Design in the Pragmatic Future
Liz Danzico
The future has never been static. The future has a history. And where we stand in the history of the future is a huge opportunity for design—specifically, the design of interactions.
Interaction design is all around us. We describe it as the relationship between people and machines, between people and people, between machines and machines. And its nature lends itself to our shaping what I’m calling the pragmatic future. In order to shape the pragmatic future, you have to walk through the gate of interaction design.
You see, design’s job used to be to write the story so the world might see the future. But no more. Design’s job today is to write the story to reveal the pragmatic future so humans can participate in it.
When we think about the future, we have a certain image in our minds. It’s a futurism that was built up in novels, in films, in TV shows, in modern mythology, in urban myth. It is a futurism we might call “science fiction” and represents one dominant version of a future.
That’s a speculative future about what could be. But that was the past: the one in which science fiction was the unattainable future. But today is different. Today, science fiction is the present, or can be. The time when science fiction was the past has passed. Science fiction is the present.
Henry Ford, who envisioned transportation for the masses long before most people could, is likely the most recognizable pragmatic futurist. Soon after the World’s Fairs, typified by the 1939 World’s Fair and the birthplace of the Futurama, was a futuristic city inspired by the pages of popular science fiction at the time.
Today, interaction design considers the user experience not by designing an object per se, but by designing the interactions and turning it over to users themselves. Because it’s now a discipline of sight, sound, touch, and perhaps soon smell and taste, it must be dynamic and responsive, involving more of the senses. Prototypes that make the future present are critical, speeding ways of communicating feedback from the person and back.
Whereas once we considered interaction design the domain of screens and buttons, we now consider how these expressions tie into bigger systems. We live in a world where we carry hospitals in our pockets, banks in our watches, find out about national violence from Twitter, and birth announcements on Facebook. As data is more readily available and designers informed by new formal and informal mechanisms for connecting, we have access to the past while being well aware we are part of something bigger.
What we do with that partly depends on designers’ capacity to envision interactions that stretch our imaginations and play with possibilities, yet remain firmly planted in pragmatism. With that, we can reveal the future.