COMMENT: Predicting technology of tomorrow

Sep 10 2009 by Lewis Harrison, The Journal

EVEN if technology makes something possible, does that mean you should do it? That was the question I took away from last week’s Dconstruct conference in Brighton, at which some 400 bearded and bespectacled web geeks gathered to hear a range of talks on the topic of ‘Designing for tomorrow’.

Among the speakers were Microsoft’s August de los Reyes, who’s pioneering some new ways of interacting with your computer, a BAFTA award-winning game developer and a couple of designers who showed clips from sci-fi classics Star Trek, 2001 and, erm, Knowledge Navigator.

For me, the most thought-provoking turn came from the very first speaker of the day.

Adam Greenfield is head of user-interface design at Nokia. In keeping with the vogue at Dconstruct, he sported both a beard and a lovely pair of glasses, and had an enviably large vocabulary – or “a dictionary containing only long words” – as a fellow conference goer put it.

The premise of his talk was that as network technologies become more sophisticated, information that’s currently constrained to computer screens and mobile devices will spill out onto the streets of our towns and cities, changing the way we interact with them. Everything will be instantly knowable.

This could mean that as you walk along a street you’ll be able to find out practically anything you’d like to know about, well, anything there. Reviews and hygiene inspection results for your favourite restaurant. Current queuing times at the local launderette. Crime statistics for that alley you’re about to walk down.

And that’s not all. As technology advances we could see cars becoming shared rather than owned – so you’ll drive a car to work and then as soon as you get out it becomes available to someone else in the area, making use of it for the whole of the day as opposed to just a couple of hours. We might also move from ‘wayfinding’, using street signs and landmarks to find your way around, to ‘wayshowing’, where you’re directed to your destination by sat nav.

Greenfield’s predictions were fascinating, but I had to wonder if such changes would really be for the better. Sure, you’d be able to get around cities more efficiently, and you might stop going to that local seafood restaurant so much after discovering their inspection results. But is that what we really want?

Isn’t one of the joys of living in or visiting a city the experience of discovering it for yourself and developing your own specialist knowledge? Maybe sometimes a little ignorance isn’t such a bad thing.

Lewis Harrison is communications manager at Codeworks, the North East’s centre for digital innovation.