The Future of Design
It probably involves space and computers.
In the past week I have learnt about a few things that got me thinking on the future of design. Well at first they got me thinking about the future… then where I would fit into that future.
The first of these future inspiring things is IBM’s Watson. For me, Watson (or the concept of) is going to be a necessary support for the other future developments I learnt about. Watson is basically the AI that every thriller movie based on killer robots is worried about. An intelligent computer that analyses a lot of data about a specific topic and devises its own ‘reasoning’. It could be fairly emulated reasoning, but very very impressive none the less. And it has real world application, that’s the future part.
Watson is currently being used by medical professors to help research possible cures. Part of how it does this is analyse the known data on a specific disease and find both extremes of human knowledge on the subject in any given area. For example it might look at the most common area on the topic and say “Guys, you seem to be looking here a lot, with not so many real results, how about looking over at this fairly un-taped stuff?”. But in a much smarter way.
One of Watson’s possible applications brings me to the second future development, happening pretty much right now. Near Earth Asteroid Mining. These guys, in a very real sense, are looking to mine asteroids that are fairly close to earth for resources that are running their cause on earth. By ‘very real sense’ I mean, they are sending their first test up in October this year. Where does Watson fit in? well the asteroids are close, but not that close… It takes about five minutes to send a command to something that far away. Kind of like saying “move left” *five minutes later* “yes sir”… “ok now move forward”… you get the point. Using Watson, they can say “mine that area for fuels” then Watson replying “ok, I’ll figure it all out”.
Joining this space news is some pretty exciting news from the guys at SpaceX. Who recently managed to get a potentially reusable rocket to launch and land again. That is a pretty huge step for the space race. It basically means, if we can re-use rockets, we can save hundreds of millions
if not billions of dollars on each project. Meaning more projects, quicker.
So the cost in space travel is coming down. This puts a very real future in our hands. A future where we can look of this earth for the resources we need. It’s hard to fathom, but this would change every industry. Another industry changer is Quantum Computing. If you are unfamiliar, it’s kind of like teleporting… data… so transportation time becomes instant. It would allow computers to be millions or hundreds of millions times more powerful than they are today. And the amazing thing about this is, it might already be about to happen. It could be in our homes within 10 years.
So with all these developments happening right now and in the very near future, things are about to change a bit… These sorts of developments will change every industry we currently have. Some will fall aside to make room for others. Some will excel and thrive. But what will Design do?
Easy. Design will be as it always has been. Emotional.
At it’s very basis, design is about emotion. It is about establishing an emotional connection with anyone, everyone… anything… someone.
Obviously a huge part is communication, but communication without emotion is unheard. I believe we are about to see a shift back to the basics. Or we are all about to realise that somewhere we stopped thinking about the core of what we do. You can see it today, print is becoming a much smaller industry, it’s not the behemoth it once was. But what remains is hugely emotional. Digital is becoming a thriving industry, but most of what is produced falls on deaf ears. People forgot to be emotional in digital. You do see a lot of good work coming out, because those people remembered that emotion drives us. They know there is no point in saying something if no one gives a shit about it.
If emotion has been the connecting factor in everything we do, than what is print? what is digital? they are simply outlets. They are the place we connect with people. The majority of people are now in a digital realm, rather than print, and therefore we drag our emotional asses over to digital and start connecting. We still use print, because people still see print, they still connect with print. We put emotion into the place people will connect with it. We use these outlets because they need it, and the people are there.
So in the future, when everything changes again, when another outlet comes along, we do what we have always done. We make people give a shit.
