Thinking about Design Trends

Design seems to behave in a reactionary manner; a trend towards minimalism will find a reaction in emotive expression, while a push toward digital might be met with a return to analog. This makes sense, as design – as a human phenomenon – is as dialectic as politics or economics. I’m aware of trends that are happening right now, because I’m helping push those trends with my day to day work. But most of us don’t want to be caught up in the current of now – we are looking at the periphery to catch the next human phenomenon, or to understand how our present will be turned on its side in the future.

In fact, an economic downturn is probably the best time to trend-jump, because out of this downturn will come prosperity the likes of which we observed in the early nineties, and then as we crept back on to our feet after the dot com fiasco. Our clients should be preparing now to service the markets that will have purchasing power in three to four years.

I look to many sources to try to understand reactionary trends. One of these sources is conferences; as I’ve written here before, the conference acts as a “pulse” of what is to come, as it is a conglomeration of thought leaders offering their views of what is important, and what will be important. IxDA has a conference coming up in February, and in evaluating the conference content, I played a bit with Wordle to create some visualizations. I fed in the abstract content for the 28 talks and 6 keynotes, and then I removed the words and variations of “design," “experience," “interaction," and “workshops." I was left with this visualization:

There are some familiar terms – some things that are expected, including Sustainability, Web, New, and People. But I’ve highlighted some of the elements that might indicate subtle professional trends, as described below:

There’s a push toward services and systems, which is the same push that has been noted by Richard Buchanan in his writing about the progression from signs to things to actions and thoughts; it’s also the same push we are seeing embodied in the evangelistic writing by Bruce Nussbaum of the power of design thinking. Interestingly, however, the words “services” and “systems” were tempered by the word “product," which might indicate a rejection of the heady intellectual stuff and a return to the simple artifact.

Another element that I found intriguing was the inclusion of “World." The notion of designing for a single, western market is outdated, as evidenced by the types of work we do at frog and the presence of our Shanghai studio. This is obviously tempered by “Understanding” – we are finding, over and over, that our old steadfast methods, techniques, and approach that we use in the states need major retooling when applied in the Asian business context.

I was pleased to see an emphasis on Methods, Research and Patterns, because I’ll be giving a talk on Design Synthesis Methods – ways of making sense of, and finding patterns in, the data collected through various forms of user research.

Finally, I’ve found a new interest in the presence – and repetition – of the word “Rhythm." The text is an anomaly from a trend perspective, coming specifically from Peter Stahl’s talk on The Rhythm of Interaction. Yet I’ll ignore the fact that only one speaker is interested in this sort of connection to music, and instead focus on the intrigue of his talk description: “As guardians of dynamic behavior, interaction designers own rhythm. Yet our work practice lacks appropriate tools and vocabulary. How do you portray a groove in a flow chart, mockup, or PowerPoint deck?” I’m also intrigued that Peter “holds a degree in music theory and composition from Harvard”. I'm even more intrigued that there was a Peter Stahl who was the vocalist for the punk band Scream – could this be the same Peter Stahl?

Hope ya’all have a great holiday, and I’ll look for you in Vancouver, catching a groove at the IxDA conference.

Jon Kolko