Process

Selected inspiration, research, and experiments

December

Initial Language:

Original Inspiration

We are interested in studying and experimenting with the potential visual landscape of the next decade, as influenced by near future technologies.

Goal: Bring Awareness

Most of the activity and growth in the space of near-future technologies (so far) has been outside of mainstream visibility.

Original Concept Interpretations:

What is your point of view about design as it relates to your area of interest?

“Good” design can bring contemporary or near future technology into mainstream society.

Based on your research, explain the important historical or cultural influences of your area of investigation.

Many of the technologies that we as a culture have grown to accept as fiction are becoming increasingly available. We are now entering the beginnings of the hypothetical world that has been prophesied for the past half century.

Why do you believe your area of investigation is important to the wider design community. How could it serve them? Why should we care?

Designers need to adapt to new trends and technologies. We aim to start a conversation about designing this immersive technological world. You should care because if you are alive in 10 years you are going to be witness to it.

Define your expectations and learning goals for your project.

Research technologies that currently exist or are going to exist in the near future and how they may be integrated into everyday life.

January

Degree Statement: 1/25

Technologies that our culture had once accepted as fiction are now increasingly available; many more exist just outside of mainstream visibility. We have entered the beginnings of a previously fictional world that has been prophesied for the past half century. As designers, we are responsible for adapting to this futuristic environment.

What are some creative ways identity systems can be influenced by this new technological landscape? What will happen to printed media as more interactive and efficient ways of gathering information become available? How can we bring this technology and futuristic thinking to mainstream society?

Informed by contemporary/near-future technologies and futurist theory, we will envision the potential visual landscape of the next several decades. We aim to start a conversation about designing in this immersive technological world.

Current Reading Material

Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things
David Rose 2014

In the tradition of Who Owns the Future? and The Second Machine Age, an MIT Media Lab scientist imagines how everyday objects can intuit our needs and improve our lives. We are now standing at the precipice of the next transformative development: the Internet of Things. Soon, connected technology will be embedded in hundreds of everyday objects we already use: our cars, wallets, watches, umbrellas, even our trash cans. These objects will respond to our needs, come to know us, and learn to think on our behalf. David Rose calls these devices—which are just beginning to creep into the marketplace—Enchanted Objects.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Douglas Rushkoff 2014

People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, and compile knowledge. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed. Well, the future's arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this "now" is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.

Who Owns the future?
Jaron Lanier 2014

Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks.

Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.

February

Research Update:

Beginning our research, we needed to gather an idea of what the near future may offer us, attempting to place ourselves in a landscape of the next couple of decades. To accomplish this, we began reading books on popular futurist theories and ideas.
After getting an idea of what the future may be like, we realized that all of our research is theoretical, and whatever we produce will be speculative in nature.

To speculate
v: To form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence.

This lead to us researching the area of speculative design, which could be roughly described as:

A contemporary area of graphic design encompassing self-generated provocations, experimental client-based projects, and commissions tackled with a high level of critical investigation.

We wish to speculate how design will be treated in the future; how emerging technology will change the way people behave and interact. To design in this emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches.

Decisions we have made and why:

We have decided to each pursue a specific field of graphic design within our visual landscape of the near future. By focusing separately on Identity Systems and Print media, we can individually research two fields that naturally overlap.

Questions still to be answered:

We have decided to each pursue a specific field of graphic design within our visual landscape of the near future. By focusing separately on Identity Systems and Print media, we can individually research two fields that naturally overlap.

In the future, we will see more:

+ Experiences
+ Integrated technologies
+Modularity
+Customization / Personalization of technology

Direction Update:

The Death of Print

With the rise of screen based technology, it has become more efficient to access, store, and consume written information digitally. Because of this, many believe that printed media will be consumed by this technology. Rather than succumbing to a hellish future of screen-based technology, I wish to make printed media more “enchanted” - integrating contemporary technology into physical printed media.

The Future of Brands

I will aim want to visualize the future for people so that they may understand it better and bring these technologies to a more mainstream attention. I will set the stage for Evan’s project, providing people with  a visualization of a more relevant future. I am currently experimenting with using brands to do so.

March

Guidelines for the future:

What are the rules of Future Design? How can we outline the inevitable principle of brands of the future. What are the things brands will have to consider?

Inspiration: Material Design

http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html

Affordances:

Instant Everything

5G mobile speeds in the next several years with inevitably with near zero latency and totally universal.

Internet of Things

Completely integrated and connected technologies from the moment you wake up to the second you go to to sleep

Motion

As we move into a more dynamically-capable visual world, our need for brands to (adapt) to this environment quickly increases.

Responsiveness

Due to the ever changing shape and format of the media with which our brands project themselves onto, brands must be responsive and able to express themselves in a number of different ways and shapes.

"The complexity of this conversation to this point has been: 'Do we animate or do we not animate?'" he continues. But augmented reality—or really any interactive digital space in which a brand tries to do something more than simply announce its presence—poses all sorts of challenges. "How do you express [a mark] physically and digitally? What kind of life does it have? How is it born in that moment, and how does it go away? How does it tell you why it’s there? Those are all really interesting questions." —Michael Hendrix, IDEO ( via Fast Co.)

Format Magazine

Cover

The cover would contain information such as the banner, issue number, some sort of information that is personal to the user. Image and type would be pulled from the content in the magazine to create a uniquely generated ‘collage’ that offers a preview of your content

Issue number: The number of the issue out of every issue ever printed. (Shows range of company)

How is content chosen?

With integration of the ‘profile’ it could be pulled from all these sources without any input from the user. Should we limit the service to only exist through a database service like this? For now, probably. Where is the focus? Probably not on how Could someone create a basic, less personal account beforehand?

Where is the content pulled from?

Anything that a ‘profile’ is connected to.
Social Media
Personal interests
Information gathered from IOT connected devices
Personal info (Google calendar, work, other life things)

What are the possible physical options?

Economy and premium paper. VS  one type of paper
Color and BW VS just
sizes: pocket, book, larger ‘magazine’ size
Binding: ones that make the most sense would be a folding or perfect bind type deal. Is a stitch too far off?I feel like it makes sense now to have less options. But could all of these also be based on what the profile thinks you need for the time you order an issue?

Other things to consider:

How could existing magazines and information providers integrate with this serviceCould pages respond to augmented reality?

Rough Print guidelines:

1.Print must be efficient and environmentally friendly
2.With the drastic decrease in printed media, the content that remains will become better designed and more considered
3.Print will become more personal and created for the user
4.Printed media will have to integrate with technology (AR)

April

Project Abstract

We have entered the beginnings of a previously imaginative world. Technologies that our culture had accepted as fiction are now becoming increasingly available and as designers we are faced with adapting to this new environment.
How will brands exist in this new dynamic landscape? What happens to printed media as more interactive and efficient ways of gathering information become available? We aim to start a conversation about design in this immersive, technological world.

Informed by contemporary technologies and futurist theory, we will envision the potential visual landscape of the next several decades through a series of speculative and critical projects.

The Future of Brands:

Took a step back and looked at research. Found that the argument I wanted to make was about the technology. Decide to continue using hypothetical brands to tell a story, more critical. Don’t have the ability to show realistic examples.
Result = Animation

Narration

"In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit itssensations." - Neil Gross 1999

In the future, there will be an internet of things.

Ideally more and more things will be connected to the internet, and you’ll know when something is. (Show asterisk in application)

When everything is connected, everything will change. From the moment you wake up to the second you go to bed, you will be at the center of an internet

Your apartment will know what time you have breakfast and will prepare itself for such.

The way you go to work will change, hailing driverless cabs commanded by interfaces we wear on our wrists. Autonomous vehicles will render traffic practically obsolete.(Taxi Smart watch welcome screen, pick me up screen, time remaining)*Surge Pricing critical

Unmanned vehicles will even change the way we deliver things. (FedNext)

*The way we monitor our young will change, allowing us to analyze their growth and development in new ways.(Othermother)
We must remember that useful implementation of these technologies is paramount. (Baby Battle Royale by OtherMother)
With all of our data floating in the cloud, why not put it to good use?(cloud graphic) why not benefit from its use ^
Why not have your data (power everything?) The ads on the street you see could be only relevant to you. (There’s no reason our printed media couldn’t be as relevant.)(Things Only You Like on billboards, AR)

We are entering a new world of super personalized technologies.

Our Story

Future Sight aimed to investigate tomorrow. 

To guide this process, it was decided that there were assumptions we could make about certain near future technologies and their inevitable developments. These would serve as affordances with which we could begin to outline the silhouette of a world we could expect with realistic potential. Among these were increases in internet connection speeds and internet availability, increased mobile speed standards, and an overall increase in the connection of devices and things.

Our discussion began circling around the theme of the Internet of Things and the excitement it had stirred in recent years. How will our world change when everything is connected to the  internet? Your shower could know who you are and what temperature you like your water. Our preferences in virtually anything can be quantified and reused, allowing for the tailoring of our world to be more relevant to us specifically.

During our hypothesizing it came to our attention that the more and more ways in which we were connected to the internet, the more data we were by nature producing. Coupled with the notion that our data could be used for our benefit and a society thirsty for efficiency, we had a recipe for a world where relevant content could easily be bountiful and standardized.
What happens when the data we produce every day simply by interacting with the internet is used intelligently for us? Will advertising finally stop being a burden to its viewers when the billboards we see are for things only we like? How could this go on to affect other industries; what if our printed media some how became as relevant?

Check out our Project log here