax effusively about whatever new product they’re introducing.

Any time an iOS app wants to give you access to your own photos, it must first ask you for permission to do so. This is understandable, because you don’t want just any app you download to be able to have its way with your photo library. But the way that the operating system asks for permission is problematic.