Scott Van Den Plas : Philosopher

Whatever the method, tool, or medium… it will be shockingly simply with remarkably complex results

We have a tendency to focus on the communications of speech, but speech is often a poor representation of thought. Communication through action and idea are also evolving. We will continue to see a consolidation of infrastructure to one extremely flexible medium. The telephone system as we know it will be gone within 10 years. Television will be gone in 15. Mobile technologies will continue to expand. Cities will offer network access as a utility. Network access will become a human and societal right. Communication devices will continue to become more powerful, integrated, and also easier to use. Massive fiber optic back bone infrastructures will be stressed and strained. The smart edge will grow.

The way we will use the network will also continue to change. Collaboration is king. There are real, tangible results to that collaboration even today. In that spirit, we will see the regulatory environment around intellectual property at first constrict further in resistance, but eventually, the rules and barriers in front of collaboration will be slowly taken apart. We will see organizations opting into the collaborative environment and sharing some access to their own resources, while in return looking for a better designed product from the community.

This collaboration will breed new levels of personal meta data about us and our relationships with others. This meta information will help us to communicate better to those around us. It will also help large organizations establish a more personal relationship with their constituents.

These relationships will continue to expand, and new definitions of communication methods will be possible. Right now, as users we are ignorant of the communication system. When we pick up the telephone, we don’t care how it works, we care about the message we are communicating to the person at the other end. As the system gets more complex, it will become more modularized so we can manage it. Eventually, we will tell the system the results that we seek and let the system itself decide the method to reach it. At that point, as designers, we are ignorant of the method of communication.

Over engineered solutions have a tendency to fail. As it turns out, we are fairly poor predictors of what we want and need. With that in mind, we will continue to act in a semi-random but directional design sense toward communication. Ultimately, through trial and error, invention and defeat, we will develop incredibly simple communication tools for general use, that can be implemented and rearranged for complex results. Human beings are problem solvers and will always insist on solving their own problems in their own specific manner. The solutions that will survive the evolution of design will be the ones that allow the most human modification within an intelligent framework.