Note: This is Part 33 of the Ruminations for Aspiring Designers series.
Nowadays, aspiring designers have a lot to learn and more to make sense of.
It could be hard for some to imagine what designers were doing twenty years ago. Even in the last five years, the emerging professions of design – UX design, service design, or digital design at large – had been going through a lot of changes. Ten years ago, it was hard to imagine prototyping tool could be as good as Figma. Just five years ago, it was difficult to imagine AI-assisted UX research.
If the only constant is change, then the hidden constant is trend.
In fact, it’s quite entertaining and insightful to speculate about what roles designers might play in the future even when speculations vary among the curious.
Those speculations are important clues to designers, if we ever aspire to live up to a higher ideal than the market allows.
Here are my speculation on five immutable trends for the near future.
Synthetic Ubiquity
AI-generated artifacts are starting to permeate most of what we interact with. AI-assisted tools are starting to take over or dominate parts of what we do.
It’d be a bummer to be anxious about it. That’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Synthetic realities have always been with us. If there’s anything special about this coming wave of AI-enabled changes, it might be how prepared we are to learn and understand it – few people of the past barely had that advantage.
The only way forward is to make the effort to understand it and make meaningful use of it.
Data Fundamentalism
The ability to process, deduce and infer from, as well as to predict upon, data is becoming more and more important, even to common people.
“Fundamentalism”, as in data fundamentalism, does have a somewhat negative connotation. Besides having to fight the human biases in data and the systems who produce it, we also have to take care of a specific part of humanity – the part where data cannot represent. Some would even argue that “non-data” part is the most essential part of being human.
On one hand, data is becoming more and more integral and critical to our day-to-day life. In fact, it’s becoming inseparable from it, regardless of which connotation you have at it – positive or negative.
On the other hand, we’re facing the harder part of the job – curating the non-data part of humanity. When two people hanging out might mean sitting outside looking down at their own mobile phone (being “together alone”), it can be really hard to sustain the incomputable human spirit, not to mention human society.
There are technologies that move people away from each other and consequently reduce the livelihood of people and communities, and there are ones that get them together.
It’s designers’ responsibility to create the latter, as is everybody’s.
Human-Centricity
Add any word before “-centred design” and you’ve got a brand new jargon worthy of a trend cycle – humanity-centred design, life-centred design, environment-centred design, planet-centred design and eco-centric design! I’m hereby proudly announcing Noah-centred design!
Yet few things we do go beyond human-centred design (HCD) in any meaningful way. Arguably, a lot of things we do are actually machine-centred design.
Bearing that in mind, how we do things is merely becoming more and more human-centred.
That human-centricity not only comes from the usual suspects like empathy, compassion or design ethics, but also comes from the mere fact that technologies have bene liberating humans from a lot of work where it was done manually by human hand. Accordingly, humans are having more time for other types of things – both knowledge work and entertainment require design to be more human-centred than, say, a manual factory assembly line.
There’s no need to argue about all those shibboleths of centricity – knowing that it’s extremely difficult to deplace “human” from the centre of whatever jargon that’s in fashion.
Activist Enablement
Activism is empowered by technologies and is growing to challenge the technological and sociocultural establishment.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing good in the establishment. That’s just to say, change comes from multiple places and radical changes often come from outside the establishment.
Arguably, the establishment is often not very good at radical change – after all, its by-definition job is to keep the status quo.
The weakest link in the whole “acti-verse” is, duh, the human link. Sometimes, the same technologies designed to deceive and exploit us could also be utilized for good.
As far as activism goes, technology and design are only two pieces of a huge puzzle. There are many frontiers to learn, understand and explore: legal, artistic, communal or political.
The intersection of technology and design is powerful and beautiful, but it’s also just a hammer hailing all the nails if we don’t look out for other intersections.
Activism always happens at the intersections. To be intersectional, we need to be multidisciplinary.
Technopolitical Consequentialism
We are facing the political and technological consequences of our collective ignorance of, or indifference to, our decision makers’ inability to sustain the societal long view, intentionally or not.
In other words, we’re evolving in an almost more “natural” way, with all the cruelties and indifferences we’d expect when we look at how the “natural world” evolves – as a flowery plant competing for sunlight among shrubs, it just so happens that you’re slightly shorter than the others around you, therefore you die, the end. Just like the universe, evolution doesn’t give a shit about your point of view.
Let the philosophers debate whether anything can matter, but rest assured, only you can give a shit about your point of view, about your community’s, your society’s, and your planet’s. We all can.
Which means who makes decisions kind of matters a lot. Only effective and efficient oversight can lead critical decisions to the right hands (and minds), individually or collectively.
I don’t have to tell you that effective and efficient oversight is designed. By some people.
Conclusion
Design is hard, maybe even harder than you think.
It’s great to know why design is hard.
It’s pointless to stick to the tools, methods and jargons.
Instead, stick to the trends and the non-data part of your humanity.
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Noah Fang 