The Hidden Possibilities of New Technology

Mobile phones used to be functionally direct replacements of their wired forebears. Now they have suddenly become platforms for entertainment and commerce and tools for information management and media consumption. One device starts to speak to another device without human intervention. One terminal supports protocols that other terminals don’t understand. Successive product and service generations start to coexist. It is difficult to imagine all the different applications of these permutations. It is hard to predict which solutions will dominate and which will fail outright.

The mobile user experience will be influenced by user interface, the application in the terminal, the operator’s solutions, the service provider’s way of presenting service content, and the quality of the content itself. All these factors utilize various technologies, and they all have interfaces to one another. Creating even a simple service calls for cooperation between many experts and disciplines. In a service development project today there may be no one who understands the whole range of solutions. Often, UI designers with impressive backgrounds in human sciences or design have the most trouble following technical discussions. For the majority of project participants, therefore, the only way to get a working assumption of what the technologies enable us to do and how they are likely to be used is to be involved in these projects long enough. Even then, educated guesses and developed intuitions are only approximate. Something that was supposed to be easy to implement turns out to be practically impossible. Sometimes the opposite occurs. Solutions that were originally postponed to allow technology to catch up are suddenly realized in unexpected ways.

What are the consequences of all this? Not only are the possibilities of future technologies unpredictable but, on the level of individual projects, even the possibilities of present technologies may remain mysterious. Technology does not provide bedrock for design.