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Past, Present and the Future Thinking – June 2020 Newsletter

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The following 7 design, inspiration and other bits of interest bullets that kept me pondering during last month:

  1. Before covering what’s next, let’s first look into the past year or so to better understand the underlying themes then it comes to design, tech and customer experience. The real MVP in design John Maeda just published his yearly CX report to help you wrap your head of the things that were influencing the way we designed to date and things yet to come. While the original report is over 90mins long, John has also produced shorter 13min version which you can find on his YT channel: https://bit.ly/cxreport2020
  2. A few years back, I dove deep into the concept of NOW. This psychology study was one of the supportive cases to map how we, as humans perceive the current moment, issues, and things to come. The study highlights how typically humans experience the NOW moment in the approximated 3-minute window. While it’s a very general guide, it helps designers to better understand how their users experience each touchpoint. For example, if you could split every journey into tiniest of segments that each take 3 seconds – how many real touchpoints and experience you’d need to account for? https://bit.ly/Now3seconds
  3. Weeks of lockdown made most of us get used to the new routines and more remote ways of working (the subject of my previous couple of newsletters). But as the governments around the globe are slowly easing on restrictions, we as designers and tech folk are left to face a new transition into the new normal. This article is a pretty good compilation of opinions of what designers should prepare for and how their lives could be different soon. https://bit.ly/designersOnLockdown
  4. Future Thinking probably isn’t anything new to most of you. Almost all of us will need to use it going forward. While a lot of agencies push a practice of such an approach to designing experiences based off of future outcomes as a method, it’s really a way to deconstruct and ideate around things. In other words, the mindset. Because of its simplicity, with enough practice, you can become a future thinker. This following link is an excellent resource for every designer to get started: https://bit.ly/FutureThinking101
  5. Besides the theory and method (mindset!), let’s take a look at this next treasure trove of real-life future thinking examples. While most of these are a quick, opportunistic way to bring useless tech and ‘innovation’ live, some are truly meaningful. What I liked the most about it is that it’s split into several categories and at least one example per category will become the new norm: https://bit.ly/PostPandemicDesign
  6. While all previous examples are what you would consider realistic future thinking application to today’s problems, this following one is all about the speculative future of human interactions and how our surroundings, artefacts and in result cultures will shape up to be different. The past we had to date is all based on close social contact and proximity, high fidelity on-premise experiences and lack of fear. The future, as seen in these examples is the opposite. Truly worth a look: https://bit.ly/SpeculativeDesignCovid19
  7. Lastly, a small update on the future of yours truly: I don’t think any of the above examples would reach you if not for the author’s openness, the courage to share their work and thoughts (just like what I’m doing now). I made this short video describing how proactive contribution, however small benefits your juniors and peers in the design community and as an indirect return boosts your own career in design. It’s also a book review for Austin Kleon’s brilliant title Show Your Work – worth picking up! 


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