The future of Industrial Design

Heres an email copied verbatim that I sent to a lecturer of mine. It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense so I’ll probably come back and clean it up, but for now I just want to put it up because I’m proud of it.

Hi Vasilije,

This is simply a follow up email to a conversation we had some time ago after your Research and Conceptualisation lecture on technology clustering. A word of warning – this is a long email, much longer than I originally intended. I understand completely if you do not have time to read though this and the documents I have linked to, especially considering you are likely working your way through our recently submitted research reports. Nevertheless I am sending this email because I have considered these issues for some time, I feel quite strongly about them and I value your opinion on these and related matters as someone who may be able to provide me with some further “food for thought” – for lack of a better term.

Firstly I was wondering whether you had any time to look into the theory of disruptive technology, expounded by Clayton M. Christensen?

Secondly I wished to bring to your attention the article I briefly mentioned by Kurzweil regarding the predicted technological singularity. The following is a link to the New Scientist article which you can access through the university database subscription: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=908239901&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=20928&RQT=309&VName=PQD

While there are certainly flaws in the argument, and although I do not believe that such radical change is likely to take place in such a compressed time frame, I do believe that the concepts regarding nanotechnology are relevant to Industrial Designers for a number of reasons, primarily because as it is seen in this article, the introduction of such technology could seem like a complete paradigm shift in manufacturing. At the moment the idea of a material that can change its properties to suit a designer’s whim seems both overwhelming and the ultimate “black box” solution to any design problem. Of course rapid prototyping technology is progressing at an extremely quick pace, with current machines able to produce parts consisting of a smooth gradient between two or more discrete materials, which along with other advancements points very much to inevitable creation of the aforementioned “grey goo” (although the term here is used without its generally negative connotations). T
he ubiquitous availability of such a material also calls into question the role of the Industrial Designer in producing a product solution.

The rise of websites such as Make and Instructables (I suggest you google these sites if you have not seen them ‘in the flesh’) points to a growing trend of DIYers who are actively fighting the generally accepted increase in consumerism in the developed world. To keep my point short, I believe that the intersection of this community and the ID industry will happen as the rapid prototyping industry moves along both axis of the disruptive technology scale (as plotted against current manufacturing processes), creating products that are both cheaper and more accurate, while allowing the use of multiple materials, etc. Interestingly the open source Fab@Home and RepRap rapid prototype projects would fall under ‘new market’ disruptive technologies that are likely to disrupt incumbent rapid prototyping technologies. Although currently aimed at the DIY community they are likely to encroach on (both current and foreseeable) market segments such as design consultancies utilising small-
office rapid prototyping machines from large companies such as Z-Corp as their accuracy improves.

As I stated above, these developments are likely to cause some disruption in the ID industry. Considering this it is my conclusion that the ID industry will, at the advent of ubiquitous home fabrication, become primarily an intellectual property (IP) industry, dealing in ideas. IP as used here is a catchall term covering copyright (and copyleft), trademarks, registered design and patents, etc. The need to embrace open source design is significant, as the large DIY market, coupled with the tools that enable them to create products of equivalent function, form, etc to those produced through ID suggest that although a large number of these created products would not be of relative merit, a number of them would be, despite the creators lack of relevant ID training. The iterative nature of open source design suggests that all of these designs (whether sub-par or successful) then have the ability to be improved further by other users. For ID to not embrace this would be akin to th
e music and movie industries currently fighting the rising trend in digital distribution and their unwillingness to develop new business models to create a revenue stream from these technologies. We briefly touched on this topic last year in the ID Theory lectures when we discussed the ability of designers to license designs for a fee, under various forms of copyright and open source, and the related issues such as liability, etc. I believe that there is a need for ID to embrace open source design, but also believe that there will be a place for Industrial Designers in such a market place, as a source of ‘professional insight’, level of resolvement of a design, quality assurance, material selection and aesthetic appeal, etc.

On a somewhat related tangent, I came across this recent article in the NewYorker, which discusses multiple simultaneous scientific discoveries, the idea of genius, and towards the end provides a round-about justification for design as a cross between art and science, since so often we see multiple designs utilising similar innovations, yet aesthetically and functionally they are singular works. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/?currentPage=all

Finally, if you are a fan of science fiction you may enjoy reading Accelerando by Charles Stross, which he conveniently released under a creative commons license. You can find a downloadable version here: http://www.accelerando.org/book/ . The book is essentially a well-conceived prediction of the events of world leading up to, through and after a technological singularity in the not-to-distant-future through the eyes of a number of related recurring characters. Interestingly there are parallels not only with the first article I linked to in this email but also the second, which suggests that many business models in the future are likely to be in the selling of ideas and concepts.

If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate your effort in reading what is essentially a short and completely unsupported essay, however I feel strongly that there is potential to use the information in these articles in a positive and practical way to shape the way the ID industry heads in the near future.

I banged it out in probably an hour and a half after I had a lot of these half-formed ideas banging around my head for the last few weeks while I did assignments I didn’t want to do. Often that’s what happens – for some reason doing things I don’t want to do (whether they were initially interesting or not) really gets my creative juices going… on other things. Most of the time that dissipates but this time the planets are in alignment and I’m trying to make the most of it. You can see it here with this blog – I should have another post up tomorrow.