![Desk](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/desk.png?w=2400&quality=85)
![](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lost-at-e-minor_logo.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
This article originally appeared on Lost at E Minor. Find the original video at the Harvard Innovation Lab.
30 years ago, work desks around the world were cluttered with calculators, encyclopedias, calendars, fax machines, corded phones, corkboards, and other vintage items. Fast-forward to 2014, you’ll see all of those things as apps on a smartphone. In the video below, a team at the Harvard Innovation Lab visualizes each item’s eventual transformation into an app and how technology has helped un-clutter our desks of today.
“We wondered what it would be like to recreate the desktop from the 1980′s and then emulate its transformation through the computer age,” the team from Harvard Innovation Lab explains. “We wanted to illustrate how technology has changed our world, un-cluttering our desks and simplifying our lives. While gradual change from year to year is often hard to perceive, a longer snapshot gives us a much more dramatic view of the technological progression we have experienced.”
Thanks to the producers of the video.
(via Design Boom)
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