Design and the future of IT

I will tell you one thing about IT. In international design, the Powers That Be are infatuated with it.

In the 1980s, at Royal College of Art shows of product design, every beautiful concept sculpture invoked a smart card reader.

Today, however, there are few smart card readers.

Products are not driven by smart cards. The UK limit to consumer payment by contactless card moved, in September, from £20 to £30; some say that IT will supplant cash by 2025. But IT won’t be able to achieve that. London’s booming payments specialists are in receipt of record funds, yet a shakeout will have to precede any kind of Android vs iOS standoff in smart card or smartphone systems.

Yet still the design establishment, relentlessly hip, believes that Silicon Valley in California and Silicon Roundabout in London can generate apps and wealth with merely the wave of a hand.

That’s wrong. Just as too many designers reduce technological innovation to IT, so too many continue to miss how human intelligence, and hard work, is the basis for all machine ‘smartness’ – ugh. The design community never bothers to interrogate the idea that dull semiconductors actually have amazing brains.

Too many designers make other mistakes with IT. They go along with others in accepting the dogma that enough is being invested in IT, and enough massive IT breakthroughs being made – ‘exponentially’, y’understand – for IT to put about 47 per cent of US jobs at high risk over ‘some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two’.  Whenever robot ethicists fear that household robots could deceive children with their fake emotions, some designers will cheer them on. Also: when robot ethicists protest that Sony’s Aibo robots go wrong with old age and so deprive dependent old Japanese of company, leaving said old people bereaved, those same designers will agree, only to join others in celebrating the funerals that are now held for robot dogs in Japan.

With IT, both ridiculous utopias and risk-averse dystopias look like remaining intense. As production of hardware and code shifts East, so both unthinking trust and unthinking distrust of distant algorithms will grow.

At the same time, user exasperation will increase.

Already, designers in Silicon Roundabout cannot get broadband to suit their demand for large file sizes. Computer and mobile passwords are still a nightmare. ‘Seamless’, the foolish adjective deployed by a million IT copywriters, will remain a mirage for years. Driverless cars? Student designers love to design for them. But before lawyers argue about their role in accidents, think about another daunting prospect: it’s called, er, system integration.

Worries are growing about the cybersecurity of driverless cars – typically enough, years or decades before such machines enter mass markets. And anyway, just supposing driverless cars really become a universal standard, we can be sure they will be driverless cars only as much as cars were ever horseless carriages.

We need to be more sober about IT. Wearable media will see many bankruptcies over the next 10 years, as mass consumer markets turn out only to be contested niches (exceptions: healthcare, industrial applications). Big Data will require still bigger efforts in data interpretation and visualisation. And American IT companies will probably still prefer to hold on to the cash they keep in foreign banks than spend it on researching major innovations worldwide. It is not just that the well-known miser, Apple, has piled up $160bn in cash abroad. Other hoarders include Microsoft  ($82bn), Oracle ($40bn), chipmakers Qualcomm ($28bn), Hewlett-Packard ($15bn) and eBay ($10bn).

Yet still designers look like continuing their adulation for IT.

So where will there be real progress, and real work for designers to do? After an overlong gestation, bendy mobile phones will finally emerge. Plastic electronics, and 3D printed electronics, will certainly grow. So will structural electronics, the kind that can bear loads or act as a hardwearing skin to products. These two applications are useful in aerospace, and, after that, in cars.

Virtual reality and augmented reality also look like they will reach a mass market. Again in the 1980s, heading Fitch’s research into the future, I used to get direct mail every week about conferences on VR and AR. Well: in the first quarter of 2016, Oculus Rift, a wraparound-3D VR device, may finally begin to realise in practice that old offer of other, IT-assisted universes.

In construction, energy and at sea, civilian drones have a big future, even if, as with technology generally, one firm’s innocent drone can be another country’s weapon of war. And behind the scenes, business-to-business IT has already begun to realise a useful Internet of things. In transport, energy and even waste management, aided by drones, machines now summon a van to deliver that vital new part before the old one wears out.