Experience design

Abstract

One way of looking to the future is to take the past as a point of departure and in passing by the present-day extrapolate to things to come. Actual practice has demonstrated that this type of forecast can be highly accurate when it comes to the advancement of core AmI technologies. For decades Moore's law has correctly predicted the exponential growth of computer processing power. And in its generalized form it is also properly indicating performance improvements in the areas of wireless connectivity, storage capacity, and power battery technology. But despite the evident empirical observations on which this law is based, uncertainty will inevitably creep into the equation the further we look ahead in time. Taking a point of reference that is predominantly monodisciplinary in nature might cause other restrictions of "extrapolated" visions of the future. For example, by focusing primarily on technological developments danger exists that complementary disciplines in the arts and sciences will remain underexposed. This situation seems undesirable, especially as true innovations seem to happen on the borderlines between different scientific disciplines. Alternatively, current trends can be ignored in order to freely, i.e., without any restrictions emanating from the past, think about the future. Realists call this way of looking to the future "dreaming" and attribute little predictive power to the resulting visions of the future. Visionaries, on the other hand, argue that the intrinsic needs and desires of people, but also the physical, mental, and social capabilities of people, only very slowly change over time. A change that is much slower, in fact, than the time scale typically used to forecast trends. These so-called normative visions of the future put the focus of attention on people's everyday life and top down inspire different disciplines to bring about new insights through collaboration. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.