From http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/the-internet-of-things-is-coming-sooner-than-you-think-18-06-2011/
I have been writing a bit of an article about the Internet of Things, from the perspective of a design Institute, and what I have written so far is below, which is now crying out for some revision and development in more substantiated directions:
The way into and the way out of design was never all that clear-cut, but it’s becoming more difficult still. A major challenge traditionally has been about the way that clients of design products and services interacted with the often entirely human face of the design apparatchik. In other words, it was still very much about human beings talking to other human beings. Technology was a vastly interesting, exciting and often frustrating canvas that people painted on in various ways. This included developing broadcast tools and platforms, every kind of print media, and immersive online virtual worlds in which, with very human desires and agency, someone might get lost.
In the evolution of this world, in between the floating point numbers which fallaciously demarcate the movement between versions and network connectivity (1.0, 2.0, 3.0…) we woke up one morning to realise that the typical street down which we walk on a daily basis was suddenly talking to us, sending out data worth on average five tweets worth of data, and our electrical items were developing lives of their own, and were joining us on the web as the spoor of pattern matching and algorithmic exercise.
But where was design?
It was where design has usually been, biting hard at the edges and falling forward fast (as Matt Locke, then at the BBC Future Media team, famously observed in talks about commissioning and independent producers in the interactive space). It is all around us, all the time, but needs guides and shepherds (a word I have heard today at the BBC in Media Quays in Salford) to be fully contextualised and appreciated for the role it plays. We all understand the value of design it seems, when holding it in our hands, mobile or tablet, or accessory from a boutique fashion store. But it still falls to story tellers to plot the points on a map and show us the waves and plateaus that characterise popular design history.
The sheer scale of the fleets of devices and potential interoperability I detect scares even the most hardened and able designers. The European document talks of the Metamorphosis of Objects. What does this translate as in the mind of a designer. How do you uncover meaningful connections through design when it seems as all the objects obey an impulse to connect that is insatiable and ruthless. Where is the syntax, where is the grammar? In their classic and essential text on social semiotics of visual design, The Grammar of Visual Design, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen cogently observe that all forms of design, situated in visual media from their perspective, cuts out and downplays what might be present in media with alternative syntax and narrative.
