Design Trends for 2013

www.thememedesign.com

Learn

CreateConsume

Move

Socialize

RetroFuturism

Augmented Dialogue

Downsampling

Quantified Ambition

Agile UrbanismSensory Bandwidth

FoodismFaceted Video

DownsamplingThe Onion hit it spot on when they joked that 90% of our waking lives are spent staring at glowing rectangles. Along with more screens in our lives, the volume and intensity of information that has been passing through those rect-angles has also been increasing—more widgets, more animations, more feeds, more dimensions, more data. In 2013 we see a counteractive trend towards digital abstrac-tions, a compressive reduction of dense information sets into radically simplified communications and visualizations.

Little Printer skims headlines from your online feeds and spits them out as a low-fi ticker tape for your bedside. Ro-botify.me creates a personalized avatar that morphs based on the quantity, quality, and content of your aggregated social media activity. And the lovably crude, etch-a-sketch-esque PopSlate case uses e-ink to display simplified con-tent pulled from your smartphone. In 2013 look for tech-nology that pares down functionality and operates at the edge, rather than the center of your attention.

Food has replaced art as high culture. We pay top dollar for the local, the organic, the socially sustainable. We de-bate the finer points of terroir. We take pictures of our food and ogle the glistening food porn provided by Epicurious and Evernote Food. Whole Foods and other premium food stores are expanding at a breakneck rate.

In 2013, specialized products, processes and mobile ap-plications will catalyze new levels of culinary geekiness. Look for more hyper-specialization, more difference, more unique combinations of foods. In the home, look for con-tinued professional aspiration and more high-tech tools in the kitchen as enhanced measurement, timing, and sens-ing become standard components of cooktops and coun-tertops.

Foodism

Quantifed Ambition“How to win friends and influence” has been the mantra of go-getters since Dale Carnegie’s influential 1937 book. In 2013 it’s all about data-driven, quantified goal setting and achievement. How popular and influential are you? Ap-plications like Klout and Traakr assign you an ‘Influencer Score’ based on your social media presence. How effec-tive are your communication habits? Use Google’s new email analytics tool to see how long you take to respond to

people. With widespread public health problems stemming from poor nutrition and exercise habits, consumer technol-ogies like Nike’s Fuelband, Jawbone, and Wii and Kinect games are also becoming key tools for lifestyle change and improved personal fitness. In 2013, a spirit of ‘gamification’ will make measuring, analyzing, and optimizing your habits and behaviors funner than ever.

Augmented DialogueMobile tech has already stepped in to help us to search and discover, to navigate, to buy stuff. In 2013 look for app-assisted conversations. Missing social cues? Don’t know what to say, where to stand, or when to look away? Smartphones will help you to navigate the unstable terrain of interpersonal dialogue.

Can’t remember the name of that celebrity? Speech-recog-nition apps like Mindmeld listen to your conversations and recommend related info and content in realtime. Google wants to join the party too, not crash it, with plans to use voice and gestural inputs to make it easier to look up facts without disturbing dinner table etiquette. In 2013 we’re going to continue to get less attentive and even more awk-ward, with mobile tech taking up the slack.

Sensory BandwidthIn 2012, a rise in texting-while-walking accidents highlight-ed the absurd perils of mobile computing. We’re increas-ingly tapping into sensory reserves to juggle the virtual world and the real world at the same time. Voice control, with its potential to free up screen-strained eyes, surged in 2012 with Apple’s integration of Siri in iOS5, and has been rolled out in many mobile phones, TVs, and in-vehicle systems. Audio outputs are growing too, especially for use in the car, with services like Aha Radio that read aloud

feeds from the web. But the auditory channel isn’t the only sensory channel with available bandwidth. Vibration and sense of touch is also being explored, particularly as a way of getting navigation directions while walking or biking, or getting tactile caller ID information without looking at the phone. In 2013 look for non-visual interfaces, especially those invented for people with disability, to gain wide-spread traction as tools for mobile computing.

Agile EconomiesIn 2012 we saw a growing tension emerging between the static, stable, tax-paying substructure of urban busi-nesses, and the networks of mobile opportunists that exploit its legal and spatial margins. Big cities draw a fairly firm distinction between a house and a hotel, but Airbnb’s entire business is based on obscuring that line, angering hoteliers and local residents. Restaurants too are fighting

back against the rising tide of gourmet food trucks that siphon away customers without paying taxes. Even the public street is being monetized, as companies like Parking Auction try to help drivers auction high-demand parking spaces before leaving. In 2013 we see even more granular capitalization of the public sphere, as open space and free time are put to work through innovative service ecologies.

Faceted VideoIn the vast intermeshed soup of hyperlinked internet con-tent, videos are the big, irreducible meaty chunks—heavy to move around, impenetrable to search, clumsily bracket-ed off by pause and play buttons, and still relatively hard to spread, embed, and remix. In 2013, look for new ways of breaking down, chopping up, and sharing video content.

Key indicators? The GIF, reemerged from its 1980’s cryos-tasis as the format of choice for spreading Gangnam Style

reenactments and other cool stuff, has officially been ver-bed by the Oxford dictionary. Iphone apps like Cinema-gram and Flixel have popularized the image-video hybrid, or cinemagraph format. And as speech-to-text and audio recognition technologies like Shazam for TV and Google’s auto closed-captioning continue to advance, in 2013 we can also expect greater video searchability as well as more ways to link video to the rest of the web.

RetroFuturismAs the objects of consumer technology literally disappear from our lives, becoming thinner, lighter, more invisible, and more seamlessly integrated, we have seen a resurgent interest, even a nostalgia for the artifacts of technologi-cal physicality. But we don’t actually want the clunky old things. We want it both ways.

In 2012 we saw the explosion of Instagram, offering 1970s-era film patina instantly layered onto your 8 mega-

pixel iPhone snaps. In fashion, the industrial neon futurism of Prada’s fall 2012 lookbook. And in music, from 8-bit Chiptune soundscapes to ubiquitous Autotune, to 90’s-era 808 drum kits, Pop and Electronic continued to aestheti-cize the tools of digital production to break the artifice of acoustic seamless. In 2013, look for product design to join the arts in this anterior gaze, as the history of technology becomes as important as its future.

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