The Role of Design in Industry 4.0
The designer’s toolkit has always needed to change based on whatever humans need technology to do for them. Designers are pressured to deliver faster so technology can ship faster. Putting new technology into the world as quickly as possible has always been central to industrialization. Today, every designer has access to thousands of templates and tools that make it possible to produce faster; however, as design tries to keep pace with emerging technology, there’s a risk of failing to recognize the implications.
History has shown that mass production requires ethics. Labor laws exist because companies are prone to paying as little as possible, providing unsafe working conditions, and expecting workers to perform tasks until their minds and bodies can no longer withstand them. Labor laws aren’t the only agents of change pushing back on the industrial machine. Artists and designers have always been willing to raise concerns regarding the ethics and quality of what comes out of production. An early example comes from the Arts and Crafts movement, which argued that products must serve more than corporate considerations. Our cultural identity is represented by the things we use and make. Without the art of making things, technology serves business interests more than society. Passion for beauty, cultural identity, safety, and intention resulted in design thinking to ensure the needs of business and society remain balanced.
Amber Case stepped onto the TED stage in 2011 and announced we’re all cyborgs. In her talk, Case explained,
“Now suddenly we’re a new form of Homo sapiens, and look at these fascinating cultures, and look at these curious rituals that everybody’s doing around this technology.”
Case is a brilliant cyborg anthropologist who works as a Research Director at The Metagovernance Project and other vital organizations, helping to establish a model for user-centric oversight for any company to manage their users’ data ethically. At the time of Case’s talk, the most popular smartphone was the Samsung Galaxy S II, which had a storage capacity of 16 GB; today, the Samsung Galaxy S23 comes in two storage variants, 128GB and 256GB. As human cyborgs, we’ve upgraded our external brain by more than 176% in 12 years. Today, there’s no need to remember phone numbers, carry cash, or use analog maps. Technology is entirely interwoven into our society, culture, and personal identity. If you live in one of the larger cities, you’ve already become accustomed to a lot more digital self-service, autonomous retail, and rarely needing anything but your phone to get most things done. You don’t need to carry much or remember as much because we always have our external second brain.
Our second brain enables us to consolidate information, create efficiencies, and make our lives less stressful. AI will increasingly become part of the operating system across all smart products, tools, and services, always running in the background, which means your second brain will expand beyond a single device. AI will provide efficiencies on a scale we’ve never imagined. AI-based machines are fast, more accurate, and consistently rational but aren’t intuitive, emotional, or culturally sensitive.
Since the first industrial revolution in the 1700s, we’ve evolved faster with each technological innovation. Three hundred years later, technology has reduced disease and cloned identical DNA because of the ability to build better hardware, incorporate better software, and reduce human inefficiencies. Industry 4.0 is kind of like a digital assembly line that’s theoretically limitless. R&D isn’t just fast; it’s hyperspeed because it’s possible to train software to improve itself. The 4.0 digital assembly line runs on intelligent software that works 24/7 and independently conducts self-improvement.
Innovative software supercharges the speed of delivering new technologies and everything it can improve. AI and ML eliminate years of human engineering, and a consequence for designers is that many of their tasks will also need to be automated. This is good because designers must shift focus to the more significant impact of technological advances on our society.
In his book MAU MC24, Bruce Mau takes the reader through the principles of designing for massive change.
“… many of our solutions create more problems than they correct”
Mau’s principles focus on the dangers of short-term thinking.
“..we dump problems that we can’t solve into places we can’t see”
Designers are essential for Industry 4.0 to stay grounded in the needs of society as a whole. Just like the Arts and Crafts rose in response to the Industrial Revolution, we need to identify the opportunities for design to balance the needs of business and people to ensure technology serves our society. Good design must consider all available options, implications, and necessary compromises.
