One foot in the industrial era—the other in the digital one. Designers meeting the challenges of the new, data-based reality.
As technologies develop fantastically rapidly today, and faster than ever, ordinary people acquire more access to information than global political leaders and Nobel Prize winners had ever had the chance to do so before. Contemporary designers feel like they are working in a transition period between the industrial era, on the one hand, and the digital one, on the other. The speed of the process bothers the imagination of designers, while frightening and inspiring them at the same time. Will robots replace them in a decade’s time? Or, rather, the development of digital printing will lead society back to the cult of handmade labor, craftsmanship, and the appraisal of the meticulous production of an object? Many production processes are being automated today, and there are more and more robots involved in them, and they are also getting smarter. How does datafication and data gathering affect our lifestyle? What can the Internet of Things and augmented reality give us? And what do experts call “the second digital revolution”?