y2k+10
New decade! What’s hot for this year or the next few years? I’m going to tune myself into a nostradamian mode and do some palm-reading. Comments are more than welcome.
First-up, Nordkapp predicts the coming of Transfomation Design. Â Which is “the process of applying design methods and thinking to normally undesigned things and services”. I completely agree, designing stuff that is complex beyond comprehension is for the benefit of humanity. I mean economics, politics and all that should be redesigned to fit this day and age. A few examples:
Credit card reader for the iPhone. While this is a solution to a system that doesn’t exist yet, it’s consequences can already be foretold.
Interactive Democracy. Maximum citizen participation to politics would be achieved using eParticipation, eVoting eetc. forming eDemocracy. Utopia, you say? Wrong. Such things already exist in Switzerland and ..Sweden! Watch this space.
Dildonics. Designing sexxx. Philips has done it, there’s a conference for it. Heck, there’s even an open-source community for it!
2nd: I predict that the next few years will be the years of free as in free beer. Spotify has now paved the way in Europe and next in line is Voddler, that will come out of beta soon (with hopefully a lot of things fixed, absolutely the worst UI I’ve tried in a long time. What else do we need for free? Games? Probably. Books? Certainly. Beer? Unlikely.
3rd: More bullshit. Think about it. The world revolves around it.
4th: Less designed design. The tools of design mend to the level of intuition quickly. (except maybe Flash) People will become the designers of their own things and print them out with Cupcakes or equivalent.
5th: A greater division between controlled and uncontrolled applications and devices. iPhone will probably thrive another few years, but developers will eventually get bored of the soviet way Apple handles the appstore and probably move on to design for other systems as well. Symbian? If forced, yes. Windows Mobile? No. Maemo? Maybe. Android? Probably. Meanwhile, open-source will gain a greater foothold in the mobile world and phones will become more and more like small computers.
