The Most Important Design Jobs Of The Future
"Design has matured from a largely stylistic endeavor to a field tasked with solving thorny technological and social problems, an evolution that will accelerate as companies enlist designers for increasingly complex opportunities, from self-driving cars to human biology. 'Over the next five years, design as a profession will continue to evolve into a hybrid industry that is considered as much technical as it is creative,' says Dave Miller, a recruiter at the design consultancy Artefact. 'A new wave of designers formally educated in human-centered design—taught to weave together research, interaction, visual and code to solve incredibly gnarly 21st-century problems—will move into leadership positions. They will push the industry to new heights of sophistication.'"
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
"Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be–to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose 'what if' questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).
Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud–seeding truck; a phantom–limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more–about everything–reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures."
(Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, 2013)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
TechNyou: Critical Thinking
"The resource covers basic logic and faulty arguments, developing student's critical thinking skills. Suitable for year 8–10, focused on science issues, the module can be adapted to suit classroom plans."
"TechNyou was established to meet a growing community need for balanced and factual information on emerging technologies. We are funded by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education (DIISRTE). We operate in partnership with the University of Melbourne, where our office is based."
CONTRIBUTOR
Liam BirtlesSHARE
The Social-Media Bubble is Quietly Deflating
"It might be over. Social–media companies drew only 2 percent of the venture capital headed to Internet–based enterprises last quarter, according to data published on Tuesday by CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture–capital investment. In the two–year stretch that ended in the middle of 2012, social–media companies took in at least 6 percent of overall venture capital invested in Internet companies each quarter. But for three of the last four quarters, those social startups have brought in 2 percent or less (with the outlier quarter largely the result of a huge investment in Pinterest earlier this year). The peak came in the third quarter of 2011, when social companies led by Twitter took in 21 percent of the total $3.8 billion in Internet deals by venture capital firms."
(Joshua Brustein, 16 July 2013, Businessweek)
Fig.1 Andreas L avl42 (27 March 2012). "Skyline with Cranes" [http://www.flickr.com/photos/avl42/6880333552/].
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy
"The approach we developed in working with our clients at Monitor Institute is what we call adaptive strategy. We create a roadmap of the terrain that lies before an organization and develop a set of navigational tools, realizing that there will be many different options for reaching the destination. If necessary, the destination itself may shift based on what we learn along the way.
Creating strategies that are truly adaptive requires that we give up on many long–held assumptions. As the complexity of our physical and social systems make the world more unpredictable, we have to abandon our focus on predictions and shift into rapid prototyping and experimentation so that we learn quickly about what actually works. With data now ubiquitous, we have to give up our claim to expertise in data collection and move into pattern recognition so that we know what data is worth our attention. We also know that simple directives from the top are frequently neither necessary nor helpful. We instead find ways to delegate authority, get information directly from the front lines, and make decisions based on a real–time understanding of what's happening on the ground. Instead of the old approach of 'making a plan and sticking to it,' which led to centralized strategic planning around fixed time horizons, we believe in 'setting a direction and testing to it,' treating the whole organization as a team that is experimenting its way to success.
This approach wouldn't surprise anyone in the world of current military strategy. Recent generations of military thinkers have long since moved beyond the traditional approach, most notably famed fighter pilot John Boyd. He saw strategy as a continuous mental loop that ran from observe to orient to decide and finally to act, returning immediately to further observation. By adopting his mindset (with a particular emphasis on the two O's, given our turbulent context), we can get much better at making strategy a self–correcting series of intentional experiments.
To provide structure to this fluid approach, we focus on answering a series of four interrelated questions about the organization's strategic direction: what vision you want to pursue, how you will make a difference, how you will succeed, and what capabilities it will take to get there.
The skills and mindset for today's strategic planning will come from continuously asking ourselves these questions about our organizations, programs, and initiatives. Once we accept Dwight D. Eisenhower's sage advice that 'Plans are useless, but planning is everything,' we will be ready to adapt to whatever curveballs the twenty–first century sees fit to throw."
(Dana O'Donovan & Noah Rimland Flower, 10 Jan 2013, Stanford Social Innovation Review)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
