Envisioning the future of design

Walls will not have light switches. Instead, motion sensors will detect when you walk in and out of a room, adjusting the lighting, temperature, aroma and digital wall decoration to your liking.

“Everything in your home is going to be connected to levels that we don't understand,” said Victor Ermoli, dean of the school of design at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). “The car will be connected to your communications device. Your glasses will be connected to a technology. Your watch, blender, washing machine, fans — every product will be connected.”

To imagine what it's going to be like 25 years from now in 2039, think back the same number of years to 1989.

“If we go back 25 years, FedEx changed my career,” said Frank Tyneski, chief marketing officer and chief of design and experience for Lz Labs. “Suddenly, I could work till midnight and get that rendering the next day. It changed the context of work. And, then, from there it kept advancing to more, faster and always connected.”

Tyneski sees the context of play changing over the next 25 years with virtualized experiences of recreational activities like boating and skiing replacing or augmenting the real thing.

“The only way you can grow a population and increase the quality of life and save the planet is to virtualize a lot of these experiences,” Tyneski said. “I won't call them unnecessary; I'll call them very necessary but I'll say the quality of the experience will be had in a different way.

“High-frequency use items are going to become better, more lasting and serviceable while low-frequency use items like your jet ski might become fully virtualized in a future scenario.”

Scott Clear, vice president of product development for Intersection, a San Diego design consultancy, said the traditional view of design as art has expanded to include thought, strategy and psychology. 

“Businesses are trying to understand the thinking processes, the problem-solving solutions that come from different perspectives and what it means,” Clear explained. “We're seeing a lot more designers getting their MBA's. The business of design has now become one of our key movements.”

The lines between design and engineering, as well as different types of design, will blur.

“A lot of people are dropping the word design because it has been abused or misunderstood,” Clear said. “They are trying to come up with new ideas to separate themselves because they are moving into where it's going in the next 25 years.”

Clear, Tyneski and Ermoli are as unconventional in their thinking as they are accomplished in their design careers.

An architect by training, Clear blends industrial design with expertise in business strategy, marketing, branding, material sciences, chemistry and manufacturing processes to help companies discover new innovation opportunities.

Ermoli was named as one the 25 “Most Admired Educators in America” by DesignIntelligence in 2011. Under his leadership, SCAD has gained international recognition for collaborating with top corporations on research and development projects and bringing entirely new products to market.

Tyneski is an award-winning designer and prolific inventor with more than 75 patents. He has led design for Dell, Kyocera and BlackBerry. He was only 30 years old in 1998 when he created the Motorola TalkAbout two-way radio, honored by Businessweek in 2000 as “Design of the Decade” and now featured in Smithsonian museum's permanent collection.

Not surprisingly, Tyneski is blazing new trails at Lz Labs in Switzerland.

“From my experience, large companies have their own internal culture and try as they might to change, it's kind of like somebody holding their breath,” Tyneski said. “They can do it for a period of time but eventually they breathe as they are. To move design to one of the center squares is something that people have become very good at talking about but not so good at actually practicing.”

Innovation is being “crowded out” by the cost-containment and workforce-reduction measures of many companies, according to Tyneski.

So he's now smack dab inside a private equity firm “where companies are being birthed” and “inserting design as the DNA” of a company. “It won't be easily displaced or forgotten or used as sort of a lemon fresh scent of the day to talk about,” he said.

Putting design at the very nucleus of a new company positions it for growth and makes it more attractive for acquisition. 

“We're making it good from the inception. As we progress through time, it'll get from good to better to great to hopefully world dominant leadership in the category,” he said.

If newly incubated companies will be driving future design, “a new breed of designer that doesn't have a name” will be at the wheel.

“It's a hybrid, somewhere in between industrial designer slash service designer — a designer that is much more a systems designer,” Ermoli said. “Every design process will start by doing thorough research and, then, the first thing that's going to be designed is the system.”

This systems designer will build relationships between people and organizations ranging from corporations to political parties to religious groups to governments. There will be less focus on products and more on systems.

What is this systems designer going to look like?

“It's an expert on relationships,” Ermoli explained. “It's an expert on experience. It's an expert on assembling the picture or the puzzle for a memorable, remarkable and positive relationship that we now call experience. It's somebody that knows the language of design because it will tell all these other designers and engineers what to do.”

New designers

Are design schools ready to produce this new breed and will companies recognize their importance and hire them?

“It's starting to happen under the service design flag,” Ermoli says “The service designers are the first to come into the equation, connecting these dots.”

Ermoli agrees with Clear that the lines between different types of designers will blur.

“The graphic designer will have to do more 3-D design, more interaction design,” he said. “That's happening but you still need a new type of designer that will get them together to design the system for the customer because everything is around the experience. And it's not an experiential designer.”

In chasing these new digital, interactive movements, the hands-on type of designer is disappearing, Clear says, adding: “The art of making is changing. We're seeing DIY to now the role of makers or making. They don't call themselves designers either. They just call themselves makers.”

The materials used to make things won't change that much, but Clear sees the role of materials processing changing.

“I don't look for new materials; I look for figuring out how to use materials in a better way,” Clear said. “What we call innovation a lot of times is not that we made a discovery in material; it's that we made a new discovery in repurposing something. We just turned our heads a few degrees and discovered new processes. So 25 years from now, I don't expect new materials but I do expect us to be able to do things faster, better and cleaner.”

Ermoli envisions intelligent materials that can go from soft and pliable to extremely rigid, depending on changing conditions. A 12-gallon soup pot, for example, could be made to collapse and virtually disappear for easy storage.

“There's a gigantic opportunity for a new material that can store energy,” Ermoli said.

This dream material, like the gas tank in a car, would allow you to store energy instantly and, then, use on demand.

“The person who comes up with this material will become the next Bill Gates by a factor of 10. It will disrupt the oil industry and everything. It will solve all the problems of electric cars. It will solve all the problems of your iPhone running out of power. It will transform the planet,” Ermoli said.

“Digital currency will replace real currency as we know it,” Tyneski said, “but it would be a very provocative future if raw material became a currency. Raw material that can be repurposed or refashioned into something else is a bit sci-fi but why not?”

Robotic movement

There's nothing sci-fi about robotics.

“Robotics could displace the arms race for low-cost labor forces and bring domestic or local manufacturing back to the United States,” Tyneski said. “When you look at the advances the past 25 years and project out, that's a very likely scenario.”

Advances in DNA sequencing has Tyneski thinking about people who are modified at the cellular level to never age versus elderly people, for instance, who are augmented through mechanical means with exoskeletons to boost their capabilities.

“This is Dean Kaman-type stuff but I can certainly envision that,” Tyneski said.

“People are looking for the next thing that's physically on you,” Clear says. “But I don't think it will be on you. It's going to be like an infrared camera that sees you walking into a room and says, ‘Good morning.'

“And you won't have a phone. It's going to be your house. It's going to be your car. It's going to be your office talking to you.

“When we look 25 years from now, it won't be a phone you're carrying around, it won't be anything. It will be your environment. Your environment is going to be recognizing you. Whether it's facial recognition or some form of biometrics, it's going to scan you — almost like your fingerprint. And, then, you'll be able to access everything through the environment that you're in.”

To understand the role of future technology, Ermoli suggests looking to the past.

“If we read history, we find that the most productive, in the sense of progress and thought and philosophy, medicine and mathematics, are the times when we had slaves to do the mundane work,” he said.