[tweetmeme]Ask a group of industrial designers what they will be doing in 5 years, or 10 years, or 50 years, and the answers you get will fall into one of two camps.
The first camp (I’ll call it “Old ID”) focuses on the qualities that make them valuable today: their ability to create physical objects of desire. They see their growth reflected in the innovation and efficiency of their processes. They see an evolution in the beauty and sophistication of the products they design.
Old ID fears that doing something different from this will dilute and diminish who they are. Disciplines like human factors or interaction design threaten Old ID. As a way to defend against these diverse points of view, Old ID will pay them lip service. Old ID will slap an anonymous LCD screen on a physical form and call it an interface. For Old ID’ers, “sustainability” is a way to market what they do instead of informing what they do. Old ID will engage in nuanced discussion about the industrial design they’ve always known instead of seeking out new motivations and meanings in design discourse.
The second camp (“New ID”) embraces ambiguity and diversity. New ID realizes that societal change is upon us and requires us to redefine industrial design. New ID understands that it is more important to stay relevant to people even if the cost is abandoning traditional form-giving. New ID says we must examine the “edges” of a product and focus less on the product itself.
At the recent IDSA conference in Miami, Old ID and New ID alike attempted to define the future of our discipline in the face of the massive change and harsh economic reality hitting us today. This challenging situation was described in different ways by a number of speakers. Closing speaker Jeneanne Rae said it well when she presented a chart illustrating the growth and size of today’s service industry vs. product industry. She described the economic and technology forces that lead to the now-dominant service economy and how our design practices will change to meet the demands of this economy. If all you do is design physical products (are you listening Old ID?), the picture wasn’t pretty.
Valerie Jacobs provided a similar impetus for change in her exceptional talk on future trends. With the rise of alternate economies people are creating their own business models that go beyond anything most of us are familiar with today. With the emergence of the simple and slow movements, maker culture, biophilia, and generative design practices, we are challenged to reconsider our role as designers. If you believe these trends are coming to fruition (indeed they are) then the “object” will no longer be held in such high esteem by the patrons of our work. It is critical that industrial design redefines itself in a mold that better serves this future.
Surya Vanka closed the conference by comparing our present society to darker times of our past: the black plague of the 14th century and the great depression of the 1920s and 30s. These bleaker moments in history gave birth to the renaissance, and a renaissance of design. Today we live in a time of ambiguity and uncertainty. The good news is these are precisely the conditions that designers are expert at navigating. We have the opportunity and responsibility to guide people with the experiences we design.
We are beginning to feel the impact of these big changes. Only by opening ourselves up to understanding these changes can we stay relevant to the people who experience our design work. If you were to ask me what I will be doing in the future, I hope I’ll be helping people understand and create the positive and human experiences that will grow out of this time of massive change.