Design is Dangerous: Just in the back of your minds...

I remember when I was about eight years old 'Heelys' were all the rage in my hometown. These shoes jumped to the top of every kid's christmas list in 2000-1 including my own. All of my friends wore there Heelys everyday, the neighbor kids would be whooping and hollering next door as they would pop the wheels out from the soles of their sneakers and glide across the ground.
In the beginning, the fad seemed harmless and a good new way for children to have fun. However, as I look back on it now, I wonder if there really was no damage done with these fun little rolly-shoes. If done at all, it's true the damage was not catastrophic. The kids didn't really know any better, they only saw a fun and faster way of getting from point 'A' to point 'B'. But these shoe-toys provided an excuse for laziness. No longer needing to walk along with their parents in the mall, the kids could roll alongside and not exert themselves at all.
Many may see this as an overreaction, and I acknowledge the seemingly silly idea I'm bringing forward, but I also see that with this huge surge in children's need for this way to keep themselves from working their legs even the slightest, a seed was planted in their minds.
With the creation of these Heelys, my generation was shown that with the right mindset, we could create anything we wanted to keep ourselves from exerting too much energy. And how much is “too much”? Who decides how lazy we get to become? With that memory wheeling through our head, in the future we might design the long-awaited hover chair! Heelys showed that creating a way to nix all physical exertion was just a little too easy.
Alright, so it's a little extreme, but the clip shown above from the Disney movie Wall-E just shows how design could hurt us if we don't show the proper restraint.