Everything New is Old Again

We all know—or at least have been told repeatedly— that we’re in a world that’s changing rapidly due to technology: while we don’t have flying cars quite yet, the ways in which we interact with the world have changed a great deal, even in the past few years.

Just how much has changed? Steve Portigal posted a link to Beloit College’s Class of 2011 Zeitgeist on his blog, and if it’s any indication, the answer is just about everything.

As of the Class of 2011, we live in a world where college students have:

• never rolled down a car window,
• always been able to slap mp3s up on MySpace or write on their friends’ Facebook walls,
• always had hi-definition television available,
• and always were able to fired of text messages back and forth.

In short, almost every interaction—designed or not—that I grew up with is a thing of the past. While growing up, I:

• always cranked down the window as fast as I could like it was some kind of game,
• never let my friends borrow any of my tapes (!) or CDs because I didn’t want them to get broken or scratched,
• never could get in any of the TV channels I wanted to watch without messing around with a set of rabbit ears,
• and never really liked calling my friends on the phone to see if they wanted to play baseball in my backyard because you’d always get stuck with their mom or sister on the phone.

I’m not that far out of college, but I’m already far out of touch with college students. For product, service, and interaction designers like us, that’s kind of a scary challenge: we’re living in a world where the fundamental “laws” we build are thrown right out the window in a short span of years. For business owners, that’s even more daunting: how do young kids see your products and branding when they grew up in a completely different context than you did?

Here’s the real challenge for designers, developers, and business owners alike: we need to constantly and consistently keep creating new ideas, new products and services, and new ways to interact with those things we create before those old ways are already forgotten. As the Class of ’11 can tell you, in today’s world, that’s happening faster than you think.