From industrial to design age
We are witnessing an Informational Big Bang that has submerged us all into a universe that functions similarly to a hologram. A web of complex interconnectivity and interdependence, where the new main component of our environment has become information.
Just like water or air, there is an abundance of these elements on our planet, well, Information is also massively present. And to navigate this ocean of informational abundance requires us to review and redefine tons of things, but especially what we truly value.
As Seneca put it “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable”
Adapting to our new world requires that all of us become designers. Creativity is now the new role of the human mind versus what used to be productivity and management, power, control, and competition. It appears that the laws of abundance that rule the informational age are indeed more related to the rules of the infinite world of creativity.
What happened with Time
Our cultures, meaning that what is created by humans, had evolved at different time paces. Processes that used to be purely three-dimensional, and happened through time, space and matter, had dematerialized and become Timeless.
I’m not quite sure for instance if Time was a component factor or a functional factor of our world when we humans were wildlife. But it certainly was one when we gave birth to technology and started using tools to shape our environment.
From gatherers- farmers to when we started using the conversion of matter to produce energy to potentialize technology, in the Industrial age, throughout this “early” man-technology evolution, the world as we knew it was attached to linear Time.
However, the evolution of knowledge, science, and technology; led us to a more and more, let’s say quantic understanding of the world, and our focus followed, and we developed our more dematerialized culture, where Time and Space were subtracted from the equation.
Although time and space are still part of many of today’s processes, it is Information that has become the main currency and structural unit of our world.
We are all to become designers.
When entering the Informational age and through the acceleration of the last years Informational Big Bang, the productivity skills that once allowed us to function well in our environment, are no longer the skills that will help us best to adapt to this new world.
“ Productivity is for machines, creativity is for humans”. Kevin Kelly
Everything about design has its place in the world we are living in now.
For instance, by definition, designers use creativity and knowledge to solve problems, and we are at a time where we are facing serious global challenges. Not running away from problems is an attitudinal skill the world needs.
The design key notions of persona and empathy place the human in the center of the equation, and we can trace the cause of most of the problems of our world to human activity. The relevance of these notions is the fuel that brings Diversity to the core of today’s social conversation and debate.
The leverage of the collective-intelligence, the model of collectively generating and voting ideas, is a now widely recognized model of work. Even French President E. Macron, highlighted the importance of collaboration within different disciplines to produce an ultimate strategy to what he presented as the France 2030 plan.
Technology herself is evolving through a process that includes more and more people prototyping and testing ideas, innovation in micro and macro markets is ultimately the fuel of the Venture Capital Economy, just as many of the disruptions we see in our world can be traced to a design process.
We ought to become designers to navigate the world we are living in. We need to create more with others, to proliferous-ly and unapologetically prototype and test solutions to the problems of our world, of our communities, our neighbors.
Then the promise of the 21st century will more likely be that of a real better world.
