Fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré says, “When I was 6, my dad showed me pictures of Sputnik. I thought then that by the new century we'd all look like spacemen with helmets and big shoes." As he discovered, the future is not futuristic.
This week we focus on pragmatic design. Design of technology is not just an aesthetic concern; bad design can hospitalize you. Let’s begin by designing the future.
We recently produced a television show with scenes that take place 30 years from now. In designing the set, we were forced to conclude that nothing should appear “futuristic”. That’s because one of the principle achievements of technology is to make itself appear not at all.
Try this at home. Grab your camcorder and record these clips: A 3rd grade classroom, an aisle in the supermarket, a movie theater, passengers boarding a plane at the airport, the view from the tallest building in your town.
Now jump into my time machine and travel to the year 1985. How would you convince all the people then that you are from the future? Why, you play back the pictures on your camera. But then they would conclude that you are a lunatic, because the chances are really good they would not notice any difference.
What they would notice is people wearing blue jeans and leather shoes. Wooden furniture. Exactly, by the way, what you would see if you jumped ahead to the year 2030.
What you cannot “see” is what’s going on under the hood of a hybrid car. You cannot “see” the greatest advance of the late 20th Century, the Internet. You can see only its effects. You cannot “see” a titanium tooth implant. Advances in materials science, in particular, are evidenced in their properties, not in their appearance.
And consumer electronics have gone beyond size reduction to injection. First, tubes became transistors, loudspeakers became earbuds. And, year after year, we marveled, “How can they fit all that power into such a small box?” The next step is to inject technology into everyday objects. So well that it disappears altogether.
Heck, your friends in the past might not even notice all those silly bluetooth earpieces in your video.
The father of science fiction prediction Arthur C. Clarke is famous for observing, “Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.” I’ll go him one better: Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is invisible.
Except if you’re dealing with an interior designer. More about that on the next page
