the future starts now

abiders, cynics and designers

abiders: “To get along, go along”

a coward’s advice

cynics: “the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”

Oscar Wilde

designers: “Don’t ask what will be, ask what is desirable and make it so”

Harold Nelson

technological design and the future

Icarus’s Designed Flight

Daedalus and Icarus’s Technological Interface Design Failure

The successful design of technologies is not a new thing. In the past, archetypal designers like Daedalus and Hephaestus, as mythic creators of technology, have given insight into the challenges and risks of design in relation to technology. Daedalus designed the wings for himself and his son Icarus to escape imprisonment. The design was a success, but the human use was a failure. Sounds familiar.

Today’s designers can learn a great deal more about the nature of the role they fill and their relationship to their cultures from these ideal types. Good designers can and do act as agents in the process of imagining and innovating new technological products and by-products. Many non-designers do as well, which is less than ideal.

The result is that society and individuals are forced to adapt to technologies that were not created in response to their expressed desires. They get what someone wants them to have rather than something that is desired and serves their best interests.

The future asks:

“Which way are you going?”

“Where do you want to go?”

The responses to the future are:

approaches to the future

Dominant response to a technologically-defined future — reaction

Creating the future through the design and innovation of technology imposed on people leaves them with only one strategy — reaction, which is just one of several options available for approaching a created future. The recent introduction of technologies related to what is called ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) is a prime example of ‘reactive acceptance’. This approach to technological innovation is consistently labeled as progress.

Progress through technology

Technical progress was measured through the continual creation and innovation of new technologies, practical science. The reasons for the creation of different types of technologies typically arose from mercantile interests rather than the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, pure science. Serving the public’s ‘best interests’ depended on other forms of progress, not just technical progress.

Progress identified with technological development followed a pattern captured in the 1933 World Fair’s motto:

The 20^th Century’s motto from the 1933 World’s Fair

In the industrialized 19^th and 20^th centuries, entrepreneurs swarmed applied scientists, encouraging and supporting them to generate instrumental knowledge that could be monetized through new forms of technology. The course and purposes for new technologies were set by commercial interests who would sell the outputs of the new technologies to emerging markets and consumers. Benefits were secured through the consequences of ‘buyer beware’, rather than fiduciary accountability.

The 20^th Century’s motto elaborated

Cultures, societies, and individuals were shaped by the technologies they adapted to or failed by. The process embedded in the idea of progress at the time did not serve the ‘best interests’ of the end user, but did serve the needs and desires of consumers through persuasion and enticement. The challenge is to find processes that secure the best interests of everyone in the design and innovation of technology.

Some excellent thoughts concerning the nature and impact of technology when embedded in society have been made by scholars like Albert Borgman, a professor of the Philosophy of Technology at the University of Montana. His book, Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for our Country (2006), is exemplary of this focus. His introduction to the notion of design and technology is:

“While political virtues of justice and stewardship have lost their vigor, the virtue of taking moral responsibility for the built environment, the virtue I have been calling design, is still struggling to be born (pg. 130).”

Other approaches for creating the future

The process of technological progress formed in the 19^th Century is still in play in the 21^st Century without modification. Even with the ever-increasing rapid advancement and adaptation of computer technologies and their effects on society, there is little effort being put into redesigning the dominant process defining technological progress. But maybe it is time. Maybe people are tired of adapting to any and everything coming at them as inevitable from the tech world.

What should the new motto for technical progress in the 21^st Century be?