What Happens When the Things We Design Wake Up?

Mickey McManus is a research fellow at Autodesk in the Office of the CTO, and Principal & Chairman of the board at MAYA Design, a design consultancy and innovation lab. He's a pioneer in the fields of pervasive computing, collaborative innovation, human-centered design and education.

In Mickey’s current research project, “Primordial," he and his team are exploring the impact on design when three inevitable technology trends converge. Often called the “Internet of Things,” pervasive computing is a game-changer that's on a collision course with two complementary trends�"digital manufacturing and machine learning. In 2012, Mickey co-authored one of the essential field guides to the era of pervasive computing in his book, Trillions. He believes that taken together, these three trends give us the ability to shift to an entirely new set of design and business paradigms for the first time in history. The way we design for things that begin to “wake up” is uncharted territory. If we don’t take into account our connected future and continue designing for disconnected things, we will design our way into irrelevance. The challenge designers face is how to surf these trends, what to do about them, and identify how designing "things" will change. Those of us that figure it out sooner rather than later, will have an unfair advantage while others will be reactionary and surprised at each turn of the screw.