Future Design

Alvin Toffler noted in his book "Future Shock" (actually, the entire point of the book) that the human race has consistently sped up the "progress" we make as civilized beings, to wit: "Ten-thousand years for agriculture. A century or two for industrialism. And now, opening before us - super-industrialism."

He was speaking about society turning from producers to consumers, and the majority of jobs coming not from production, but selling of production, but it is easy to apply that time frame to other sources, say music. Thousands of years of passed down melody. Hundreds of years of written music. A hundred years of recorded (vinyl) music. 40 years of tape. 25 years of the CD. At the most, 10 years of MP3. And all these technologies took time before they reached mass consumption, so really it was only 10 years maybe of CD dominance before digital music was/is the leading musical conveyance.

CD's also became the first technology (in music terms) to be rendered completely obsolete by what came after it. Vinyl, which does not degrade, begat hiphop, which begat sampling, which begat music as we know it today. Tape could be spliced, doubled, recorded over, and generally, if one doesn't mess with it, will continue to play. Digital music is portable, editable, and has an infinite lifespan, provided one can read the information. CD's can do some of these things, but for the most part, it was only an intermediate step, it's in all honesty an inferior technology. All the drawbacks of everything before it, none of the advantages.

But CD's were portable, more so than anything before it...they were flat! They were and are still bulky, from the packaging to the books of discs we carry (those things is heavy!). So the question becomes, why are they still around? Time has shown that technology has come up with faster and faster technologies, can we see what's coming around the bend? It's probably already here.

MP3's seem like something of an end result at the moment, doesn't seem like there's too far to go past digital and instantly transferable. But why hasn't this translated to the marketplace? The music/movie industry has been sticking to the disc format, even though sales have shown that people just aren't buying them anymore, especially in music, but DVD's are not immune, especially from what I'm going to say next.

Flash drives are inifitely more portable, inexpensive, and secure than disc technology. Bands are starting to release whole albums on flash drives (as the White Stripes show above). Though I don't think it has worked, I don't have the data, but I don't think sales have been great. Here's the why....USB drives are still only computer driven. Why would you buy a USB drive when you could download it over the internet? right? Only completists are looking to buy them. If USB capability was built into music players you could pop a USB in like a CD/tape, and bam, on you go, same thing for car stereos. With a large enough flash drive, you could render in car Ipod's obsolete.

Flash drives are cheap too. On the smaller sizes (256mb etc), you're really only paying for the materials, and the price will go down as storage sizes get larger. And what about that? I have a 4gb flash on my keychain, flash sizes are getting larger, we could conceivably have 100gb flash drives on keychains any day now. Which brings us to movies. Each DVD, not including hi-def/special features, etc, weighs in at about 4.7gb, or at least that's what they sell as recordable dvd's. That's a little over what I'm carrying in my pocket everyday. If TV's were equipped with flash drives....Eventually, more content, less packaging, and well, more computers in everything, to make it work. And USB has got to be a lot easier to control the spread of piracy, you could make them read-only, locked, etc.

So what does this mean, and why is it on an art/design blog? I don't own stock in a flash drive corporation, just trying to look around the bend a bit. Well, the idea is there, and already flash drives are omnipresent, at least among the computer-savvy. As designers, it's time to start thinking about how this will be implemented, and more importantly, what it will look like, both outside and inside. And in all-probability, it will not stop at USB, that will not be the connection device of the future. Sim cards, firewire, uh...mental telepathy will come along shortly. Cause that's the thing, while USB is handy, it's not the most aesthetic thing in the world, already there are tons of designs for USB sticks, from the dog that humps your computer to the lego brick, but it's still pretty basic. We can make it better, we can improve it, and we can improve how it is handed out. And if we don't, someone else will, it's only a matter of time.

(of course, this also assumes that the music industry hasn't screwed itself completely, and that there will be a music industry in the future.)