As a part of our collection on design in 2023, Son Tran, director at PriestmanGoode, gives his view on what product design may appear like in 2023.
What do you assume product design will appear like in 2023?
Relatively than predictions a few new aesthetic, what pursuits us at PriestmanGoode is how design will drive change, resulting in enhancements in folks’s lives and a extra optimistic future for the planet. Past delivering the bodily and tangible, design can lead new conversations and provoke totally different views to resolve crucial challenges.
With wider recognition of the necessity to cut back waste and protect assets, design is shifting in the direction of extra modular options the place particular person parts might be changed with out the necessity to re-purchase from scratch. So, slightly than defining new merchandise to assist a unending cycle of consumption, design can concentrate on fixing extra advanced and significant issues while partaking folks throughout the method.
We see this in our work for the transport sector, the place new merchandise launching in 2023 will probably stay in service past the goal dates for internet zero. Subsequently, design has a task to play in educating on the advantages of modularity, longevity and using round supplies. Equally in public transport techniques which can be adjusting to totally different patterns of working and commuting, higher engagement with passengers will likely be important to satisfy evolving mobility wants and put under-utilised areas resembling stations and excessive streets to extra imaginative makes use of.
We additionally hope that the facility of design will lastly take away boundaries related to accessibility. Relatively than await laws, the ambition and optimism related to design is one of the best ways to create merchandise that work for all necessities, via this inclusive method.
Lastly, we predict that design for the metaverse will turn out to be as vital as design for bodily interactions. Manufacturers now see thrilling potentialities to have interaction clients past the bodily in additional immersive methods, and in doing so create new experiences. Success will likely be measured by the flexibility to transform these experiences into extra worth.
What was your favorite product design mission of 2022, and why?
In our work in product and expertise design, we’re all the time on the look-out for the exemplary and we discovered it in 2022 once we travelled on the Brightline Florida rail service that connects Miami to West Palm Seaside, and ultimately to Orlando and Tampa. On this privately funded system, the practice units are designed across the wants of passengers, with the very best ranges of consolation. Journeys are absolutely built-in with first and final mile journeys on scooters and electrical automobiles and the branded expertise guides passengers at each stage from kerbside to vacation spot. It’s “rail utopia” and we usually quote it as such!
