In-between narratives
We are in-between stories, in-between narratives, organizing how we make sense of the world we live in, and in-between discourses framing the roles technology can play in human experience.
The omnipresent old narrative - technology as a passive, waiting to be used tool - is losing its ability to inspire the future and is holding back new possibilities and innovation. This old discourse is so deeply embedded throughout our way of seeing the world that it creates a massive blind spot. To fully unlock the experiential potentials of our expanding relationship with adaptive, always-on technology, we need a new framework and narrative to uncover and inspire new expectations and possibilities.
We are fitting new things into old stories.
Electric vehicles are being marketed like gas vehicles — as performance objects, as status signals, as individual assets. Not as software-defined systems with adaptive capabilities. Not as potential participants in the social life of the communities they move through.
AI assistants are being designed like very fast search engines — waiting for a command, executing it, returning to standby. Not as companions that could notice the situation they are in and respond to it, offer a different view, make us aware of things in way that previously wasn’t possible.
Charging stations are being built like fuse boxes — functional, installed, belonging to no one in particular, having no relationship to the place or the people.
The technology is capable of something different. The design imagination is still using the old frame.
This is the in-between: the period when capability has outrun imagination.
When the new systems are arriving before we have asked what they should be.
When the pattern is being set — not by design but by the template.
The connected world is not just about making more things talk to each other.
The question is what we want them to say.
I find this question more interesting than any other in design right now.
It is also more urgent than it has ever been.
