Mh… Technology…
I can’t really help myself: I love technology in every possible form and way. Honestly I believe I’m actually investing more money on Kickstarter and Indiegogo fancy stuffs than Amazon and Ebay combined.
Nowadays technology is so intertwined with our day to day life that sometimes we are not even able to properly recognise where the true boundaries between analog and digital are, but We, as designers, have to try to open a window leading directly to the future: we constantly have to envision how our users will behave in our designed scenarios, how they will interact with our designed interfaces, what are the trends and patterns of tomorrow.
Living today but watching tomorrow is not an easy task, that’s why movies, books, novels and Sci Fi TV serials should be our primary source of inspiration.
Designers should always take care of objectives, rules and constraints while designing things, without them we do not deserve to be designers but artists. Sometimes, fictional media are just a work of art (think about the beautiful interfaces of the Avengers movie) sometime they are little gems that can truly shines with their blue sky thinking.
The Blue Sky
For those who are not familiar the blue sky thinking, aside from the fancy name, Blue Sky Thinking is an idiomatic english phrase which roughly means “Thinking that is not grounded or in touch in the realities of the present”, in this case it’s also a powerful technique, or exercise if you prefer, that allow us to think about a product or a service which may technically exist today, but without some assumptions or conditions (outside our direct area of influence) they may ended up to not be a feasible useful artifact.
So we have to think about the best case scenario (the blue sky) where all the required conditions are met and there are no clouds / impediments to our service. If we can think about a blue sky, we can communicate it to others, share it.
If we can pretend it is a real scenario enough, and we convince enough people it is real after all (which is not), it may become a reality.
Pretend, fake, pretend again, until it becomes real.
In practice
It sounds a little awkward, but it is a very common technique, for example in commercials:
This is the commercial for a very minimalistic and visionary electric car.
The whole scripting aims to create a believable scenario where this car is really a perfect fit. In our reality we have to face a lot of impediments that make that car less then a useless toy, such as thievery, the lack of electric chargers, unsuitable roads.. and so on.
The commercial depicts a blue sky that can lead to an increase of the buyers demand. If the market may grow enough, big player may grow an interest as well into investing into electric chargers for example, thus creating the very first conditions for the blue sky to concretize.
It’s kinda similar to the fulfillment of a prophecy prediction.
So let’s back to Black Mirror.
I totally passed upon this beautiful miniseries of a couple of years ago, and i decided to catch on.
Well, after watching these seven episodes, I was… I am amazed and delighted and believe me, if you are a visionaire you can’t miss it.
Black Mirror (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/) is a collection of stories, one per episode, with a strong flavour of the old/ancient Twilight Zone, if you are old enough to remember it.
Each story is carefully written and it is crafted right to make you think, a lot…
The leit motiv of the whole serie is the technology, subtle and integrated the fabric of the society, but the unconventional twist of Black Mirror is that it totally credible and realistic, it shows a blue sky, which is scary and rise a tons of ethics concerns.
The beauty is that it really takes care about all the consequences and the collaterals around the introduction of a technology in our lifestyle, not only in their range of application, but with a very unusual holistic approach.
For example if you have a small implant that let you record all you life in real time and make every instant of your memory sharable, researchable at will, how do you gauge the social implications of this little marvel?
The show did this masterfully, indeed:
- Sure, it is incredible to be able to access our memories whenever we want, but how this over availability and clarity can shift our range of values?
- Are there behaviors not socially acceptable?
- What are the relation with people with and without implant?
- How people may react to things that they can’t forget, how they can cope with bad events?
- Can your life memory become a stealable good? and for what purpose?
- and so on…
Again, if the technology allows you to displace or clone your personality and infuse it in something physical, what are the limits we decide to constraint ourselves into playing, teasing, torturing, exploiting our surrogate mind?
The show is a golden mine.
Technology is giving us superpowers, we are hyper augmented being but everything comes with a price and we always have to relate with the consequences of our design choices.
I don’t want to spoil this beautiful show, so go and get it, you won’t regret it!
A fan made Black Mirror trailer
I often lose myself into infinite activities where I can live, work, teach, learn on how people interact with the future.
