Designing for Emerging Technologies

Foreword

Buckle up fellow design and innovation junkies! We are the proverbial kids in the candy store, invited to peer into the gray area between brain-exploding stories about emerging technologies, any one of which alone could change the world. Resist the temptation to gorge on any one story before sampling the full cross section offered in these pages. Perhaps a better metaphor—particularly after appreciating the full breadth of possibility contained in Designing for Emerging Technologies—is that you will feel like a kid in a sandbox; a sandbox filled with nascent technologies beckoning design and innovation junkies like us to come play together to unleash the adjacent possible. To combine and recombine emerging technologies in new ways to change the way we solve the important social challenges we face in the twenty-first century. You know what I’m talking about: the little system challenges, like education, healthcare, energy, and government. Jon Follett has beautifully curated a sandbox that will inspire you, make you think, and most importantly enable you to act to help design a better future.

“Nascent” is a beautiful and optimistic word. The stories about to grab you in this book are about emerging technologies. These are stories of capabilities in their formative stage, when they are most malleable and offer the greatest possibility frontier. Nascent technologies are the stem cells of society’s future. There’s a reason why so much biology research focuses on stem cells. Stem ...