What's next? A preliminary resume of the past decade of digitalized communications

Design Management Journal, Fall 2003 by Hesse, Christine, Hesse, Klaus

Peering into the future, Christine and Klaus Hesse see a challenge. Distinctions between supplier and user, medium and media are disappearing. The segmentation of markets is ever growing. The pace in cycles of information and meaning is speeding up, and experience is coming to be more valuable than the word.

The digitalization of communications has made our workaday world-indeed, the entire global market-shrink to monitor-size. all the threads of communication, from entertainment to information, from purchasing to sales to telecommunications itself, now converge on our PC screens. The separation of tool and medium no longer exists. The user is a consumer, a game-player, a supplier, an operator, a poet, a thinker, a draftsperson, and an administrator all rolled into one-sometimes as a private person, sometimes as a professional, but most of the time as both. Though all these activities were already possible, now everyone can do them successively, or even at the same time and in the same place, on a single "desktop." What really stands out is the sheer number of tasks one can accomplish and the continually expanding opportunities in each area, not to mention the global availability of all of it. The digital revolution has inexorably led to a new phase in cultural evolution, which is far from over.

Come one, come all

It is this democratization of the complete chain of publication for print, Web, video, and audio products that typifies viewing habits in the new century. Never before has a single design tool offered so many options, and never before have so many people made use of them. The result is a pandemic of "designed communication," whether intentional or not. The design process is not a scientific event and cannot be viewed objectively; and there are no functional barriers to the pleasure of creating something new. This is why so much music and so many posters, flyers, logos, and videos are emanating from living rooms and adolescent bedrooms across Europe and the US. The means of production and communication are affordable, freely available, and easy to learn for a large sector of the population, and certainly this is a great thing for society. Moreover, the low cost of drafting and production work and its independence from the constraints of time, place, and suppliers, are a welcome creative underground for the established communications industry and most likely the true engine behind the success of digital home studios. This also holds true, at least in principle, at workplaces around the world, where employees invest much time and effort in drafting PowerPoint presentations. (Unfortunately, because they often disregard the rules of "information design," many of them seldom get beyond the default template.)

In general, however, this development is a godsend for the training of young creative talents, who tend to drive the cycle of digital communication. Design students and art academies are increasingly shifting their focus away from the "physical arts" of sculpture, painting, and so on to digital instruments. Today, there are hardly any young illustrators who do not make their drawings with mouse-clicks or on plotter tables. And the audiovisual side-film and video, for instance-continues to exert an almost magnetic attraction on every new student. The expansion of the Internet has also established English as the language of the world. At the same time, national languages are still able to assert their independence as never before; anyone wanting to reach people online in Europe or Asia has to do so in the lingua franca. The fear that English might replace or repress national languages has never proved justified.

The changes precipitated by digitalization affect us all as consumers and as professionals. The cyclical expansions and updates of hardware and software continually add fuel to the already blazing fire of communications. The pressure they exert on the makers of communication, design, and production is growing too, meaning that the opportunities offered by new digital tools constantly have to be explored and, if found feasible, exploited. It is only human to revel in the new opportunities offered by each upgrade. And all the goodies a new tool can offer will, sooner or later, also pop up in photography, typography, motion pictures, and product design. (Let us not forget Photoshop 5.0 and the "blur" function, or the still-predominant "Flash look" sported on so many online sites.) Many of these new wrinkles will disappear as quickly as they came.

New images and sensory overload

The more images we absorb, the less impact they have on us. Each new image invites the next; each one seen invites another one as yet unseen. This accelerating acclimatization is causing a major headache for communications professionals. The old rules of market penetration seem to have gone by the wayside; advertising campaigns, for instance, last only two to three years before they have to be replaced by a subsequent campaign. The mad dash to find uniqueness is, of course, an enormous problem for the professionals. In such times, how can one still convey the quality behind the design? How can the interconnection between content and form be protected from becoming arbitrary? In addition, the predominant, "classic" media (print and TV) are no longer able to satisfy the needs of brand and service providers for communication. Offers, markets, and target groups have broken apart into segments the size of little grains of sand. Target-group-specific journals and broadcasters are popping up all over the place in Europe. The market is breaking down into smaller and smaller bits, and the media are following suit.