Machines For Living: The Future of Design

Brian Ling, a designer at Philips, writes at Design Sojourn that the next industrial design evolution will treat all layers of a product as an expression of a single conceptual design. "In the past", writes Ling, "what was practiced and taught to us at school was that Industrial Design was a process that was essentially a linear step by step process." This step by step approach, diagrammed on the right by Ling, is also found in the legacy approaches to software design (waterfall) and architecture (design-bid-build), each of which is undergoing changes very similar to the one Ling describes in industrial design.

Ling describes a common problem with the legacy step by step approach, a problem which designers in all industries will recognize.

"The problem with this sort of approach we found out, was that people started to treat our product “layers” as they would budgets. If there was a lack of budget they would “logically” start to “cut” back these layers. Some examples of common discussions designers have include “Oh no money? Ok lets toss that metal housing and turn it into plastic…” or “Can’t afford that brush metal trim, lets turn it black instead?”. Does this sound familiar?"

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For centuries, we've designed systems that alienate us from ourselves, from community, from the flow of life and our natural desire to do good. With the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, we live in a designed world. We can redesign it to be smarter, more efficient, and responsive to our natural lives and processes. Just as modernists called a house “a machine for living in”, so today all systems must be redesigned as machines for living.