THEME 1: Mobile
Previously, we proposed year 2011 being the year of the mobile. It’s happening, albeit not quite as fast as we expected mostly due bad economy. Here is our take on 2012, divided into three themes —larger contexts, if you wish— we see as the most dominant catalysts for the change for the industry and ordinary consumers alike.
1. The year of the mobile web
As mobile devices with a proper browser—smartphones, dumbphones and tablets— will gain momemtum, corporations face a situation where their existing and potential consumers will be able to access web from everywhere, not just from behind their computer.
The Joe Average being more aware of mobile means also less opportunities to sell individual screens to home — many of the energy monitors are failing already. People don’t want additional screens in their homes, especially when most of the tasks handled by them can designed to be accessed anywhere through a mobile device.
2. Redux of location-based commerce
Hyperlocal targeting has for a few years now been the wet dream of advertisers. While it’s hard to imagine a feasible mass market scenario around this, the smartest companies will see this as an opportunity to offer better and more relevant service to their customers. Others try to jump the moving train but fail miserably when using the same tactics as in paid advertising. The ones who play this right by being respectful towards the context and understanding the necessary hyginene factors such as privacy will rise up as champions in both business sense and as increased commercial value linked directly to their tactful interaction with their customers.
3. Diversification of mobile
Android and Windows Phone will offer iOS an alternative. iOS will remain the strongest commercial platform but WP will catch up due MS+Nokia marketing effort. Elsewhere, browser-based hybrid application will start taking over iOS gates. In order to compete with this, Windows Mobile will up the ante by revamping IE Mobile for WP Apollo.
THEME 2: From data to making meaning
Open data movement has been gaining steady movement throughout the year, and the public eye has seen many great visualisations which will bring them more aware of the potential that lies in making the invisible visible, and yet better, meaningful.
4. Everything that can be software, will be.
The airline industry is changing enterprise systems to tablets, cars become cellphones where you sit in, and all is connected through ubiquitous wireless networks. Fiction? Not quite, but the today here and now. This change will have huge implications to industries it hasn’t disrupted yet — mostly enterprise solutions and any physical goods that either are outdated fast or require shipping long distances. Also related: 3D printing and scanning.
5. Quantified Self
Most of the things us humans do can now be measured in numbers, in a way or another. We are in essence becoming information organisms, our location can and will be tracked through mobile devices, transactions and browser logins. We know the air quality around us, the nutrition we have daily and so forth. The devices we carry start being aware of when we sleep, walk, run and sit still for too long.
As GigaOM’s Connected Consumer-whitepaper states, “Part of this shift means that the body is shareable, at least in terms of information and data.” Anthropologists refer to this as “biological citizenship, and social networking platforms enable even those individuals with rare disorders, such as Crohn’s disease or Huntington’s disease, to reach out across the world and find others who share their conditions.”
This all presents a huge opportunity space for designers and companies to tap into. How can we make our lives better by understanding the implications of our everyday actions to our lives as a whole? The key here is to not concentrate on just narcissitic self-observation but to step up a few notches from just pure data into making the mundane meaningful. How might we best remove the complexity of apps, platforms and manual input from here? And as Jawbone’s failure with their smart bracelet UP shows, the interaction design around connected personal objects isn’t easy.
6. Conversational Computing
Us humans tend to project ourselves to inanimate objects such as interfaces and interactive systems. We feel software is more human than it really is, and humanize the interactions we engage in. Computers behave badly, ATMs have a teasing character. Designers and software developers are already taking advantage of this through designing behaviour and dialogue into interactive systems. Apple takes this even further with Siri, a powerful speech recognition algorithm with huge variety of hand-tailored answers for added quirkiness and — human feel.
- More;
- Apple Siri
- BASAAP
- Think: Product personas
THEME 3: Magical realities
By tapping into the two previous themes, designers and companies are able to offer new magical realities to people. In some this means increased opportunities in transactions — monetary or otherwise—, to some new ways to interact with the world around us.
7. Personal commerce
The data available from the transactions and in the cloud offers merchants more and better opportunities to connect with their customers. Ideally,your merchant knows enough of you to serve you better. For example, Square’s Cardcase enables two-way, personal dialogue with the customer and the merchant. Other, bigger companies will find to tap into this as well— some through replicating Square’s model or utilizing technology such as NFC.
8. Augmented reality
…but not the way you think. As a concept, AR has much more potential than just contextually overlayed POIs on top of live image. The best way to describe this is reality can be seen a platform to leverage the context by anchoring it to real world constraints.
Dentsu’s Suwappu explores augmented storytelling through using toys as markers. Shadow Cities use the real world location as a platform for MMMORPG and magic. Sky View app for iOS amplifies the real world with near-magical information we didn’t expect to be visible.
- More;
- Suwappu
- Shadow Cities
- Sky view
9. Added computation
Like we anticipated a year ago, sensorial interaction is gaining momemtum. The year 2011 has seen a lot of new products and services taking advantage of different personal sensors and display devices. The basic sensor technologies are now fairly well-developed and stable, so the time is right for software-led innovation. NFC is on its way already — big merchants like Visa are waking up to smaller challengers such as Paypal and Square. Urban informatics and the data cities collect is being opened up. For designers, this means a lot of new opportunities to innovate. The easiest way to do this is to rethink existing objects and technologies through added computation and combining many single-bit interactions into new interactive systems.
To sum it up, what do these themes mean then?
For brands and companies this sets interesting challenges: as the branding has to carry throughout different platforms, the devil is even more in the details and how the brand behaves, talks and interacts with your throughout different digital, physical and spatial touchpoints. As sustainability is dead, replaced by cradle-to-cradle thinking and renewability, just inventing and producing new physical things isn’t sustainable for any longer.
For content providers it will both a threat and an opportunity. It is now easier than ever to reach out to new and existing customers, but as the world gets more complex, the absolute control is harder, and competition tougher. The winners will go back to basics; quality, transparency and courage to find their soul and project it to every touchpoint over interaction with people.
For designers, the world is wide open. The world opening up it’s onion-like layers of data and behaviour presents opportunities to both improve the existing and invent new, disruptive things. Despite the economy, there are lots of opportunities to be had.
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