18 Predictions For The Future To Live By Now

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18 Predictions For The Future To Live By Now

The intelligent craftsperson is the visual world’s thought leader.
A challenge to the primacy of traditional currency – a resurgence and innovation in barter.
The most useful and most simple exchange of goods and service wins.
Learning how to continue to trade, create value and be compensated in the face of the creative commons shift. People will not pay for things they can get for free therefore creativity that is spreadable through the ether (music, movies) must find a new way to be supported, through networks of supporters. The contract will be implicit. Just not sure yet how.
Living life as a combination of your online identity and brand and your offline interactions, enriching both through the recording and refining of both to its bare essence of what matters most to us.
Consumers are empowered with increasing control over the shaping of the things they surround themselves with. Products we consume must be refined to their ultimate utility. The consumer is too savvy and stretched too thin to tolerate poor design and unnecessary steps in service. New creative challenges result in more innovation in design, higher mental processes up the ante, more inventions result and inventions that matter, that speak to our current concerns of climate, sustainability, environment, crowded spaces, creating more time for our hurried society to enjoy life.
Remember that sustain means creating something that allows us to stay on this planet longer, to enrich future cycles in the life of a thing, allow for continuous improvement, continued harmony.
As technology is further and further integrated into our mobile lives we will become untethered to our computers again and our interactions will exist in a third space, now forming.
As more exciting innovative materials are being created and light sources are redefined and evolved, the raw organic materials from metal to wood to vegetal fabrics will be prized and cherished and treated with respect. Nature the new ‘love mark’.
Finding ways for us to live for a common good instead of an increasingly alienating individualistic and ephemeral satisfaction. Individualism will be more and more about satisfying both social and common needs and finding time and space to recharge. Rampant selfishness and egoism is now subsiding.
The end of the traditional fashion magazine. A centralized authority defining what we should love, follow, wear, is falling to the wayside as more diverse voices share the stage and fashion moves so quickly as to be as unremarkable as yesterday’s lunch special.
Design is integrated into utility. Design means organization of principles. Ordering. Prioritizing. We will have to take the most time and care at this stage because competition is fierce. Homogeneity is a constant threat. And for the process to be invisible, it must be thoughtfully considered beforehand.
Simplicity is king but that doesn’t mean dull.
Scent and color become design elements.
Everything has a purpose but that purpose might be visceral, might be emotive. We have to listen to culture and hear the shifts.
We must stop saying ‘consumer’ and say ‘people’ ‘person’ ‘citizen’. As marketers and developers, we are on the same side. We must not work to ‘trick’ people into buying. We must respect their needs and serve up the best solution, the best most enjoyable experience or product.
Create whimsy. Create pleasure. Get people to think. Promote expansiveness. Promote progress. Promote sharing.
Time is a luxury. Time will be a currency. We will ‘pay’ in order to have more time.

An agency in Barcelona asked me what I thought about the future and this is how I answered in an email. It came off the cuff and still holds true for me more than a year later.

-Chauncey Zalkin