Aurora: Forecasting the Future
by Jesse James GarrettCreating Aurora sometimes challenged us in ways we didn’t expect. In a typical design process, one of the biggest factors influencing the design is the set of constraints we have to work within — not just the limitations, but also the criteria for success for our work.
A good designer can create a design that accommodates all the constraints and still delivers an elegant, satisfying experience to the user. A great designer can go beyond this and create a design that demonstrates that some of those constraints weren’t really there to begin with. But when you’re designing for the future, all of your constraints are imaginary. Making smart choices about the constraints you create for yourself makes the difference between a plausible solution and science fiction.
But with a problem like designing the browser of the future, we weren’t even sure where to start. The evolution of the browser seemed to be intimately intertwined with the evolution of the Web — and to some extent, the underlying Internet — itself. Plus we had to account for trends in general computing technologies: smaller, faster, powerful, more connected and ubiquitous devices, enabling new kinds of interactions and applications.
To help us get a handle on all the possibilities, we asked Jamais Cascio to contribute some time to the project. Jamais is a professional futurist who forecasts trends for organizations that will drive their strategies on timelines quite a bit longer than the next quarterly earnings report. He co-founded the popular blog Worldchanging and runs his own blog called Open the Future.
Jamais called on a whole lot of smart people and led them (and a bunch more from both Adaptive Path and Mozilla) through a two-day workshop to forecast one possible future for browsers and the Web. Through a series of group exercises, we identified three major trends that we thought would have the biggest impact on the web:
- Augmented Reality: The gap is closing between the Web and the world. Services that know where you are and adapt accordingly will become commonplace. The web becomes fully integrated into every physical environment.
- Data Abundance: There’s more data available to us all the time — both the data we produce intentionally and the data we throw off as a by-product of other activities. The web will play a key role in how people access, manage, and make sense of all that data.
- Virtual Identity: People are increasingly expected to have a digital presence as well as a physical one. We inhabit spaces online, but we also create them through our personal expression and participation in the digital realm.
Based on these trends, Jamais wrote three scenarios fleshing out the details of how these trends might come into being, and how they would manifest in people’s everyday lives. We wanted to use these forecasting scenarios to explore several aspects of this possible future world that we knew would never end up in our movie, but would provide us with some context for the design choices we’d be making.
Download:
Forecasting Scenarios
Forecasting Workshop Contributors:
Mike Beltzner
Rebecca Blood
Stowe Boyd
Leah Buley
Dawn Danby
Alex Faaborg
Henning Fischer
Jesse James Garrett
Dan Harrelson
Sebastian Heycke
Julia Houck-Whitaker
Mike Liebhold
Jessica Margolin
Peter Merholz
Lisa Rein
Tomorrow on the Adaptive Path blog: The technology of the future!
Entries (RSS)
August 6th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Very cool concept – but how does the user discover these interface items? The cursor or “hand” concept seems a bit hard to discover – or does it just appear when needed/?
Really enjoyed the video – well put together.
August 7th, 2008 at 9:29 am
In addition to enhancements to presentation, please introduce an adaptive model of the web
which implements some reasonable metric(s) measuring the distance in “concept-space” between
web-docs. (Implies on the fly classification of web docs [ some web pages have semantic markup
and can be classified more easily, others require ad-hoc classifiers])
Such browser-side web page classifiers and inter-page metrics allow for browser side
filtering and refining of web traversal independent of a centralized search and retrieval supplier)
Remember: Google is the new MSFT so the above facilities help free the user from some
of his/her google-dependence
August 25th, 2008 at 5:26 am
[...] Il y a par contre des choses plus novatrices comme ces clusters contextualisés qui pourraient inspirés les équipes de Google Desktop. Pour en savoir plus sur cette interface, je vous recommande les explications suivantes : Aurora Interface Guide and Design Concepts de même qu’aux scénarios d’anticipation ( Aurora Forecasting the Future) [...]
February 24th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
[...] designs of what the Firefox Web browser of the year 2020 might look like. Adaptive Path, in turn, asked me to help them think through what the Internet and the world of 2020 might look like, so that they would have a [...]