I recently came across a list of 17 product design trends of the future (and today) from the design firm IDEO that I found interesting. These concepts are already here today in some form or other, but not necessarily mainstream nor emphasized by the majority of product designers of the world today. Here is the list:
- Ever-increasing Simplexity
- Diagnostic Everything
- Mobile and Wireless Everything
- Virtual Prototyping Interactions and Living
- Context Awareness
- Sensors Everywhere
- Your Identity Everywhere
- Smart Surfaces
- Data Visualization
- Deliberate Hackability and Open-Source-ness
- Peer-to-Peer
- Mashups
- Co-Created Everything
- Body Hacking
- Radical Transparency
- Collaborative Innovation
- Techno Collective Action
This list appears to be predominantly geared towards technology products and often would impact Internet related products. The trends I’m most excited about are:
- Ever-increasing Simplexity- Many technology products are still too complex– for example, installing a wi-fi network in your home still too often requires calls to support hotlines
- Mobile and Wireless Everything– Lots of usage models can still be enhanced by mobile technology, particularly in developing countries. Already, some great examples in Africa and India of rural residents, often farmers, who have been exposed to new opportunities due to wireless technology access.
- Your identity everywhere– More mainstream Open ID platforms and single sign-on would be a marked improvement to today’s Internet experience.
- Diagnostic Everywhere and Sensors Everywhere – Particularly with the world-wide need for better energy management to protect our environment, it will be important to see developments where people can easily look at a diagnostic tool and understand their energy consumption and more energy efficient alternative choices.
- Collaborative Innovation– Crowdsourcing, collaboration across countries and economic classes, and proliferation of open-source technologies continues to be a hot bed of discussion and debate. Very interested to see if this concept is more real than fiction as we move into the future.
Periodically, I’ll be checking on this list and applying the latest advancements in the technology fields to see which trends are truly becoming mainstream and which are still sputtering along.
[…] low impact potential solution—a lesson here is sometimes simplicity is all you need (one of the Product Design trends in 2009 from IDEO was simplexity—here’s a good […]