Chapter 9. The Future of Interaction Design

The future of interaction design is being created right now. Interaction designers on their own or at start-up companies or huge organizations are devising products and services that will change how we interact with each other and with our world. It's not hyperbole to suggest that the next 20 years will see significant changes in almost all aspects of our lives: our health-care experience, how we entertain ourselves, how we shop, how we get from place to place. How, when, and where we receive information will be completely transformed, and interaction designers will be there, to guide and design the products and services that will shape the future.

Interaction designers must take a role not only in creating the future of the discipline, but also making sure that the future works well and is designed for humans to use and enjoy. The next decades will see some amazing advances, some of which are explored in this chapter, and interaction designers will be at the center of all of it. It's an exciting time.

In the next decade, the Internet will move from behind computer monitors to the objects and buildings that are all around us. Microprocessors, sensors, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags will be built into everyday objects and networked, creating what writer Bruce Sterling calls "an Internet of things." Indeed, we will likely stop thinking of the Internet as a destination or a place, just as we don't think of electricity as such.

With wireless connections blanketing our cities (either through monolithic engineering projects such as Google's current wireless project in San Francisco or ad-hoc networks patched together by individuals and businesses), the ability to access information contextually, when and where it is needed, will become more commonplace. We will be able to find people and things, and they will be able to find us.

As described in Chapter 7, our products and services will better adapt to us, and we to them. Robots will perform tasks in our homes, schools, cities, and businesses. Intelligent agents will find information we need before we need it. We will wear our computers on our sleeves, if the computer isn't the sleeve itself.

The future will be what the future has always been: hopeful, scary, unknown, disorienting. Only more so.