Design Futures: September 2020
We are living through a time of great reckoning. We are surrounded by a convergence of technology designed to solve problems — ranging from the innovative to the mundane — paired with the rise of data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Add thousands of algorithms that impact what we see, what we learn, and how that shapes our beliefs — and our brains — as we evolve as humans. Design is part of everything we interact with.
Design, in all its forms, is central to the future outcomes of human life. In small ways — how moods are shaped by the way we experience music, or prepare our morning coffee, or receive information. In larger ways — how we experience the community around us, how we shop, drive, eat, play, work, travel, and relax. And in significant ways — how we interact with our climate, with money, with space, with privacy, with other cultures and populations over time.
And at the crux of all these elements, the open question: What do we want the future to look like?
Your answer to that question might have been very different seven months ago than the one you’d give today — we’re all familiar with the list of crises 2020 has dropped on our collective doorsteps. What’s interesting is how the pressure of these circumstances is catapulting innovation, shaking loose long-accepted routine, and shining a light on how we can design better, more sustainable, solutions across myriad industries, from how we manage food supply chains, to how we deliver education, to where and how we work.
Last month, we explored the future of money, the rise of the experience economy, and the New American Dream in our COO, Jon Kolko’s Fast Company article. This month we’re digging into how economic shifts, the rise of machine learning, and AR/VR could converge to create a sea change in how technology and data are used in the future of employment — and social media’s impact on our future professional selves.
Before you hop off to read about the Future of Employment, be sure to scroll down for a plethora of great content, an event invite, and our favorite reading, listening, and resources this month.
We hope you enjoy this speculative future exploration and it ignites questions worth asking about how you want the future to look.
Explore the Future of Employment
Featured Events & Articles
Is Automation Coming for Designers?
Computers are increasingly taking the place of workers in industries across the globe. But what about in design? Is it possible that machine learning could replace the need for designers and create outcomes just as effective to ill-defined problems? We examine this question and more in our recent Medium article.
Future Sessions Event: Sept 29th
We’re bringing together an incredible line up of leaders in design and tech — with influential roles from impactful organizations — for a livestream discussion around how to embrace speed and sustainability, why we haven’t built the future we imagined, and how to design for and build real change.
Reserve your free ticket on Eventbrite >
Interviews with Designers & Founders
We met with Future Sessions speakers to discuss their real-world experiences creating companies that are revolutionizing fields from travel to mindfulness to insurance, building inclusion and equity into business processes, what being future-ready means, and their visions for the future.
Finding Inspiration
Our team’s shortlist of what we’re reading, listening to, and learning from:
Interaction Design & Coding for Kids
It’s back to school time. As physical classrooms are replaced with Zoom, some companies are going the other direction and creating ways for the digital to become physical.
Check out LogiBlocs interactive world >
Meet the Tangiplay robots >
Power the Polls
With a record shortage of poll workers this year, we’re volunteering to help ensure a safe and fair election in our communities.
Imagination & the Misfit Kid
Labrinth’s second album, a “concept collection about a child who sells his imagination to a businessman in exchange for success.”
“America”
Sufjan Stevens’ beautiful, haunting new song full of questions, biblical allusions, and signs of the apocalypse.
The Power Broker
Robert Caro’s biographical portrait of New York’s “master builder,” Robert Moses, from young idealist to urban developer to public figure with questionable ethics. Was he a nonpartisan leader or was he consumed by a need for power?
“Affluence Killed New York, Not the Pandemic”
Is the city’s current reckoning really due to COVID-19 or was it inevitable?
Thank you for joining us on this month’s Design Futures journey. Let’s keep imagining what the future can be.
Take a look around our website to learn more and get in touch to continue to the conversation.
— Modernist Studio
