The Future of Design in 25 Years

Dear Reader, 

I want to be clear. You are a designer. We are all designers.¹ A designer is simply someone who makes a decision for a construct. Perhaps you’re a navigational route designer, figuring out the best way around traffic despite what your GPS alerts you to. You could be an everyday meal designer balancing the trade-offs between meal quality, timeliness, and price. So designers, I hope you’ll endeavor to make intentional design decisions. 

Let’s start with a baseline. What are the things that we build, what is our construct? Our construct can be defined as a combination of design, art, and technology, with varying degrees of where we choose to lie on this triangle. 

• Art is an abstraction for the pictures we create, the smells we want to invoke, the audio that we hear, tactile feedback, and the tastes we savor. The art components are sub-pieces that allow us to experience our construct. 
• Technology is the tool we use in order to construct or convey our construct. If we choose to not restrict our definition of technology to be a substitute for machines, we can see how our application of technology now encompases all constructs throughout time.
• Design in our construct are the specifications and decisions made in order to form a communication layer between those who seek to interact, use, or experience. It is the storytelling connection between our art, technology, and user.

So, now that we have a baseline established, let’s look at how we can see ahead into the future.

What Does The Future Hold?

We can take a hint from Alex McDowell, production designer of Minority Report acclaim, and “extrapolate forward.”² We take a starting point and see where a set of logical decisions would take us. For our purposes, let’s start with the past, as we might be able to see patterns and trends that emerge. 

• With oral storytelling we required the technology of a shared language, sharing our constructs, becoming the transmission technology.
• In recording our stories through visual marks we utilized and created tools to help us leave images and symbols—symbols on cave walls, paintings on canvas, and words on a page, categories that could each warrant a discussion on their own.
• Through stagecraft and a shared cooperation of artists we could create dances and plays. 
• In a new ability to broadcast we formed radio programs, bringing performances inside people’s homes.
• With the technological breakthrough of audio/visual recording we find film and television. At first there was a mimicry of the stage, but soon we found that we could invent an entirely new language to express a visual narrative in time and space.
• As we rapidly approach the present we encounter emerging technologies such as virtual reality and commercial constructs such as the metaverse—ways of telling stories so new that it has become lodged into our collective consciousness but not yet solidly experienced by the masses. While some of these incarnations of storytelling will cement themselves into a medium of the future, others will be a passing fad.

So how do we extrapolate forward from here? In taking a condensed view of our modes of storytelling, we find layers of storytelling technologies building off one another, each taking inspiration from previously developed techniques to create new storytelling methods. 

At our core we strive to put our audiences into our imagined worlds with a sense of presence and immersion. Regardless of the name or incarnation of the technology, we have been iterating down a path to stronger levels strengthening our engagement with our audiences.

What does this mean? As designers we can do amazing marvels with an ever-growing suspension of disbelief that melts away with each iteration. We will be able to make engaging performances, giving the chance for the audience to participate in these experiences. We will have both incredible superpowers to communicate to our audience on a personal level, but also levels of impact that we must become responsible for.

We Can No Longer Shrug Off Our Responsibility to Our Creations

In Answer in Progress’s video, “i taught an AI to solve the trolley problem,”³ we are confronted with the simple fact that our designs are a result of our decisions, while it may be tempting to blame our tools for having a mind of their own, or falling for magical qualities we, the creators, imbued our constructs with to begin with. Even with technologies such as machine learning, we humans are still leaving our fingerprints in its designed construction, along with the curated data that we teach it with. Just as a parent is held socially accountable for their child, we too are responsible for our constructs. The sooner we can accept this fact, the faster we can actually do something about it.

User-Generated Content and the Problem Of Ironoia

“Ironoia,” a portmanteau of “irony” and “paranoia,” coined by Ian Bogost,⁴ is a way to describe our modern practice of wrapping original constructs with a layer of irony through commentary such as internet memes. In effect we begin to lose the ability to experience source constructs in their originality. With each new layer of ironoia that we apply, we lose our connection to the source to the point at which the original can disappear completely. 

I am not advocating against the use of user-generated content mechanisms, however, as designers and developers we rarely give thought to our complex interactions beyond what we prescribe as administration and censorship. Without the discourse on understanding why or how users can experience things, the rate of ironoia-created constructs can be caught in an ever accelerating, neverending feedback loop—a fast, iterative pace that perhaps original content created within the span of minutes or seconds will be displaced by its ironoia commentary.

Designing a Future with Accessibility in Mind Can Be a Win for All 

Not everything in the future should be met with the same skepticism. In 2018, Microsoft launched the Adaptive Controller. In 2019, Logitech responded with the Adaptive Gaming Kit,⁵ input devices aimed at bringing accessibility to the mass market commercially. We are seeing the commercial sector invest in what has traditionally been seen as a niche market relegated to custom-developed solutions. While we are ways off from affordability being addressed, with each new iteration, visibility, and competitor, pricing certainly will be driven down. 

When solving issues around usability constraints, we find that we end up opening up new opportunities for everyone. 

The Role of Designers in the Future Workplace

The production role of designer will continue to explore, play, iterate, and ultimately handle more. We are witness to the designer and developer merging into the prototyper. Traditionally, by the nature of skills needed to manipulate material or media, a designer was locked down to a specific trade. Alternatively, if a designer ventured into a realm where new skills, time, or budget were required we would have to limit ourselves to visualizing with analog tools such as pen, paper, cardboard, and whiteboards. The usefulness of tactile prototypes is not going away, however, we are starting to find ourselves being able to reach wider across multiple fields of interest using prototypes that can simulate closer to final products than ever before. We have already seen designers across multiple fields working with robust tools develop functioning prototypes that at one time took entire teams of designers, artists and engineers to make.^{6, 7} 

One Last Extrapolation Forward Together

Let’s imagine that the entire Design, Art, and Technology triangle has embraced a communal sharing of our tools and techniques. One of our contributions to the future will not only be sharing our language of design, but an intermixing of perspectives we can find, as Noam Chomsky describes, a natural language.⁸ Design thinking for all. Not an exclusive elite, but an earnest attempt at improving and enriching all of our lives. Collectively.