Social soothsayers frame the future at Zoic salon series

Wiredrive and Zoic Studios co-hosted a discussion on Thursday, May 13 hoping to parse out some insights about the future as technology continues to shape the world around us. Zoic Studios Creative Director Leslie Ekker moderated a panel of experts from the fields of design, technology and sustainability. After a brief introduction from Wiredrive President Bill Sewell, the following speakers talked about what our future would look like as they touched on politics, consumerism and social responsibility:

• David Bloom, Social Futurist
• John Picard, Global Sustainability Consultant
• Scott Robertson, Concept Artist and Visual Futurist

See photos and video from the event!

Politics, self-organization and social discourse

The contribution that blogs and other social technologies have had on the democratization of web-based public discourse has been a much-discussed concept for over a decade. There is little arguing that anyone with access to the Internet can disrupt the vertical, one-way feed of information blasted through media outlets in favor of a multi-voice virtual space.

But for David Bloom, the trend toward self-organization is the most interesting effect of social media. Bloom points to Obama’s 2008 bid for the White House in which millions of dollars were raised using web-based communication tools. In 2010, the Tea Party is doing the same thing on the far right side of the political spectrum. Both the Obama campaign and the Tea Party movement are examples of swaying public opinion through social media.

But more importantly, the ability to have an opinion, make comments and interact are enabling people to form groups with others who share their views. In Bloom’s view, it is the self-organizing groups, both geographically and virtually, that are having the greatest affect on the socio-political landscape.

Fact-checking is another area of public discourse that Bloom said is changing as a result of greater access to communication tools. We have unprecedented power to publish our own views and interpretation of data, as well as illuminate falsehoods that pervade mainstream media. But this proves to be a double-edged sword. Easier access to the social microphone means that there is just as much opportunity to disseminate inaccurate, even deceptive, facts.

Bloom acknowledged that this phenomenon would add to the already tidal wave of information washing over our computers and mobile devices, but he didn’t say whether he thought this would lead to deeper understanding, mass confusion or a mixture of both.

Physical media will continue to decline

Scott Robertson, who teaches design and publishes design books, sees us heading toward a future with less physical media in favor of web-based content. Although he admits that online content is convenient, he points out that it leaves little room for monetary gain. “If it’s digital, then it’s free,” is how Scott characterized new consumer expectations.

Leslie Ekker agreed with Robertson, adding that he believes that DVDs are essentially dead. In Ekker’s view, devices such as iPad are going to change how consumers buy music, books and movies. This is perhaps a foregone conclusion at least since the advent of the iTunes store, but what seems not to have not sunk in is the idea of ownership. Consumers own a piece of digital data versus a tangible good. And consumers don’t really own the media they purchase because the actual product is digitally stored in the cloud.

Challenges to educating designers of the future

Despite the potential effects to Robertson’s business model, he is excited about the opportunity new media represents in terms of educational resources. But is a digital education better or just different? Robertson said that one of the problematic effects of designing digitally is that they don’t learn to create things with their hands.

Virtual modeling and design is becoming a must-have skill. As a result of the heavy emphasis on the pastiche-like workflow of digital design, students don’t have that tactile sense of how things work. Robertson acknowledge that students are becoming very adept as assembling and collaging, but, in his view, the lack of understanding of the physical elements hurts their design abilities.

The future is green

As trite is it may sound, technology has and will continue to play a large role in building a sustainable future. For example, John Picard predicts that more bio-mimicry is in our future. Bio-mimicry refers to studying and mimicking nature to build better, more sustainable products. Abalone shells are the strongest materials in the world. What can we learn from them to create naturally strong materials? Buildings should be more like trees and give back rather than take.

A greater use of bio-mimicry is one of the reasons John Picard doesn’t see the crisis everyone else does. But he was unabashedly optimistic about the future of sustainability for number of reasons. For example, we have computational tools that can help us visualize our impact on the planet. Picard’s assumption is that once we start seeing those costs, we will shift our focus from an economy based on the lowest bid to one based on what’s most responsible. Doing the right thing used to be the harder thing, but the good news is that we have the technology, resources and the generational awareness to do what’s right.

Everyone on the panel agreed that the awareness of the younger generation is the difference maker. Robertson pointed out that when his students see what’s possible in environmental design, they want to do that for the rest of their lives.

Despite Picard’s optimism, he acknowledged that there is a lot of work to do. For instance, he said that according to one study, we need to be 80% more efficient to just to balance out the effects we’ve had on climate change [editor’s note: we were not able to cite data that could confirm or dispute this figure].

Picard also conceded that, whether we like it or not, the same corporate political machine that steered us in the wrong direction in the first place will be the same engine that drives us out of it. Money will drive green business. For example, retrofitting existing infrastructure with greener materials and components is big business and will be for some time because people want to live in healthy houses, work in green buildings and so on.

Changing consumer behavior

From a brand standpoint, we are figuring out that streamlining product lines is one way to help facilitate sustainability. For instance, Bloom said that we are starting to see fewer physical goods and fewer choices in the goods available. Although this strategy may run counterintuitive to what have traditionally seen, Ekker argued that its psychologically more satisfying to choose from six different items, rather than from 60.

But the wild card in predicting social trends is that we can’t know the hundreds of small decisions that people make everyday that affect our environment, product design, flows of information, etc. But, as Robertson pointed out, people in the advertising and entertainment industries have significant influence on people’s decisions.

For him, the question is how to design things in a way that help people make the right choices. How do you design things in a way that gets people excited about things like bio-mimicry? The film Avatar got close in that it evoked an emotional response. People wanted to go to Pandora and help the Na’avi.

General trends

The panel also predicted the following trends:

• More women in positions of power
• 70% of the world’s population will live in large, developed cities
• 100% electric vehicles
• Mayors will become more important than presidents
• We will put the earth to work; energy will be derived from an array of environmental sources