Realities, Alternate and Future (via SXSW)

by Christopher Hlavaty, posted March 13th, 2008
categorized under events, trends

The end. After five days of panels, parties, lectures, and libations, I leave Austin duly exhausted, and yet, exhilarated; full of ideas for future projects and interactive experiments, full of promise for the future of our emerging discipline, and its prospects for empowering humans to live smarter, happier, more meaningful lives.

In her closing keynote, the futurist and game designer, Jane McGonigal, spoke of the moral responsibility we designers face in our everyday practice. Ours is the onus of bringing happiness, challenge, and reward into the quotidian of human existence. If we can make our daily reality more like the alternate realities we seek in games, perhaps drawing upon the models used in game psychologies, might we enable a richer human experience? Is there a way to make household chores fun? Can exercise routines take on the character of a massively multiplayer online game? Can an online simulation force us to envision a world depleted of its natural resources? See choreWars, ziked, and worldWithoutOil for examples.

And now for self-interest: what might the future hold for our profession? Several themes emerged from the conference’s dialogues; most centered around the concept of building social networks (surprise!), which in turn foster communal intelligence. Ah yes, the start of transhumanity. One panel even suggested designers of tomorrow would not “design” in the traditional sense of the word, but instead, create systems that enable a communal approach to design. We designers would provide the factory, the cogs, the wheels, but users, or at least some of them, would build out and iterate upon the design itself. In some ways, the SDK’s and API’s of today are precursors to this trend, though such systems limit the potential “user-as-designer” base to those with specialized programming skills. What happens once computer science becomes a prerequisite alongside math and reading and phys ed? Power to the user.

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