The Design Ideas Shaping Our Future

Charlotte Fiell explores the crossover between computer arts and wider design practice

For much of my career, I’ve had a keen interest in computer arts and how they relate to other areas of design. It’s made me realise how crucial the computer arts are for pushing digital boundaries, and that the implications of digitalisation on design practice were probably going to be a lot more profound than most design commentators were then contemplating, and indeed they have been.

This was brought home to me recently when we were asked to write 100 Ideas That Changed Design. This is a book that covers the big ideas which have shaped design practice and the world around us.

One of the earliest ideas we explore is The World of Tomorrow, by which we mean the visualisation of the future. This potent forward-looking concept predates significantly the digital era and has strong connotations with Italian Futurism, the 1939 New York’s World Fair and 1960s Space-Age design. In recent decades, it’s been VFX movie magic that has more than anything else helped imaginatively shape our visions of the future. But even more importantly, 3D digital visualisation has over the past decade made the leap from high-budget moviemaking into everyday design practice, thereby enabling designers to pre-viz their own worlds of tomorrow before committing them to reality.