Humanising technology

Abstract

In the future we will have a population with a much more diverse profile of capabilities — physical, sensorial, and cognitive — than that of today, accompanied by different lifestyle patterns for work, leisure, living and social interaction, and with diverse socially and culturally induced needs and desires. The extent to which technology will mediate for our greater individual wellbeing through products and services that satisfy our physical and emotional needs across the changing age range is the real issue under discussion in the following chapter. We are an inventive and adaptable biological species with deep socio-cultural and spiritual needs and desires that lives largely, in the developed world, in a ‘technosphere’, a synthesised artificial world of our own making. How do we reconcile our many individual corporeal, social and spiritual needs in facing the challenge of delivering ‘inclusive’ design in an era of rapid technological change which will also see profound changes in population demographics and lifestyles in the next twenty years?