“What’s the future of design?” he asked rhetorically. “There is no future. When the product becomes bionic, in the end there is no product.”

The digital age, Mr. Starck said, has created a process of “dematerialization,” in which products like the Zik headphones are simultaneously shrinking and becoming smarter. “It’s the elegance of the minimum,” he said.

The end result? Eventually, he announced, we’ll all be implanted with microchips, and we’ll be the product.

Of course, that could take a while…