The Future of Graphic Design is part of the Personal Development Plan module we did at school just yesterday. The goal of the course (apart from other stuff) is to prepare us for long-lasting career and prepare us to face the changes in the design industry. In the “The Future of Graphic Design” exercise we had to pick one of the topics on future of graphic design, make a research, do some conclusions and make a presentation – in groups with at least 2 members.

The topics we were able to choose from were:

• Globalization
• Inclusive Design
• and finally Interactive Apps

And the questions we had to find answers for (well apart from bringing our own ideas to the table) were:

• What will the effects be?
• What will be the challenges?
• What will be the new business & career opportunities?
• How can designers plan to adapt to these challenges?

Because I was involved doing campaign having inclusive design in mind when doing the Design for Diversity, and because I’m preparing the Graphic Design in context of User Experience (and interactive) design presentation, the natural choice for me was Interactive Applications.

Predictions of future?

I think everybody heard about those fantastic predictions from 50s and 60s, how the world in 2000 will look like. The American and Russian scientists were solving out the problem how to build atomic airplane, The American Railroads planned to have atomic trains (almost everything had to be atomic I guess – even the wrist watch:). We were supposed to spend our holidays on Mars. Fortunately, nothing of it happened. Yet.

Want more? Enjoy this ubercool Retro-futurism gallery!

Touch the future

But there are technologies and applications of the future, which we can (almost) enjoy today and from research of these technologies and from the design of these technologies, we can guesstimate what the bright future is going to bring.

One of the revolutionary factors in future applications will be more natural approach how to operate them. Apple with the iPhone’s touch screen showed other mobile phone manufacturers the way how to go – how to operate our devices in seamless, natural and hassle-free way (although the touch-screen itself is nowhere to be a brand new technology).

Soon we’ll see all such devices equipped with touch screens. Why? Because of that natural way, how to operate the device / application. Mouses, keyboards, trackpoints, styluses or even trackpads we use to deal with are only unnatural conduits, a barrier between the user and application.

We can enjoy this upcoming kind of interaction not only in our touch-sensitive mobile phones, but soon we’ll be able to use our future applications on devices like these:

We are going to see more and more natural approach, how to operate all different kind of applications soon – not only using our hands, but our voice and even breath. And mind – finally.

We will see our applications operating not only on 2 dimensional surface of screen, mobile phone, tablet or table – but in 3d space, surrounding us and creating virtual office or multimedia room. And they are going to be tangible.

Do you remember Star Trek’s Holodeck? I believe we are going to see it in future.

Knowledge on the go

One of the crucial elements of smooth user experience is the knowledge, how to operate application/device and what that app can do for us. If the knowledge has to be in our heads, the people without that knowledge may have problems operating that app/device. If the knowledge is spread in the world around, anybody can easily use the app. The holy grail of the seccessful app/device is when the app becomes self-explanatory.

So in order to make the use of such apps or devices painless, the knowledge how to use them will be more and more concentrated in the world, not our heads. This leads to the augmented reality.

We can enjoy applications allowing us to gather all the different pieces of the information on the go – as well as transmit them. (Big Brother coming?) Soon, you’ll never be lost (at least geographically), not knowing what to do and what you are staring at.

Ease of use

All these great pieces of upcoming technology and applications should have 1 thing in common – ease of use. Can you imagine how would we benefit from applications bringing broad range of features, but only for a bunch of people, trained professionals, who will be able to use them?

Have a look on this comparison. Or better, go to your local phone store and try it out for yourself, as did I. We even don’t need to talk about the broad possibilities operating system can bring. Just look at the home screen. iPhone is simple – what you touch is what you get (WYTIWYG – just invented that abbreviation ). But what you get if you touch Jet? Honestly, I was confused at least by the left-hand-side pallete of widgets.

What is the role of us – designers? What is our challenge?

• design apps as intuitive and self-explanatory as possible
• design for user, not for technology
• prototyping, user testing
• stick to the ethical side – privacy, make the design misuse resistant
• design with visibility, affordances and feedback in mind
• design keeping errors in mind, offer solution when error occurs and provide “undo” or “back” options if possible
• last but not least, aesthetics

How can designers adapt to these changes?

• learn, keep your knowledge up to date
• learn more about human behaviour, how we interact with the world around us
• learn more about psychology and sociology

What I learned from this exercise?

As I said in the beginning – my choice of interactive apps wasn’t random – I’m studying User Experience and Interaction design for my contextual studies. The exercise helped me to understand, that in my future career I’ll always need to keep up-to-date, and continue studying not only about design, but rather about how we, people, think, behave and interact. How to prototype, how to design keeping all possible errors in mind…

The presentations of the other classmates were very interesting too – especially the one on inclusive design. They mentioned web accessibility, which is my daily bread at work, so I know the W3C and WAI principles and when we develop websites, we stick to them as much as possible. Listening to them was cool, not biased angle of view is always great!”