Design Trends for 2013

Consume
Downsampling Foodism

Create
RetroFuturism Faceted Video

Move Learn
Quantified Ambition Agile Urbanism Sensory Bandwidth

Socialize
Augmented Dialogue

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Downsampling
The Onion hit it spot on when they joked that 90% of our waking lives are spent staring at glowing rectangles. Along with more screens in our lives, the volume and intensity of information that has been passing through those rectangles has also been increasingmore widgets, more animations, more feeds, more dimensions, more data. In 2013 we see a counteractive trend towards digital abstractions, a compressive reduction of dense information sets into radically simplied communications and visualizations. PopSlate, uses lovably crude, etch-a-sketch-esque e-ink to display images on your iphone case. With more and more information passing through many social and information feeds, Were already seeing this with physical products like the Little Printer, which literally prints a very lowrez stream of content selected from your online feeds, and or online, products like Robotify.me that input your many social feeds in realtime, and crunch it down into a digestible nugget.

Foodism
Food has replaced art as high culture. We pay top dollar for the local, the organic, the socially sustainable. We debate the ner points of terroir. We take pictures of our food and ogle the glistening food porn provided by Epicurious and Evernote Food. Whole Foods and other premium food stores are expanding at a breakneck rate. In 2013, specialized products, processes and mobile applications will catalyze new levels of culinary geekiness. Look for more hyper-specialization, more difference, more unique combinations of foods. In the home, look for continued professional aspiration and more high-tech tools in the kitchen cooking as enhanced measurement, timing, and sensing become standard components of cooktops and countertops.

Quantifed Ambition
How to win friends and inuence has been the mantra of go-getters since Dale Carnegies inuential 1937 book. In 2013 its all about data-driven, quantied goal setting and achievement. How popular and inuential are you? Applications like Klout and Traakr assign you an Inuencer Score based on your social media presence. How effective are your communication habits? Use Googles new email analytics tool to see how long you take to respond to people. With widespread public health problems stemming from poor nutrition and exercise habits, consumer technologies like Nikes Fuelband, Jawbone, and Wii and Kinect games are also becoming key tools for lifestyle change and improved personal tness. In 2013, a spirit of gamication will make measuring, analyzing, and optimizing your habits and behaviors funner than ever.

Augmented Dialogue
Mobile tech has already stepped in to help us to search and discover, to navigate, to buy stuff. In 2013 look for app-assisted conversations. Missing social cues? Dont know what to say, where to stand, or when to look away? Smartphones will help you to navigate the unstable terrain of interpersonal dialogue. Cant remember the name of that celebrity? Speech-recognition apps Apps like Mindmeld listen to your conversations and recommend related info and content in realtime. Google wants to join the party too, not crash it, with plans to use voice and gestural inputs to make it easier to look up facts without disturbing dinner table etiquette. In 2013 were going to continue to get less attentive and even more awkward, with mobile tech taking up the slack.

Sensory Bandwidth
In 2012, a rise in texting-while-walking accidents highlighted the absurd perils of mobile computing. Were increasingly tapping into sensory reserves to juggle the virtual world and the real world at the same time. Voice control, with its potential to free up screen-strained eyes, surged in 2012 with Apples integration of Siri in iOS5, has been rolled out in many mobile phones, TVs, and in-vehicle systems. Audio outputs are growing too, especially for use in the car, with services like Aha Radio that read aloud feeds from the web. But the auditory channel isnt the only sensory channel with available bandwidth. Vibration and sense of touch is also being explored, particularly as a way of getting navigation directions while walking or biking, or getting tactile caller ID information without looking at the phone. In 2013 look for non-visual interfaces, especially those invented for people with disability, to gain widespread traction as tools for mobile computing.

Agile Economies
In 2012 we saw a growing tension emerging between the static, stable, tax-paying substructure of urban businesses, and the networks of mobile opportunists that exploit its legal and spatial margins. Big cities draw a fairly rm distinction between a house and a hotel, but Airbnbs entire business is based on obscuring that line, angering hoteliers and local residents. Restaurants too are ghting back against the rising tide of gourmet food trucks that siphon away customers without paying taxes. Even the public street is being monetized, as companies like Parking Auction try to help drivers auction high-demand parking spaces before leaving. In 2013 we see even more granular capitalization of the public sphere, as open space and free time are put to work through innovative service ecologies.

Faceted Video
In the vast intermeshed soup of hyperlinked internet content, videos are the big, irreducible meaty chunksheavy to move around, impenetrable to search, clumsily bracketed off by pause and play buttons, and still relatively hard to spread, embed, and remix. In 2013, look for new ways of breaking down, chopping up, and sharing video content. Key indicators? The GIF, reemerged from its 1980s cryostasis as the format of choice for spreading Gangnam Style reenactments and other cool stuff, has ofcially been verbed by the Oxford dictionary. Iphone apps like Cinemagram and Flixel have popularized the image-video hybrid, or cinemagraph format. And as speech-to-text and audio recognition technologies like Shazam for TV and Googles auto closed-captioning continue to advance, in 2013 we can also expect greater video searchability as well as more ways to link video to the rest of the web.

RetroFuturism
As the objects of consumer technology literally disappear from our lives, becoming thinner, lighter, more invisible, and more seamlessly integrated, we have seen a resurgent interest, even a nostalgia for the artifacts of technological physicality. But we dont actually want the clunky old things. We want it both ways. In 2012 we saw the explosion* of Instagram, offering 1970s-era lm patina, instantly layered onto your 12MP iPhone snaps, and in fashion, the low- neon futurism of Pradas fall 2012 lookbook. In music, from 8-bit Chiptune soundscapes to Autotune, to 90s-era 808 drum kits, Pop and Electronic continued to aestheticize the tools of digital production to break the artice of acoustic seamless. In 2013, look for product design to join the arts in this anterior gaze, as the history of technology becomes as important as its future.

Experience Design & Innovation

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