Bruce Sterling schreibt:
Why do I—a science fiction writer—spend more and more time with designers? What does science fiction have in common with industrial design? As it turns out, quite a lot.
In the science fiction genre, we have a signature product that we call the “sense of wonder.�? This is what we are supposed to supply eager consumers: works of wonderment. Amazing stories, fantastic stories, mind-blowing stories.
[...]
I spend a lot of time thinking about imaginary industrial products, cyber products and post-industrial products. Design thinking has become a powerful means to my end.
[...]
One of the things I like best about designers is that, unlike scientific historians or techno-sociologists, they tend to be user-centric.They’re not creating fine-art objects for their own sake, they are actually designing some thing for somebody—or at least for some demographic.
Design has regional or national character: There’s Italian design, German design, Japanese design.
But the roots are shifting. The world is globalizing— perhaps not culturally, but definitely technologically. There are 6.35 billion people in the world right now. Barring some plausible catastrophes such as sudden climate change or global plagues, we’re going to top out in about 2050 at roughly 9.1 billion people. Ninety-eight percent of the population boom will take place in the so-called developing world, especially Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
That is the future design consensus. You’re designing for the demographic? That’s tomorrow’s market.
The trend is getting legs now. China is experiencing a construction boom of such colossal proportions that they are searching for scrap iron from all over the planet. People in the Ukraine are stealing entire trains to sell to the Chinese scrap iron market; people in Shanghai and Milwaukee and England are stealing manhole covers to meet the Chinese demand for steel.
I’m interested in this Asian population surge from a design perspective. I wonder what Chinese and Indian designers might want to make—what they would talk about at the IDSC or the IDSI. in what they want to buy. The consumer of the future isn’t some cornball Chinese stereotype in a bamboo hat or an Indian villager in a Gandhi loincloth. This guy is the mid-twenty-first century’s everyday native citizen. He’s not unlikely or strange or transgressive in 2050. He’s the average, the norm. So, who is this guy? That’s what I wonder—what I need to wonder—as a science fiction writer.
Why do I—a science fiction writer—spend more and more time with designers? What does science fiction have in common with industrial design? As it turns out, quite a lot.
In the science fiction genre, we have a signature product that we call the “sense of wonder.�? This is what we are supposed to supply eager consumers: works of wonderment. Amazing stories, fantastic stories, mind-blowing stories.
[...]
I spend a lot of time thinking about imaginary industrial products, cyber products and post-industrial products. Design thinking has become a powerful means to my end.
[...]
One of the things I like best about designers is that, unlike scientific historians or techno-sociologists, they tend to be user-centric.They’re not creating fine-art objects for their own sake, they are actually designing some thing for somebody—or at least for some demographic.
Design has regional or national character: There’s Italian design, German design, Japanese design.
But the roots are shifting. The world is globalizing— perhaps not culturally, but definitely technologically. There are 6.35 billion people in the world right now. Barring some plausible catastrophes such as sudden climate change or global plagues, we’re going to top out in about 2050 at roughly 9.1 billion people. Ninety-eight percent of the population boom will take place in the so-called developing world, especially Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
That is the future design consensus. You’re designing for the demographic? That’s tomorrow’s market.
The trend is getting legs now. China is experiencing a construction boom of such colossal proportions that they are searching for scrap iron from all over the planet. People in the Ukraine are stealing entire trains to sell to the Chinese scrap iron market; people in Shanghai and Milwaukee and England are stealing manhole covers to meet the Chinese demand for steel.
I’m interested in this Asian population surge from a design perspective. I wonder what Chinese and Indian designers might want to make—what they would talk about at the IDSC or the IDSI. in what they want to buy. The consumer of the future isn’t some cornball Chinese stereotype in a bamboo hat or an Indian villager in a Gandhi loincloth. This guy is the mid-twenty-first century’s everyday native citizen. He’s not unlikely or strange or transgressive in 2050. He’s the average, the norm. So, who is this guy? That’s what I wonder—what I need to wonder—as a science fiction writer.
20. Februar 2005 15:43 Uhr. Kategorie Design. Keine Antwort.
