Antonia Ward fast forwards to the year 2050, to a future world that is defined by design.
The year is 2050. Here in the UK, Kylie Jones is travelling by the public hoverway to one of her three jobs. Today she’s working at Japanese electronics giant Suntory’s headquarters in South Wales. She and her team are designing gestural interfaces for some of Suntory’s most popular products, the MediCam range of personal health management devices. They’re popular with over 80-year-olds, and Suntory became a global leader in the field soon after 50% of the Japanese population reached the age of 60, when its investment in assistive technologies really paid off.
Kylie’s mother doesn’t really understand what her daughter does, but she’s happy to get a discount on the systems that link her body sensors to the personalised healthbeing and preventative medicine provision services run by the National Healthbeing Service. Mind you, her mother keeps asking if she’s making plans for ‘her retirement’, which always makes Kylie laugh. ‘No one retires any more, Mum,’ she says. Sure, most people change their working habits at around 70, but the idea of putting yourself out to pasture in your youthful mid-60s just seems strange. When Kylie’s mother was working, though, it was before the 50/50 Act, which put so many women on to the boards of companies, so maybe work was a bit different for her generation.
Two days a week Kylie devotes her time to her own business, designing print-at home customisation kits for 10G phones which she sells on 3dBay. Her mother still calls them ‘mobile phones’ which is odd because there isn’t any other kind. And once a week Kylie can be found teaching at a nearby school – she partly does it for the tax relief, but if she’s honest she quite enjoys working with the kids in their ‘right brain’ lessons, plus the networking with other VolunTeachers is good. Some of the kids could do with spending a bit more time playing those sharing skills computer games. When Kylie was younger you just learnt to share automatically because you had brothers and sisters, but families are so much smaller these days. And though she’d never say it out loud, She thinks the teachers are paid too much. Some of their bonuses are scandalous.
Sha’kiera is aged 25 and an experience sequencer for McDonaSoft, one of the oldest fast-mood companies in the business. This week she’s designing customer interactions around the Lacrosse World Cup, which is being held in Kazakhstan. Her knowledge of the ageing company’s history is a bit sketchy, but she knows they used to sell quite basic products and didn’t provide the whole range of interactive, mood-changing and energy-giving experiences that people now look for at meal times. As for food in the past, Sha’kiera can’t quite believe there were ever health issues around food, but things were different before she was born. She likes to point out to her friends that she’s a pro-designer, not just a digital artisan: after all, she has a post-experience degree from the Apple School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Oxford. Lately, though, Sha’kiera has been wondering about changing jobs.
Since carbon emissions targets were personalised and linked to local rates, interesting businesses have been springing up around resource management services – helping people make sure they don’t get fined for not managing their waste or energy use properly. Then there are the luxury food brands – when 80% of your food has to be locally grown you’re willing to pay a lot for an imported vegetable on a special occasion, no matter how loyal you are to your local vertical farmer.
But today she’s putting these thoughts aside while she plans a disorienteering trip – you can now go places where you pay to have your GPS disabled. Imagine being totally, utterly lost – now that’s a high-adrenaline leisure activity.
Oscar is trying to pretend he’s not 40 this year. He’s got enough on his plate running his 15-to-25-person multi-design consultancy (everyone has a flexible workforce) and trying to keep all his clients happy. If only he could cross-sell some more work. Wouldn’t it be great if the brand narrative work he’s doing could extend into some more retail theatre projects like they did for Saab baby buggies. He’d like more clients like his Indian ‘cosmeceutical’ magnate (one of the biggest Bollygarchs) and less of the standard online packaging and personal branding clients. He’s not sure who is harder to get hold of – the personal brand managers or their clients.
He’s behind on his e-learning MDBA course (and it’s one of the best Masters of Design Business Administration courses in the world), his BBC subscription needs renewing – of course you could just rely on free news, but would you trust it? His girlfriend, who is a system-designer for a Moroccan fuel-cell dealer, is going to stand as an e-MP in the European social media elections this summer. Oscar is looking forward to the World Cup because, like so many guys his age, he’s fanatical about lacrosse, but he thinks the new technology is ruining the game. He’ll probably watch the match in the pub with his best mate Tiger, if they can find one that isn’t overrun with the tourists who flock to the UK to watch the most state-of-the-art holographic sport transmissions in the G50.
Perhaps he should have done what his dad suggested and taken that steady, if slightly boring, job as a spaceline pilot?
When 80% of your food has to be locally grown you’re willing to pay a lot for an imported vegetable on a special occasion.
The world in 2050
- the world population is 9.1 billion, while the UK population stands at 72 million
- 2 billion people in the world are over 60, including a quarter of the UK population
- China is the largest economy in the world, surpassing the US in 2041
- the global fuel cell market is worth more than $180bn
- new legislation has connected local taxation to an individual’s waste production, promoted locally grown food and made 50% of all company board members female