- Greetings everyone.
Today's presentation is about the design of the future
and the future of design.
So these are two interrelated connected things,
but we talk about both of them separately
as a part of this conversation.
So let's first talk about the design of the future.
(upbeat music)
So one of the things that designers do overall,
whether they are product designers, graphic designers,
architects, interior designers, etc.
One of the things that they do
is they look at current conditions
they look at the needs of people as they exist right now.
And when they design something.
And when that something that's been designed
goes out into the world,
when it converts from an idea into a tangible product,
when it converts from a concept into a building,
it actually happens in the future.
So you might be designing something now,
but it goes out into the world a few months, a few years,
a few decades down the road.
So designers are always designing for the future.
So if you think about that,
one of the things that designers do
is they imagine existing conditions,
but they're actually designing for the future.
So in a sense,
you can see design as an activity
that creates potential futures for us all.
So that's one thing that designers do.
We look at current conditions and imagine what the future
could look like.
So all sketches, all prototypes,
all renderings,
all the visual expressions that you see from designers are
in some sense scenarios of what the future could look like.
So very often we hear about two things,
technology and society.
And very often we imagine that technology is a force
that changes society.
Technology changes society to lead us to future conditions.
That's a dangerous way of thinking.
We cannot think purely in terms of technology
as a driver of human society.
It's important to think in circular ways.
So just as technology can drive certain social conditions,
social behaviors, similarly,
it is social conditions and people who drive technology.
So the relationship between technology
and society is a mutual relationship.
It's not that one drives the other,
is that both influence each other, moving us forward.
So one thing to keep in mind is not to imagine the fact
that digital technologies will really transform who we are.
Yes they will, but similarly, we by being who we are,
we transform digital technology as well.
So the future conditions,
depend upon us as social beings,
and also depend upon us as creators of new futures.
And if you think of designers as creators
of potential new futures,
one person that comes to mind who has been thinking about
this quite a bit is a designer.
And actually someone who's referred to as a visual futurist
Syd Mead, and what you see in this rendering,
this illustration is one potential imagined future
that Syd Mead came up with
and Syd Mead is a transportation designer.
So he's known for his amazing designs of vehicles.
He designed sets for science fiction movies.
He has done a series of these environmental graphics,
renderings presentations about the future.
So he's referred to as a visual futurist.
And in this quote,
you can hear him saying,
"in visual futurism, the line between total fantasy."
So what you might imagine the future to look like,
"and what's futuristic is a thread of reality."
So any imagined future essentially is how you
as a human being in the current time,
imagine the reality to be in the future,
so it's a thread that connects the now to the future,
the present to the future, right?
And so Syd Mead has done an enormous amount of work
in thinking about what those potentially futures
could look like.
If you have seen the movie Blade Runner, Syd Mead
was responsible for the design of the sets of Blade Runner.
He's responsible for the design of the vehicles
that are seen in the movie.
It's what you see here in this illustration,
this rendering is a sketch of the vehicle
that was referred to as the Spinner.
So you can see that he has imagined
what these future conditions could look like,
what transportation of the future could look like.
And that's what he's expressed in these drawings.
You see some more renderings as well.
You can see entire cities with people wearing certain kinds
of clothing, vehicles, transportation mechanisms,
all on a very large scale in this landscape,
you see people standing,
you can see people's clothing as well.
So in a sense,
it's an expression of future conditions
for the perspective
of what we will wear, what we will drive,
how we will live and what our environment
could look like in the future.
Being a transportation designer,
he has spent quite a bit of time thinking about the vehicles
of the future.
What could those look like?
And here you see some examples of
some potential transportation design concepts.
And this is also another sketch of his,
which is an imagined landscape for an entire city,
an urban environment and its relationship to nature.
So you see some of these really incredible expressions
of what the world could look like in the future,
by these visual futurists and designers
who imagine what the material landscape would look like
a few years, decades or centuries down the road.
So that is one aspect of design.
So the process of design actually is about imagining
what the future could look like.
On the other hand,
one of the things we can do in this presentation
is think about, OK, so we know that design in some sense,
plays a very important role in shaping our future, right?
So the design of the future,
but what about the future of design itself?
How will the practice of design change in the future, right?
We know how product design, graphic design,
architectural design, landscape design, interior design,
etc., how they operate now,
but how could design itself change in the future?
So let's look at some of the changing conditions
that we see right now that could shape the future of design.
The one thing that's been happening,
one thing that designers are thinking about is
what is the role that design plays
in practices of innovation?
And so they often, companies think of innovation
in very, very broad terms.
They think of innovation as any new ideas
that can be productized, that can be marketed,
that can be sold and bring some form of value, right?
And that value is value to people, value to the company,
financial value, as well as social value,
environmental value.
So value is really important
in some of these definitions of innovation.
So what role does design play?
And there's more and more conversation about the fact
that the way designers think,
the way designers practice their craft,
the practice of design itself can play
a really important role in engaging other disciplines
and making innovation real.
So that's one really important way
by which design is changing.
It's being a broader,
deeper and more important role
in the practice of innovation.
Another thing is the prominence
of this whole area that's referred to as design thinking.
And we've talked about this in this class before.
Design thinking can be broken out
into several different components,
including everything from being empathic
to the people that you're designing for,
to being collaborative,
to being at ease with ambiguity.
So this diagram essentially shows
all of the different aspects or components
of what design thinking could be like,
but there's recognition,
especially in the business world about the fact
that designers have a unique way of thinking.
And that unique way of thinking can be really beneficial
in a very broad sense about how an organization operates,
what an institution does, how a company behaves.
And so it's an important piece of what design does now,
and it will continue to be so into the future as well.
Another really important thing.
This is happening quite a bit all over the world
is something that's referred to as the Maker Movement
and the DIY Movement.
So the Maker Movement essentially refers
to people who like to make things
and are more energized and empowered
by various things happening in society
at the moment that allow them to be successful
at making things,
people who have ideas, who launched companies.
The DIY Movement, essentially DIY refers
to do it yourself.
So people who instead of going out and buying products
that are off the shelf, they want to make things themselves.
They also want to make things for themselves,
but also to be able to create a new business,
to be able to sell them to others or the like-minded people.
So there is an enormous groundswell in the world right now
about people who want to make things themselves,
people who don't want to buy things off the shelf
and have several things happening
that we talk about in just a moment.
Around them in society that actually enables them
and empowers them to do so.
One of those things is referred
to as desktop manufacturing
also referred to as additive manufacturing,
also referred to as rapid prototyping
also sometimes referred to as 3D printing.
So what does the first two is the prevalence
and the availability at very low cost,
relatively low cost of machines that can be used
for rapid prototyping,
machines that you can feed a computer file to,
a CAD file to, a solid virtual solid model to
and it'll create a part for you, right.
So there's quite a bit of this happening these days.
You can buy these 3D printers and rapid prototyping machines
for fairly low cost.
So what this has done is it has given people
the ability to build things themselves.
So if you have some software program,
if you can create a virtual model on the computer
of a product that you're interested in,
or are interested in designing
or interested in manufacturing,
you can actually create that model and have it built
by machines like these at your home, right?
So this whole idea of desktop manufacturing
that you don't need massive factories to make things
as long as they are simple and not too complicated,
you can actually make some of these things at home.
So these new technologies of rapid prototyping
have made it easier for people to be able
to make things themselves.
And that is one of the things that is fueling
the DIY and maker movement today.
Another important thing that we see these days
is this notion of crowd funding.
What does that mean?
What are the things become really easy these days
or become a lot easier these days is
to get funding for your projects
by reaching out to a broad range of people.
So there are companies like Kickstarter, for example,
who allow you and encourage you
if you have an idea for a new product,
but you don't have the money to actually take it to market,
you can present this in the form of video, explanation,
etc., on the Kickstarter website.
What it does is it sends this out to a broad range of people
who can then access that website,
who can access your video,
who can see what you've done.
And if they find that interesting,
they can invest in your idea.
So a large crowd can fund your project.
And these are strangers.
These are people who you don't know,
but through access to that website,
you can actually raise money
from a large number of people.
And that crowdsourcing crowd funding model
has made it easier for people without any funding
to support themselves,
to create these new businesses,
new markets and new products, new companies.
That's another thing.
One thing that will become more important
as we move forward
is this whole idea of sustainability.
We know that we only have one planet on which we live,
and we have to make sure that this one planet
is sustaining life for us as human beings,
but also life for all the plants and animals, all organisms,
all living things on this planet.
You only have one of these planets and we have to make sure
that we do not destroy this planet,
that we have to engage in the right kinds of behaviors
by design, to make sure
that we minimize environmental impact.
We clean up our oceans.
We reduce the pollution and we take care of the planet
in as many ways as we possibly can
because it's the only one we have.
So sustainability will become more important
in several ways.
Number one,
it'll become more important because consumers
will ask for it.
Consumers will want to have products
that are more sustainable.
Another thing that'll happen is
there'll be more regulations.
There are more regulations from governments,
from regulating bodies to ensure that companies,
individuals, designers, engineers, businesspeople
do not harm the environment more than
they already have, but actually keep it in check.
So more demand from consumers and more regulations
from regulating bodies will be two really important
things that will drive sustainability in the world.
So that's one other really important factor
to consider in the future of design.
The way design happens today, it's entirely global.
So things could be designed in one part of the world
by one designer,
they could be prototyped in another part of the world.
They could be manufactured in the third part of the world.
Warehouse in a fourth part of the world
and sold in a fifth part of the world.
So this is not unusual for companies
to have multiple satellite locations,
vendors, long supply chains,
distributed supply chains, where things are designed,
conceptualized, manufactured, stored,
sold all over the world.
This is a model that exists right now.
It only continues to happen more so in the future
because what companies are trying to find
is where is the best cheapest, most affordable,
fastest speed for me to get products made, right?
And that will continue.
At the same time though there's more
and more emphasis on thinking about the local.
The problem with being global is that you have
to engage in an enormous amount of transportation.
If I'm designing something in California
and getting it manufactured in China,
there's an enormous amount of transportation that happens
between the two countries and that leads
to pollution, that leads to environmental impacts
and therefore, one of the things that has been talked about
is the idea of making things locally,
using local materials and local resources.
That cuts down tremendously,
the amount of environmental impact
that we might have by cutting out the transportation.
But the other important thing it does is
it provides local employment.
So being local has two really important benefits.
One is the social benefit.
It provides employment.
It keeps funds, it keeps money in the community itself.
And second, because it cuts down on transportation,
it minimizes environmental impact substantially.
So we will have global
but with that in mind,
we'll also have lots of emphasis on the local,
such as things like farmers markets or local farmers.
It's important for us to buy produce
that is made there are fruits and vegetables
that are made in that are grown
in our neighborhood rather than getting them shipped
from halfway across the world, right?
So there'll be an emphasis on the global
and the local together.
What we can do locally we should,
what we have to rely on globally we will.
And that's thing one important trend
that will continue to happen in the world of design.
Another thing that's really important
is that of transdisciplinarity.
In the future, we will be tackling,
addressing, solving problems
that will be a lot more complex than we see today.
The problem also will accelerate
a lot faster than we see today.
And for that we have to work in teams.
And this is an example of something
that we are doing at Arizona State University.
We have students working in teams
from business, from design,
from sustainability, from graphics,
from engineering, and together,
we come up with solutions for the problems
that we are solving right now.
And one really, really important thing
is to think of this notion of thinking in systems.
We have to realize that any one thing that you do
in the world could have lasting unexpected consequences
as part of the world.
It's like dropping a rock in a pond
you have these ripples that emanate
and those ripples could go from the center
of the lakes, to the shores of the lake.
And that is an impact that we have to consider.
And therefore, if you think in systems,
if you recognize that everything is interconnected,
you drop one thing here it has impact over there.
It'll force you to think, it'll help you to think in systems
and therefore when you design something new,
you'll keep in mind the fact
that it could have lasting impact somewhere
completely unexpected
and far away from you where you are right now.
So what we've done in this talk is we've looked
at two key things.
We've looked at the design of the future.
Essentially what that means is that designers,
when they come up with new ideas
they are being sent out into the future,
anything that you design now can only be realized
into the future.
So that's one aspect of design.
And the second thing we looked at was the future of design,
the profession of design itself,
how is it changing and what are some of the key factors
that'll change design for the future.
Thank you very much.