On a recent trip to our company offices in Cambridge, MA, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Jonathan Follett, a principal at Involution Studios and an O’Reilly author, and Mary Treseler, editorial strategist at O’Reilly. Follett currently is working with experts around the country to produce a book on designing for emerging technology. In this podcast, Follett, Treseler, and I discuss the magnitude of the coming disruption in the design space. Some tidbits covered in our discussion include:
- Design’s increasing role in genomics and synthetic biology. (For more on the genomic/synthetic biology space, here’s a recent Wired video interview with Craig Venter.)
- Robots taking our jobs, and what we humans will do for work.
- Embedded sensor networks and connected environments — soon, we’ll never get lost in a building again.
- Cross-pollination of industries to inform and evolve our emerging connected environments, such as the cross-disciplinary nature of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
- Approaching political policy as a design problem — politicians could benefit from design theory and rapid prototyping techniques found in design and manufacturing fields.
- Scientists growing burgers in labs.
And speaking of that lab burger, here’s Sergey Brin explaining why he bankrolled it:
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