It is clear that
pervasive mobile
devices...are
going to have a
transformational
impact on our world.
Designers have a
responsibility to enable
this transformation,
to bring the power

what we need, we can’t make sense of it.

So what are human-centered data? How should they be presented, stored, organized, visualized, so that they are relevant for us, and not (just) for a computer? What does that mean for such varied fields as car design, mobile device software, or digital signage?

We will need new metaphors that embody very human concepts such as preciousness, moods, attraction, surprise, and forgetting, and apply them to data sets, data algorithms and data visualizations.

to the people, and to
provide them with
the tools to better
govern their lives and

and local/physical communities of sharing? To what extent can digital/mobile communication tools help people in both online and physical communities manage their sharing and exchanging practices? What would the rules, rituals, and habits of this future world be?

I was recently involved in KashKlash (www.kashklash. net), a collaborative foresight experiment that asked these questions, and many more. People like Bruce Sterling, Regine Debatty, Nicolas Nova, and Josh Klein did the first groundwork on understanding the future of money, sociality, and alternative currencies. Later, many more thinkers and professionals joined in on creating shared future scenarios. At the time of this writing, the results of the project were not yet known, but should be available for you to view and reflect upon by the time you read this.

the communities and
societies they live in.

The Data Avalanche and
Human Control

People are not computers. We forget. We cannot search our mental databases. Our thinking and memory are not disconnected from acting and sensing. The two are engrained and inseparable.

Yet computers are increasingly driving our day-to-day lives and pushing their paradigms into our human experience. We are rapidly moving to a world where everything is always stored—in many different locations—and everything is always accessible.

Life would be easy for us if
we just thought like computers.
But we don’t. We feel bombard-
ed with data, but we can’t find

The Human Experience of
Sustainability

The world we currently live in is far from sustainable across all the core contexts of human experience: economy, society, environment, and spirituality.

Nathan Shedroff argues that user-centered design or experience design in itself leads to more sustainable product development, and he certainly has a point:

“More meaningful products as well as ones that better meet our needs don’t require us to buy more and more things (in order to fill those needs and desires). Fewer, more meaningful, effective, and sustainable products will be more fulfilling and more sustainable than more and more less fulfilling, effective, and meaningful ones. In addition, devices that adequately meet our needs, especially technological ones, often have the effect of not only dematerializing competing products but also products in other categories (like the iPods and iPhones are doing).” [ 2]