Future Design
Last night I caught the second episode of Discovery Channel’s Future Car. This episode was about the design of the car of the future. Right off the bat, the show caught my attention when they had an interview with Luigi Colani.
In his interview, he discussed how design can get ahead of itself. If people aren’t ready for the change, they won’t be as accepting of it. He claims that as the primary reason he feels he’s so misunderstood.
Looking at the proposed designs of the future cars, they do look a little strange. It’s not what we are used to in the dawn of the 21st Century, but the way the explained the reasoning for the various designs made absolute sense. Essentially, car’s haven’t changed much in 80 years. The cars of today mimic the original model-T, which mimics a horse drawn carrage. Now, or in the very near future, we will switch from an internal combustion engine and a mechanical steering system to an entirely electric car. The posibilities for these new cars are only limited by imagination (and physics).
Translating this thinking to my area of expertise, interactive media and design, I’ve often thought of the limitations we face currently. Most websites I come across are layed out like newspapers. Why? Because that’s what people are used to. Most websites today are comprised of text. I’ve often said, maybe just to myself until now, that I don’t think existing media is nessesarily suited for the future, i.e. placing a 30 second commercial in an On-Demand system.
When I was a Radio, Television & Film major my freshman year in college, there was this new show coming out called Survivor. The general concensus at the time was that “Reality T.V.” wouldn’t last because people wouldn’t buy into it, and craved creative television (even though The Real World had been on for a while).
The truth is, people love it, and it’s extremely cheap to produce. Survivor pays out $1,000,000 to the winner over 22 episodes, while, on the last season of Friends, each of the 6 members of the regular cast was getting that amount per episode. Do the math.
The future never really turns out the way you expect, otherwise, we’d all be ruled by the apes we used for cheap labor 16 years ago. The truth is, adaptation is a slow and painful process, though quicker than evolution. I’m currently pressing buttons on a machine that they never would have envisioned feeding punch cards into a machine larger than Adam’s apartment. So, perhaps when I bitch about a blog layed out like a newspaper, perhaps I’m just misunderstood by the general public to some extent. Colani said, “The human eye wasn’t meant for hard corners.” It’s used to them, though.