Costas Bissas – The ‘we’ in today’s innovation

You cannot be living somewhere in the western world in the year 2008 without having witnessed the effect of new technologies in your daily routine. The simplest example being the mobile phone tucked in one of your pockets as you walk out of home. New media and technologies are part of our everyday life, whether it is a new object, service, a newly discovered website or a social networking platform. ‘Being Digital’, is becoming part of our essence.

Emerging technologies are adopted by manufacturers and are at our disposal a short time after their conception. Their implementations shift our lifestyle in such a way that a number of gerunds have seen themselves entering the realm of digital media; surfing the web for reasons like shopping, banking, traveling, researching, networking, dating, learning, sharing and so on. We can now process a great amount of information and gain access to unlimited sources of knowledge.

During the post World War II years, Europe set out from being a number of poor and battered individual countries to a prosperous and wealthy economic union. This voyage was significantly aided by industrialization and investments that in turn led to growing markets and incomes. By satisfying the basic needs of their people, the next step was inevitably to comfort their life, following the American example of consumerism. In that time, the profession of the industrial designer was positioned between the old notion of the craftsman and the new age of mass manufactured products. The designer had to be able to reinvent old rituals, identify new needs and make them relevant. It is the time when ‘star’ designers came to the forefront with the ability to extrapolate traditional skills, such as carpentry masonry and jewelry, to be enjoyed by a wider audience. What put them on the leading edge was giving form to the function with the use of the new technological developments made available, responding to the requirements of the market at that point of history, reflecting the sociological, financial, ethical and political status.

Today the surplus of products that surround us is the result of this long lasting voyage. It has become the consumer’s demand for the function to be fulfilled. Any other case is nothing more than a bad or at least problematic product. And if the technological achievements of the last 30 odd years have made us digital, to quote Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, in his talk in the CHI 2008 conference, “What about being human?”. Where does the position of an industrial designer lay in a post-industrial age? An answer can be sought by observing the transformations that have been occurring in the world of design. Traditional industrial design consultancies like IDEO shift to a form of strategy development consultant, taking up a role that used to be part of marketing agencies and marketing campaigns use the terms ‘brand experience’ and ‘reason to believe’ as a point of sale. Academics and design clusters have been bridging the gap between art and design, advocating the notion of object semantics and poetics, delving into the visual impact of objects. Such signs have been pointing designers to the direction of designing complete experiences rather than designing for the sake of the 3D products. The physical object thus becomes a materialization of an intangible idea and process. It is the way Kodak started off becoming a photographic reproduction business, with the motto: ‘you press the button, we do the rest’ in 1888 or how Apple developed the interconnected communication of all its i-devices through its i-platform.

These signs denote change. Even if this word is lately turning into a trend due to American politics, its meaning should not be disregarded. Modern world is indeed in need of substantial alterations that will enhance our way of life based on the grounds of the existence of technology. In an event hosted by Nesta in London, the audience had the opportunity to hear UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and songwriter and political activist Bob Geldof speak about the edge of innovation and why it is so relevant today. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, stated the reasons that inspired him to remotely connect scientists and their data, while emphasis is put on the openness, accessibility, connectivity, networking, democratization and decentralization qualities that derive from the Internet.

Of course the sole designer will never become obsolete, as there will always be a market need for products with the distinct signature of its craftsman-creator, but that is not where innovation lays any more. New technologies and media require the understanding of both material and immaterial for their potential to be maximized, and a wide range of skills are important to make sense out of all their complexity. This plethora of skills can concurrently exist and flourish by merging groups of individuals coming from different backgrounds, collaborating on common projects and goals. In the design of an experience, there is a requirement for input spanning from engineering and programming, to humanities, interaction design and branding, where all these professions have their own territory but still overlap, indicating that diversity in the process of innovation is as essential as oxygen to the creation of water.

All the new possibilities of technologies can only be comprehended, analyzed and explored by multidisciplinary research. A growing number of educational institutions and research centers in the UK and the USA having realized these shifts have been teaming up artists, engineers, designers and scientists to face real problems and issues, inventing future applications for technologies that enhance the human experience. Research has to adapt to this new holistic model that will make the greater picture obvious. Most importantly, the existence of public or private organizations willing to invest in this area is vital, even if the risk involved seems high in the short term. The long term benefits can be life changing. By not creating the necessary independent platform to innovate, shift will have a hard time occurring.

Part of design’s role is to communicate that multidisciplinary research on new technologies aims to provide answers to the real problems of humanity. Not all future applications involve cyborgs and under skin monitoring chips. Good things will happen. It’s a promise.

Special issue: participatory design
Tags: costas-bissas, design, innovation, interdisciplinarity