Graham Kenny, President of Reinvent Australia, described the organisation as a collaborative initiative to create a conversation on a shared vision for the nation. The bottom line of its endeavors is to increase the quality of life for all Australians, by influencing government and business in how they work.

Kenny quoted Henry Mintzberg in a recent Harvard Business Review article, Rescuing Capitalism from Itself.

Kate Eriksson, Head of Innovation at PwC, described the landscape of the participants in creating a vision for the future of Australia, and noted that being polite is one of the biggest impediments to progress. The big questions are ‘What we can do? How can we do it?’

Oliver Freeman, Vice President of Reinvent Australia, talked about the crisis of parliamentary democracy, in which powerlessness is a recurring theme, resulting in a “manifestation of misalignment”. We need to realize James Surowiecki’s idea that collectlvely we are smarter than the elite few.

Michelle Fitzgerald, the newly appointed Chief Digital Officer of the City of Melbourne, spoke about using technology to reimagine our cities, to enable better human experience. The most important part is to co-create a vision for Melbourne as a smart city, with all stakeholders involved. Melbourne has many assets, including its open data platform, sensor on rubbish bins, and much more, but it needs to be ready for dramatic further change, including the impact of driverless cars.

Paul Schetler, CEO of the Australian government’s recently formed Digital Transformation Office, noted that the big difference between government and private sector is that government doesn’t participate in a market, they are sole providers of government services. There is an ethical imperative to provide the best possible services. We must do better. The costs of computing and storage have gone through the floor, completely changing the economics of service delivery. This opens up the opportunity to focus on service design.

Reinvent Australia seems like an excellent initiative, complementing existing efforts to form useful visions and catalyse action to build a better national future. I look forward to seeing what comes from the group.

Click on the image below to watch a video of the segment.


Over the years I have done work for clients on the future of homes and received media coverage for issues including our relationships with our homes and how homes will nurture and protect us.

In today’s program there was plenty to talk about on the predictions of new technologies in the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, and living room.

However at the end of the interview the question came up of what happens when the technology doesn’t work?

This is a point that was addressed in my report for Intel Security on Safeguarding the Future of Digital Australia in 2025.

For all the wonders of what technology can do for us, we need to be sure not to become dependent on it.

A very pointed example is digital locks. They may be secure, but if there is any system failure, we may not be able to get into our own homes.

There are many issues that need to be addressed, not least backup plans that function even if there is no electricity or an operating system failure, as well as contingencies for systems malfunctioning.

Good design can certainly address these issues and provide us with security and control even if technology malfunctions. However we need to recognize that good design is not always prevalent, or built-in to all components of the systems we build.

As technology moves to the heart of every aspect of our lives, we need to be sure that we maintain full control, even when our beautiful home of the future crashes.

You can view a video of the segment by clicking on the image below.

We primarily discussed the fantastic Wikihouse project, which provides Creative Commons plans for parts which can be 3D printed or machine cut and readily assembled to build inexpensive homes.

The genesis of Wikihouse was in addressing housing affordability in the UK, however it is now a global movement, enabling both individuals and communities to inexpensively build homes.

Open source concepts are at the heart of the project, freely providing plans with a license that means that improvements must be shared back with the community.

Yet this approach for house-building is only enabled by 3D printing and machine cutting, allowing digital plans to be easily made into the components from which the buildings can be constructed.

Open source evolved from the world of software and has now been applied across many other domains including physical objects.

3D printing has until recently been limited to fairly small-scale objects, however this is being rapidly scaled up.

Given the broader scope of these technologies, housing seems like an obvious application, and Wikihouse a fantastic initiative in this space.

Where else can open source plans and 3D printing be applied to bring value to communities?

Click on the image to see a video of the segment:

In the segment I pointed to some of the broader trends shaping the future of work, as well as particular jobs that would be disappearing or growing.

REFEREES are an excellent example of the kind of work that is on the verge of being automated. Judgment and decision-making is required, however those decisions needs to be based on as full data as possible. Human referees can only have one view of events. While many sports are starting to allow computer data to be used, such as whether the ball has crossed the line in soccer, these are only in limited instances.

Of course judging whether there has been a foul is far less cut-and-dried. However multiple cameras on all action, combined with machine learning algorithms fed by thousands of examples of what does and does not constitute a foul, could probably already perform better than most human referees on the field. Sportspeople’s and fans’ willingness to embrace the new technology is another issue, however there are few who would dearly hang on to the flaws of human referees.

DESIGN is in a way the defining domain of the future, in shaping technology, products, and indeed everything in our world so it best suits humans. Design requires creativity, and even more it requires a deep understanding of what it is to be human, and how we want to experience the world. In the segment I used the example of emotional robot designers, those who design machines to interact with us on an emotional level.

While it sounds like a specialist role, in the broadest sense it will be a massive job sector. We need to design effective emotional engagement into the technologies we create. Design will be at the heart of the 21st century, and design work will grow massively, because it requires uniquely human capabilities to forge a human-centric world.

As a society we need to be thinking deeply about how automation will impact today’s and tomorrow’s jobs. Many jobs will disappear, yet there will massive demand for many domains of human talent.

Considering this we can shape our companies, educational institutions, and personal journeys to where prosperity lies.

The next phase of development will be to enable phone users to Shazam actual objects, said Riley, such as a cereal packet in the grocery store to get more nutritional information or a DVD case at home to buy the movie soundtrack.

The capability is not new, with services such as Amazon Firefly allowing users to identify objects and buy them on Amazon, and Slyce identifying objects within a store for lookup and purchase. However Shazam’s excellent and long-standing service suggests they will execute well on object recognition and take the domain further.

There are massive implications for both retail and product design.

Design
A couple of years ago, anticipating this development, I wrote about the idea of “Shoezam“, that could recognize and order shoes on the street. I wrote:

With 3D printing and other customized manufacturing techniques, apps that allow the essence of items to be captured through images will mean that anything can be duplicated virtually at will.

What will this mean for designers?

In a world of open information flows and inexpensive manufacturing all recognized designers are already getting copied wholesale. Yet this may be miniscule compared with what is coming.

Of course recognition technologies used in the app and the manufacturing processes will not be fabulous for some time to come. Customers will only be getting an approximation of the original.

Over time the quality will improve, gradually and surely.

Yet even at the apogee of replicating technologies, there will of course be a premium for buying original designer clothes and objects, for many reasons. It will give prestige and status to have originals, people will prefer to reward designers, and there will always be some quality difference. Quality will be truly to the fore.

In-store comparative pricing
The most obvious implication of Shazam’s object recognition capabilities is simply making it easier for customers in a store to identify an app for comparative pricing.

Shopping on the street
This only slightly streamlines the process of putting in the object’s name or scanning its tag when you’re in a store. However it does allow people to identify objects – such as clothes – on the street or in places other than stores in to purchase them.

Contextual information and reputation
One of the great possibilities is gathering deeper information about a product, not necessarily from just the manufacturer. A ‘Wikipedia’ of products could bring to bear both manufacturer information and others’ data or opinions. This would be an excellent route to access aggregated consumer opinions or manufacturer reputation scores.

Accurate, easy and widespread object recognition was only a matter of time. With Shazam’s reach that is likely to be very soon.

In this shift there are certainly opportunities as well as substantial challenges for retailers, designers, and manufacturers. The landscape of buying is rapidly changing.

The Australian newspaper yesterday featured an article titled Mobile exposes need for design skills, programming languages: Ross Dawson based on an interview with myself and Alan Patterson, CEO of the Australian Computer Society, which is organizing the conference.

The article begins:

The rise of mobile is absolutely shifting the nature of technology work as it becomes an important – and often primary – interface to digital worlds. Indeed, mobile technologies are changing the nature of virtually every kind of work.

Interface and user experience design has moved to the center of technology, partly due to the smaller screen sizes on mobile devices, as well as our soaring expectations of beauty. Design is the core skill and capability that makes technology useful today. This is just part of what makes technology a fundamentally creative field.

The full article is well worth a read, it goes on to cover some of my broader perspectives on the jobs of the future as well as Alan Patterson’s insights on mobile and the future of ICT work.

The Strand is the best possible location for her in Sydney, with its classic Victorian architecture and rosta of leading Australian designers such as Akira, Alex Perry, Scanlan Theodore and sass & bide.

The Strand is producing a series of videos titled We Are The Makers, featuring the stores in the arcade. Below is the video of Victoria, which in less than 2 minutes successfully captures some of the vitality and creativity that is expressed in her jewellery. A very nice write-up of the interview is also available.

Over the last few years I have been drawn increasingly into the future of retail, not least due to the degree of uncertainty in the industry.

In my keynote next week at the International Retail Congress in Lima, Peru I will be sharing some of my latest insights, while recent work has included working with a large supermarket chain with their suppliers, a US pharmacy/ convenience store in developing future-oriented strategies, and fashion retailers in exploring shifts in the industry.

One of the key issues that will drive the future of retail is uniqueness. In many retail sectors it is very difficult to have unique elements to their offer, however it can be a critical differentiator. In sectors where offerings truly are unique, through design, on-premises craftmanship, and truly personal service, that needs to be made as visible as possible.

This is why the Strand’s video series is so apt, focusing on and capturing the uniqueness of the artisans in the arcade, including restauranteurs and shoe craftspeople.

Have a look at the video. You will catch a glimpse of how unique personality and creativity is being made available in a world in which so much is exactly the same.

It was a fascinating discussion, which was definitely useful as I develop my forthcoming Future of Retail framework. (Still working on it, I don’t know when it will be ready for the public, more later.)

Michael Fox, founder of the highly innovative and successful Shoes of Prey, spoke about some of what they envisage for the future of retail.

One of their internal initiatives is an app they dub “Shoezam”, which acts like Shazam in that people can take an image of a shoe they like in the street, which the app analyzes so that users can immediately order that shoe for themselves.

Michael said that the team is working on the app in background mode, for example during in-house hackathons, as it is a challenging problem and will take some time to develop an app that can extract the subtleties of the shoe it is looking at.

Of course there is a major difference to Shazam. In Shazam users that hear a song and like it can identify it in order to buy the song, with the creators of the music getting paid (hopefully).

However Shoezam – as I understand it – won’t identify the actual shoe it is looking at so that users can order the same shoe by the same maker. It identifies the characteristics of the shoe so they can be duplicated, or approximated as closely as possible, in the Shoes of Prey custom shoe creation process.

The implications of this are profound.

With 3D printing and other customized manufacturing techniques, apps that allow the essence of items to be captured through images will mean that anything can be duplicated virtually at will.

What will this mean for designers?

In a world of open information flows and inexpensive manufacturing all recognized designers are already getting copied wholesale. Yet this may be miniscule compared with what is coming.

Of course recognition technologies used in the app and the manufacturing processes will not be fabulous for some time to come. Customers will only be getting an approximation of the original.

Over time the quality will improve, gradually and surely.

Yet even at the apogee of replicating technologies, there will of course be a premium for buying original designer clothes and objects, for many reasons. It will give prestige and status to have originals, people will prefer to reward designers, and there will always be some quality difference. Quality will be truly to the fore.

But will fashion designers, among others, see their earnings plummet, as they have for many musicians?

I suspect the best will do very well indeed, even in a world of possibly wholesale replication. But there are many unknowns.

We have to recognize that these replication technologies are inevitable. And one of the issues we need to focus on is that the creators – rather than the copiers – must be sufficiently rewarded for the value they create.

At one point the conversation shifted to how companies could generate the innovation that will meet the soaring expectations of users.

Notably through the work of MIT’s Eric von Hippel, companies have grown to recognize the critical importance of co-creation in innovation, and in particular the role of ‘lead users’. Lead users are typically those who find new applications for products, extend their use, and are the most discerning.

In the interview I was asked how companies can find these lead users to help them innovate.

My response was that by far the best way is to find them in communities. The rise of social media has made it far easier for the most discerning and sophisticated in their fields to discover like-minded people with whom they can share ideas and develop their expertise.

This means that companies, rather than trying to find lead users individually, can find them already clustered with their peers.

Some years ago I consulted to one of the world’s most prominent companies engaged in open innovation, helping them to work out how social networks could be used to support their innovation efforts.

The key issue in tapping communities of lead users is not one of discovery, it is one of engagement. Lead users are usually suspicious of commercial involvement in their conversations.

The only viable way to engage successfully is to begin as a community member, contributing and participating as a peer. This means companies need to have community-minded experts on their staff, who learn by engaging with these peers. From there it is possible to bring them into the innovation process, both formally and informally.

As I pointed out in the interview, while this provides the richest and best insights and stimulus into innovation, relatively few companies are good at tapping communities of lead users.

Today and moving forward, this is a critical capability to drive successful innovation.

I used my framework for the future of the CIO to point to the macro drivers of change in technology and society, and how these are shaping the technology function in organizations, and in turn the role of the CIO.

The single most important shift in society is that we expect more on just about every front that we can imagine. We expect more in everything around us, in terms of excellence in quality and service, opportunity for ourselves and our children, flexibility in our work, and openness and transparency from business and government.

We also expect beauty.

It is a core aspect of humanity for us to seek and appreciate beauty, whether it is in the natural world or that which we create.

Certainly art has been central to humanity from our very beginnings. Royalty and the wealthy have long sought to make even their basic tools, utensils, and lodgings beautiful.

Yet during the twentieth century we went dramatically backwards, as functionality was deemed paramount and aesthetics often irrelevant. Le Corbusier’s austere apartment blocks and their East German descendants were a powerful symbol of supposedly efficient yet soulless living.

It is telling that almost all the early personal computers were beige, arguably the ugliest color in existence. Even Apple for the first two decades of its existence stuck its technology in ugly boxes, even though their user interfaces set the standard in usability and attractiveness.

However expectations have risen rapidly over the last couple of decades, to the point at which most of us quite simply expect beauty around us, not least in the tools that we use at work and our personal lives.

After long suffering the same blindness as other computer manufacturers, Apple finally woke up with the revolutionary release of its multi-colored iMacs in 1998, making consumers realize they wanted beautiful computers, not ugly ones. Other manufacturers swiftly responded. Today computers and phones are objects of beauty and aesthetics almost more than of function.

All of this speaks of the rise of design, perhaps the central concept of the 21st century. Design is fundamentally about combining function and aesthetics within constraints.

We of course have extraordinary constraints, not least environmental and economic, however working within those constraints design elegantly brings us function. Elegance is essential, and beauty is a simple step beyond.

Beauty is about transcending the mundane. Today we expect that.

Functionality alone is not enough to succeed in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Beauty is also required. We expect it, we can have it, and we are not prepared to settle for less.

Our expectations are increasingly about self-expression, about surrounding ourselves with things that are aligned with the essence of who we are.

In every domain, from enterprise technology through to consumer goods, companies must realize that beauty is now a basic expectation of their customers. And as they do we will together create a more beautiful world.

Image source: Marcin Wichary