Last Wednesday during a short trip to London, I attended i-Design ‘08, hosted by Dynamo London as part of London Design Week.  It was a fascinating day, with some great insights into the future of interactive design.  It worked as a series of speakers, and panels, discussing their own practices and design issues.

The main issues that emerged from the day was the community-based generation of the internet, and how design and technology were now communicating with a mass-audience on a new level.  The introduction of the wii and the iPhone have created invisible, intuitive user systems.   The Nintendo DS has attracted a new audience to gaming, and interactive design as a whole is beginning to become much more friendly, and less technologically sterile.

Another issue, brought up mainly by Alexander Deshamps-Sonsino of Tinker, was the possibility that design could be taking a backseat to technology, designers are allowing technologists to teach them.  The speakers as a whole encouraged designers to develop coding skills and be very much involved in the whole process.

The final speech, by Timo Veikkola of the Future Laboratory, was something I had been looking forward to, and was indeed very interesting.  He outlined various emerging trends and creations that were shaping the future.  These included;  the Perceptive Pixel ‘Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall’; the ‘Musion Eyeliner Holographic Projection System’; Adrian Cheok’s huggy ‘Internet Pyjama’; and a virtual snow game to help the recovery of burn victims.  Also mentioned were virtual environments that display over the real world - London streets could be made to look like Blade Runner.  Earlier in the day there had been speak about virtual online avatar environments, SecondLife being the best known.  Although these are incredibly popular, I personally find them a bit unnatural, and can’t help but feel they may not be very socially responsible.  Perhaps there could be something in the combination of the two, so the virtual world is not so separated from reality, but enhances it.

Tags: i-design '08

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.