Digital Design Theory (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016) is available on Amazon.

Futurist experts have estimated that past the year 2030 computers in the cost range of inexpensive laptops will have a computational power that is equivalent to human intelligence. The implications of this modify will exist dramatic and revolutionary, presenting significant opportunities and challenges to designers. Already machines tin can process spoken language, recognize human faces, detect our emotions, and target united states with highly personalized media content. While applied science has tremendous potential to empower humans, soon it volition also be used to brand them thoroughly obsolete in the workplace, whether past replacing, displacing, or surveilling them. More than than e'er designers demand to look beyond human intelligence and consider the effects of their do on the globe and on what it means to be human.

The question of how to design a secure human futurity is complicated by the uncertainties of predicting that future. Every bit it is practiced today, blueprint is strategically positioned to better the usefulness and quality of human interactions with technology. Similar all human being endeavors, yet, the practice of blueprint risks marginalization if it is unable to evolve. When envisioning the future of pattern, our social and psychological frames of reference unavoidably and unconsciously bias our estimation of the world. People systematically underestimate exponential trends such every bit Moore's law, for instance, which tells us that in 10 years we will have 32 times more total computing power than today. Indeed, as estimator scientist Ray Kurzweil observes, "We won't experience 100 years of technological advances in the 21st century; nosotros will witness on the social club of twenty,000 years of progress (once more when measured past today'due south rate of progress), or nearly i,000 times greater than what was achieved in the 20th century."

Design-oriented research provides a possible means to anticipate and guide rapid changes, as design, predicated as it is on envisioning alternatives through "collective imagining," is inherently more futurity-oriented than other fields. It therefore seems reasonable to ask how technology-design efforts might focus more than effectively on enabling human-oriented systems that extend beyond design for humanity. In other words, is it possible to design intelligent systems that safely blueprint themselves?

Imagine a hereafter scenario in which extremely powerful computerized minds are imitation and shared across autonomous virtual or robotic bodies. Given the malleable nature of such super-intelligences–they won't be limited past the hardwiring of DNA information–1 tin can reasonably assume that they will exist free of the limitations of a single material trunk, or the experience of a single lifetime, allowing them to tinker with their ain genetic code, integrate survival knowledge directly from the learnings of others, and develop a radical new form of digital evolution that modifies itself through nigh instantaneous exponential cycles of imitation and learning, and passes on its adaptations to successive generations of "self."

In such a post-human hereafter, the simulation of alternative histories and futures could be used as a strategic evolutionary tool, allowing imaginary scenarios to exist inhabited and played out before individuals or populations commit to actual alter. Not just would the lineage of such beings be perpetually enhanced by automation, leading to radical new forms of social relationships and values, but the systems that realize or govern those values would likely go the instinctual machinery of a synchronized and sentient "techno-cultural mind."

Bringing such speculative and hypothetical scenarios into cultural awareness is i way that designers can evaluate possibilities and make up one's mind how best to proceed. What should designers practise to set for such futures? What methods should exist practical to their enquiry and training?

Today's interaction designers shape human beliefs through investigative research, systemic thinking, creative prototyping, and rapid iteration. Can these aforementioned methods be used to accost the multitude of longer-term social and ethical issues that designers create? Practise previous inventions, such as the internal combustion engine or nuclear power, provide relevant historical lessons to acquire from? If picayune else, reflecting on super-intelligence through the lens of nuclear proliferation and global warming throws light on the existential consequences of poor blueprint. Information technology becomes clear that while systemic thinking and holistic research are useful methods for addressing existential risks, creative prototyping or rapid iteration with nuclear ability or the environment as materials is probably unwise. Existential risks do not allow for a 2d chance to go it right. The only possible class of activeness when confronted with such challenges is to examine all possible future scenarios and use the all-time available subjective estimates of objective take a chance factors.

Simulations can also be leveraged to heighten designers' awareness of trade-offs. Consider the consequences of contemporary interaction pattern, for example: intuitive interfaces, systemic experiences, and service economies. When current pattern methods are applied to designing future systems, each of these patterns tin can exist extended through imagined simulations of posthuman pattern. Intuitive human-computer interfaces go interfaces between postal service- humans; they become new ways of mediating interdependent personal and cultural values–new social and political systems. Systemic experiences become new kinds of emergent mail service-human being perception and awareness. Service economies get the synapses of tomorrow's underlying system of techno-cultural values, new moral codes.

The kickoff major triumph of interaction design, the design of the intuitive interface, merged technology with aesthetics. Designers adapted modernism's static typography and industrial styling and learned to accost human factors and usability concerns. Today agile software practices and design thinking ensure the intuitive arbitration of human and machine learning. We adapt to the design limitations of technological systems, and they adapt in return based on how we behave. This interplay is embodied by the pattern of the interface itself, between perception and activity, affordance and feedback. As the adaptive intelligence of computer systems grows over fourth dimension, design practices that emphasize the homo aspects of interface blueprint will extend beyond the one-sided human perspective of machine usability toward a reciprocal relationship that values intelligent systems every bit partners. In light of the rapid development of these new forms of artificial and synergetic life, the quality and safe of their mental and concrete experiences may ultimately deserve equal if not greater consideration than ours.

Interaction blueprint can also define interconnected networks of interface impact-points and shape them into choose-your-own-adventures of human experience. Nosotros live in a world of increasingly seamless integration betwixt Wi-Fi networks and sparse clients, between phones, homes, watches, and cars. In the near hereafter, crowdsourcing systems coupled with increasingly pervasive connectivity services and vesture computer interfaces will generate massive stockpiles of data that catalog human beliefs to feed increasingly intuitive learning machines. Just as human being-centered design crafts construction and experience to shape intuition, post-human-centered design will teach intelligent auto systems to design the hierarchies and compositions of man behavior. New systems will flourish as fluent extensions of our digital selves, facilitating seamless mobility throughout systems of virtual identity and the governance of shared thoughts and emotions.

Applying interaction blueprint to postal service-human experience requires designers to call up holistically beyond the interface to the protocols and exchanges that unify human and machine minds. Truly systemic post-man-centered designers recognize that such interfaces will ultimately manifest in the psychological textile of postal service-human gild at much deeper levels of significant and value. Merely every bit today's physical products have slid from buying to on-need digital services, our very conception of these services will get the new product. In the short term, advances in wearable and ubiquitous computing technology will render our inner dimensions of motivation and cocky-perception tangible as explicit and actionable cues. Ultimately such manifestations will be totally absorbed by the invisible mitt of postal service-human cognition and emerge as new forms of social and self-technology. Design interventions at this level will deeply control the mail service-human psyche, building on research methodologies of experience economics designed for the strategic realization of social and cognitive value. Can a market demand be designed for goodwill toward humans at this stage, or does the long tail of identity realization preclude it? Will we live in a utopian world of socialized techno-egalitarian fulfillment and dearest or get a eugenic cult of celebrity cocky-appearing?

It seems unlikely that humans volition stalk their fascination with technology or stop applying it to improve themselves and their immediate fabric status. Tomorrow'due south generation faces an explosion of wireless networks, ubiquitous computing, context-enlightened systems, intelligent machines, smart cars, robots, and strategic modifications to the human being genome. While the precise grade these changes will take is unclear, recent history suggests that they are probable to be welcomed at first and progressively avant-garde. It appears reasonable that human intelligence will become obsolete, economic wealth will reside primarily in the hands of super-intelligent machines, and our ability to survive will lie across our direct command. Adapting to cope with these changes, without alienating the new forms of intelligence that emerge, requires transcending the limitations of human-centered design. Instead, a new breed of postal service-human-centered designer is needed to maximize the potential of post-evolutionary life.

This essay was adapted with permission from Digital Design Theory (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016) edited by Helen Armstrong.

Photo: Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images