Future of Design

Intro: Design is always changing, and with tech and design increasingly aligning, we're arguably headed to the most radical period of change in design history.

How radical will the design landscape of the FUTURE be, then?

The Boundaries of Design will Fade

As nearly everything becomes a connected device over the next few years, you'll see a collapse of the wall between graphic designers, technologists, interfaces designers, and so on. To design the cross-platform experiences of the future, everyone's thought processes will merge together. The distinction between industrial design, digital design, and system design will continue to fade.

The Designers will have to Play Outside the Known Field

As leaders of the organizations increasingly understand the ability of designers to use their talents and perspective to expose opportunities and understand and solve complex problems, designers will officially be called on to move outside the traditional boundaries of what a design effort is, into the true definition of businesses, and be responsible for exposing and building new frontiers.  

Greater Empathy in Design

A deeper empathetic understanding of how people experience a space or product will become more important. With an aging population, people may need an item to help them, but not necessarily want it . . . for example, an alert bracelet, or something that protects their safety. No one wants to be reminded they are aging, and the design of both products and buildings must respect the emotions of this audience, as well as meet their needs. And it also gave birth to the Cognitive research and Human-centered design will take on increasingly complex meaning.

Advertising and Marketing will be Part of the Design Process

Right now, a lot of companies design their product two years out, then go all the way to the factory before they even start thinking about advertising and marketing. That's not going to be successful in the future: For products to succeed in the future, everything will need to be super consistent. Design will stop happening in a vacuum, and advertising and marketing will become increasingly linked to the design process.

The Design is Never Finished

As everything becomes available everywhere—in the physical and virtual world—more and more people will respond to designs that offer a framework for personalization, individual expression, and adaptability. In other words, design will increasingly become less about what you take out of the box, and more about what that design offers over time as you live with it and will become the mechanical extension to your natural living being and the way you live.

Storytelling Storytelling and Storytelling

This is more a branding thing, but people today don't experience the Internet in a linear form. They don't watch just one video, or read one blog post about a product. Brands will need to stop trying to tell their stories linearly, and instead break them apart and tell them across a system. Marketing campaigns will start to look like subway roadmaps, and become more granular and complex. And storytelling needs to be emotional, human and fun. Video will take a huge role. In fact so big that within next 5 years, almost  75% of all content in the Internet will be Video content.

Designers will have to Become Psychologists

Owing mostly to the sheer number of devices that require management and interaction, consumers are surrounded by objects that have resulted in new complexities. The future is going to consist of more automated objects, and designers will need to take a deep dive into the workings of the human mind using psychographic, ethnographic, and sociocultural research to develop products that provide meaningful engagement that will simplify our lives. Yes I am talking about Human factors, Personas, Consumer research and again Cognitive research as well as Microtone analysis. And it’s happening already in many industries like Banking – where startup Banks are threatening the Big Banks, Healthcare –smaller players giving the leaders a run for their money, Hotel and Hospitality – Airbnb kind of disrupters are hammering the base of Hilton style chains, Transportation – we all know the Uber story etc. 

Bespoke Design vs Design for the Zillions

There will be a well-defined divide between designers in tech for the bespoke economy (i.e., at the scale of tens of users) versus designers in tech for the global economy (i.e., at the scale of millions of users). Designers for "fewer people" will deftly leverage technology that enables short-run advances like 3-D printing, as well as the many e-commerce front-end technologies that are now available. Designers for a "zillion people" will leverage technologies for evaluating their solutions at scale to test and retest their assumptions in large sample populations. They are at the melting pot where social science meets big data meets leading hundreds of designers, researchers, and engineers.

Emotional Design. Design for Emotions.

The fundamental of design didn’t change since we first discovered (or I should say proven) the emotional aspect to it. Remember the famous experiment by Harry Harlow in 1950 on Monkeys? It effectively proved that baby Monkeys are not only searching for food but they are searching for Food and emotional attachments to the food source (which was their Mother). That experience had led to the permanent addition to the Feeling factor to the design in addition to the Form and Function factor. So design thinking started to look like this:

Anyways, to summarize, when you encounter a design ( I am not talking about fine art here), it’s about ‘How does it make you feel?’. And that’s the fundamental design principle of the past and present that all FUTURE DESIGNERS will have to keep in mind. Because every winning design gets us emotionally attached to it. Just try to think what made Volkswagen Beetle the most long lived and loved car in history (Just to give you a clue: The vehicle has such an adorable design that Disney based a live-action film on the car: a thinking, self-driving Beetle called Herbie the Love Bug.)

Toast a Smarter Future with Intuitive Design

Objects have evolved from static to dynamic to smart and getting smarter with the adoption of human traits like autonomy and proactivity. In this context, form is no longer just about the physical attributes of an object, or a traditional interactive experience, it has expanded to adopt the dialogue between man and machine. As it stands, there’s no pattern for how to design a smart toothbrush, a VR experience, or a self-driving car. When virtual space becomes an interface, consistency in design shifts to become adapting to the user’s personality. Studies have shown that many people, in an effort to make emotional attachment to their smart objects, tend to like them to pets or children. People, on a whole, are anxious to establish a relationship with their technology, and they do so by creating a mental model for its behaviour. Remember that autistic child who wanted to marry ‘Apple Siri’?

Point is, smart design has to be intuitive. Intuitive design kind of represents human form but does not necessarily mimic it. And intuitive is not limited to gesture only. It also represent smell, taste and friendliness. Intuitive design adapts to your personality and learn from it. That’s why future of intuitive design lies in the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence). So soon in future, time will come when you will build a relationship to your car, your shoes, your watches the same way you do to your pets or friends. That will pave the way of the perfect bond between human and machines.

Theoretical Design Meets Practical Design

Usable/ practical design will become increasingly important, driven by the expectations and sheer volume of the baby boomer generation. While theoretical design embodies the critical aspects of safety and functionality, it does not cover everything. What about comfort, familiarity, emotional attachment and dignity? What about using design to define your identity; like a statement? We will see an evolved blend between universal design and livable design that will meet people's functional and emotional needs.

The Internet of Things will Lead to Internet of Spaces

The Internet of Things usually refers to technologies like Nest and Fitbit, but one does not make something "smarter" simply by placing a smart micro-processor in it and connecting it to a network. There will also be vast ramifications for the way we design products and spaces. Welcome to the era of your connected everything. Era of thinking machines; when the smart electric Car will drive itself towards the charging station and automatically pay the bill through its wallet or through your Bank account.

The Object will be Less Important than Ever

As products become increasingly more complex and in many ways act as portals to much broader functionality or capability, the object that delivers this will become even more important, especially as a means to attract and drive participation in an ecosystem. But the object being well designed will not alone be enough for success. The entire ecosystem and all its interaction points must be as well designed as the object itself in order for sustained adoption to occur. It is already happening to many industry such as Banking; where how effectively you design an Omni-Channel customer experience, holds one of the key to how you future-proof your Bank.

The Age of Interaction Design

Future of Technology is interaction/ interactive Design. It is about making the technology invisible to the user by providing immersive interactions through Design. Concept is not new but it’s visibility is. Technology has come to the age of Design; and now Design drives the Technology. Because we have started to realize that we have to love to use the technology and only an amazing immersive and interactive Design can make it happen.

Companies will Become Responsive as their Websites

The companies that succeed in the future will be the ones that can responsively react to what's happening. In the future, it'll be more important to design long-term systems that can pivot to change, optimize, and reinvent their products, without having to start from zero each and every time. Companies will have to become as responsive as their websites to meet the challenges of the future, in a literal sense: The way they are designed will have to respond in real time to culture, not just predict it all out.

Browsers will Feel like Native Platforms

Google's already been pursuing this with Chrome OS, Microsoft following the suit with Edge, but in the future you'll see browsers than can do a lot more than we're currently used to. They will stop being such a distinction between in-browser design and native design. Not only will most of our Apps live in the cloud, but they won't feel any different than the ones that live on your hard drive. 

Design will Become Important to Tech Companies, Financial Services Industry, Healthcare and Virtually Everyone

There will be a rise in large tech companies taking a greater point of view with respect to design. For example; IBM Canada is hiring about 1,500 designers to strengthen their design first approach. Capital One has gone one step further to acquire Adaptive Path which may help them to design the perfect future bank. This is not dissimilar to what occurred in the automobile industry as it began to mature—the famous point when Henry Ford refused to sell variations in the only colour that mattered, compared with GM, which diversified its designs to appeal to larger populations; resulted in rise of GM. We can see it already with Google's efforts around Android's enhanced "Material" visual language; and results are very obvious.

Relationship Between Data and Design with Grow Stronger

As we build more connected smart things that observe and measure us and our world, the relationship that design, functionality, and experience have with real-time data analytics will grow. So designers will need to know how to play with data, and use data to build new definitions of everyday objects as we make them smarter and more effective. For example when a Bank will undertake to redesign its website or customer acquisition experience, it will have to see how it’s customers are feeling now and what its competitors are doing etc.

Design Infrastructure will Drive a Company's Valuation

An organization’s ability to understand and utilize good design practices will become a key part of valuing a company. We are seeing this today in that our simple participation with an early-stage company increases their valuation. This idea will grow as a general measure of competency in the same way that a company’s operational infrastructure drives value. We will see design competency as an official aspect of how much a company is worth; if Apple hasn’t proved it already.

Its a Mobile World

World is going Mobile. And I am not talking about Mobile phones or Smartphones only. Mobile devices are everywhere. The concept of Mobile is far more complex than just Smartphones. It is true that Smartphones are the catalyst of Mobile revolution, but it has triggered the chain reaction which is allowing us to enter into the era of Smart and Connected devices. Imagine designing a Smart device experience that has no physical form. Only way you can feel its presence is how you interact with it. How do you design such a device which breaks the boundary of physical object and interactivity. Our future designers will have to master these design techniques that will effectively make the machines disappear and let us interact with it in a whole new way. Because soon we will be surrounded by Mobile devices that will completely change the way we live and do things.

Rise of XDs

Don’t we all love the X factor in design? Because the X factor is the unknown that we all are after. The X factor is the holy grail of all design thinking that gave the birth of UX or User Experience. Now we are moving beyond that. Welcome to the age of XDs – the Experiential Designers. Before taking a deep dive into the XD world, let’s talk about the Experience first. Experience is the combination of Design, Content and Engineering. Experiential designs are not a new concept. We all encounter the experiential designs around us. Billboards, Wayfinding signage, Art installations, Trade shows, Outdoor video installations etc., these all are examples of experiential designs in different forms. But what is changing is, we are slowly entering into the era of HYPER PERSONAL experiential design. Remember the movie Minority Report? Where Tom Cruise was greeted by his name often he entered into a public space, and the space knew his likings and behaviour patterns and space was able to customize itself as per his likings. That’s the World is about to unfold in front of us from pure fiction to reality. And question is, how are our designers preparing for that? How effectively we create HYPER PERSONALIZED objects, devices, public spaces and virtually everything that is able to reconfigure and redesign itself based on who is using it? Imagine the millions and probably billions of design combinations that you may have to fit into those configurations that also will have to work harmoniously to create that completely personal, engaging and immersive experience. Future designers must be able to successfully solve these challenges.

The Future Leaders

More and more, individuals trained in design will hold leadership positions. However, it will always take a broad understanding of a business and the vision and strength to take it somewhere. But strong business skills combined with design training and talent will become a potent combination.

So top 3 Future skills will be:

• Entrepreneurship

• Creative Designing

• Computer Programming

If you have any one or combination, you rule the future.

Conclusion: Design = Existence

Future designers will be those who can effectively use technology to amplify the design experience to a level where design blends perfectly with everything we do. It almost like we can’t see the Air but we can’t survive the withdrawal from it. With the rise of AI, XD and HYPER PERSONALIZATION, design will become so integral to our life that it will almost loose it’s physical form and will merge into our senses, our daily lives and our emotions. How effectively we can adapt to this new era or style, will define how we transform ourselves into successful Future Designer. Although fundamentals of design will not be shaken but how we approach and apply it, will. So be prepared to face this because this is probably the most interesting time for all of the designers like us when the entire industrial world is taking ‘Design First’ approach because it’s just not that they want to; because they have no other choice.