“There is a superorganism building up,” says Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an interactive designer at Bing Mobile in a video produced by Bassett and Partners, “humans are no longer at the top of the food chain.”
This is all in “Connections”, an expansive infopiece on interactive design and the coming “internet of things” as interactive designers voice a dazzling new environment where the love knot between digital and analog is firmly tied. No more faked analog. No more beepy text alerts to mar your terrestial existence.
Yes, it can all seem a little floaty.
But the real hurdles for interactive design are both technical and esthetic. How can technology feel real-timey and feed information so that it is not an artificial overlay on our world, but a seamless integration?
New formats and templates are being developed, tossed, and reintegrated, in attempts to become behavior-sensitive, contextual, and meaningful.
“It’s a little tragic,” says Helen Walters of Doblin/Monitor, “how everyone is trying to translate print onto digital formats.” The sensibility is that there is so much more to be imagined.
And it’s not just about sharing where you’re having a beer, or birthday fotos. It’s about genius rushes of invention that blossom into more efficient uses of energy, healthcare monitoring, optimizing and evolving more appropriate systems and services. Or seeing the digital footprints of your friend who walked down the same sidewalk you're on, fifteen minutes before.
With allusions to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and other current events, the video declares, human beings are becoming a collective organism able to influence social change, entrepreneurship, and commerce.
“There is a colony of humans connecting in this way and those reactions and collective thoughts happen fast, and they happen in very visible ways,” says Aguera y Arcas. “It’s not very different from what happened during the Cambrian explosion, when cells began to aggregate together using chemical signals, then became organisms. Their behavior became more and more collective as signals became more and more explicit.”
As you watch these passionate UX designers explain their vision, you become convinced that if they can imagine it, it will come.
