Defining the New Singularity

Mark Rolston, Chief Creative Officer, frog design

Date: Wednesday, March 12

Time: 5:05 - 5:25 PM

Location: Grand Hall

Today, the identity of a product is no longer defined by form factor alone, but rather by the information that encases it, passes through it, and is accumulated by it over the course of its lifetime. The future of product design is, indeed, convergence. But it is convergence of a scale much broader than hardware and software working together; it is a convergence of information and object, of politics, ecology, and business, of human being and technology. Rather than teach users to operate within the digital world, we must now amend the digital world to better reflect the sensuality of human existence, our innate understanding of physics and inherent biases in comprehension.

As the conceptual scope of our work expands, the design artifact, the object itself, must assume new value as identifying symbol. This is the irony of the situation: while the object itself has become less dominant in the overall product story, it assumes new importance as the icon for this much larger set of relationships. Human nature will always seek a focal point - a singularity - to recognize, capture, and associate with the greater notions at hand. This presentation will explore the importance of this new singularity.