Program Coordinator Dr Andy Hines contributed a chapter “Future-friendly Design: Designing for and with Future Consumers” to the latest PDMA Handbook. He shares a few thoughts on this contribution below.
The increasing partnership between foresight and design over the last several years has nudged more and more futurists towards the design space. For some this has been quite natural. My fellow student in 1990 in the Houston Foresight Program (then “Futures Studies) Lloyd Walker came to the program
with a background in industrial design and has long been a proponent of this partnership. He curated an APF Gathering at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena several years ago. Design has been a regular topic inAPF meetings and discussions. The Houston Foresight Program held a joint course with OCAD a few years back called Futures by Design. And this Fall, I supervised a PhD student from Italy for her dissertation comparing the use of scenarios by futurists and designers.
So I was happy to have the opportunity to jump deeper into the fray with a contribution to the latest PDMA Handbook on the role of design thinking in new product development, aptly titled Design Thinking. It’s quite an impressive volume, and being a part of it allowed me to read up on what my fellow contributors were thinking.
I chose to focus on the role of changing consumer values in the future of design, drawing on the research I did for ConsumerShift. The premise of my contribution is that while new product ideation and design is aimed at future markets, the ideas and designs are typically developed using current consumer needs. I outline the framework for understanding long-term values shifts, which provides insight into how consumer preferences are changing into the future. I focus on the two emerging values types (postmodern and integral) that are driving these changes are describe their trajectory over time. I note how these shifting values are at the core of five emerging consumer needs, which are illustrated and brought to life with representative future personas. Finally, I conclude with implications for designers and developers both in terms of adding to their tool kit as well as identifying cross-cutting themes of change across the consumer landscape.
