Design. Design Never Changes
Will we become design generalists?
Kevin Kelly, a world-renowned visionary and author of the book ‘What Technology Wants’, argued that efficiency and productivity are for machines, and therefore everything that becomes more and more streamlined will eventually be taken over by technology. Humans, on the other hand, are good at everything non-efficient: science, innovation, and creativity are prime examples. These are, and will forever remain, our core strengths compared to machines.
Following this reasoning, I believe there are two trends that can be identified for the future of digital design.
Design generalism
The first trend is what I call design generalism. In the future, designers will not be dealing with the specific details of screen design anymore. Instead, there will be artificial intelligence that, through machine learning of millions of cases and established design principles, has learned how to build a design effectively by itself. Just look at initiatives such as Pix2Code and Firedrop, and realise that this future is closer than you think.
I do not think this should be a cause of concern for our profession. Rather, designers will be freed to think bigger, to merely engage in the high-level design of services, supported by technology. There will be a job called ‘experience architect’, who oversees the design of the general service experience, and outsources the detailed design of each touch point to technology. Moreover, there will be ‘personality designers’, skilled in social dynamics, human cognition and language, that will design the (hopefully friendly) nature of our future collaborators, the artificial intelligences.
Innovation-driven design
The advance of technology is like a tidal wave; inventions come and go, but each one chips away the rock that forms our belief of what is impossible. Regardless of their size, each new wave causes new challenges for design. Invariably, new technologies start out rough, cumbersome, and certainly not user-centred. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, for example, started being developed long before an actual use case was conceived that would add value to people’s lives. (Should Luke Wroblewski’s question ‘What would augment reality?’ not have been asked before countless hours and money were spent on these devices’ development?)
This brings me to the second trend: innovation-driven design. To make newly invented technologies usable and relevant for consumers, there will always be a need for jobs such as interaction designers, visual designers and developers. They are needed to create the look, feel and function of the next generation of user-friendly products. And we will always need their very human ‘gut feeling’ to push innovation ever forward. The key lies in the adaptiveness of designers, as they need to be able and willing to quickly adopt new technologies, and adjust to changes continuously.
In the upcoming years, however, the product will become the service. In fact, a product is only one small part of a service. Product designers can no longer afford to focus solely on the technology itself, as the quality of the design will depend on how well the general context and experience of the end-user has been considered. Designers (and companies for that matter) that fail to take this into account, will not be able to stand up to the competition of those that do. The product should never be considered separate from reality.
Future’s constant
There is a red thread through both trends. However advanced technology may become, and however much its waves of innovation may continue to (radically) change the world, the future will have one constant factor: the basic needs of humans. People will always long to feel competent, socially connected, and able to decide their own fate. They will always need food, drink, safety, and warmth.
Our moral responsibility as designers, therefore, will remain unchanged as well: to provide value to people’s lives by understanding them, solving their problems, and fulfilling their needs.
The means, however, will be ever-changing.
