Carsonified has been doing its "Future Of..." conferences for a few years now, and the big shows for 2008 and 2009 have been its Future of Web Apps and Future of Web Design. With stops in New York, Miami, Dublin and London, these tours have showcased the best thinking available on these topics. You can't do much better than follow the news and reports emanating from these heady get-togethers if you really want the best possible predictions about web design and applications.
Future of Web Apps (FOWA)
The Future of Web Apps is an ongoing showcase of successful web technologies and business trends, the ones that got us where we are today-which is always the day before tomorrow, the dividing line between "before" and "after," the ever-present "now." Standing on the very cusp of the future, the FOWA tour delivers informed analysis and the best-educated guessing available, from the leading web pioneers of today.
FOWA events are attended by major European and U.S. start-ups as well as established industry experts, making it the best place to absorb essential information from designers, developers and entrepreneurs. Presentations over the past year have tended toward the continuing refinement of the web's "social apps" and their interfaces, building "desktop quality" web apps, going "mobile" and perfecting the "software as service" model. All of these developments affect what a web designer does, as well as what web designers must be able to do tomorrow that they do not do (or do well) today. This will play out one of two ways. Either web designers will get "techier," or they will collaborate in new ways with the tech teams. If you have to lay a wager, go with the latter.
Future of Web Design (FOWD)
Upcoming events on the FOWD tour cover a wide range of topics, which continues to solidify the expectation that web designers are either going to get more technically proficient, or work with someone who is. Such scheduled presentations as "Charting Daily Data," "Scaling the Synchronous Web" and several on client-centered interactive design confirm a growing role for the designer. Apparently some pundits expect web designers to become the dealmakers in the interactive formula, bringing client input into the design process and occupying the central role in a design-by-committee process.
Of course, other web pros take almost exactly the opposite position. Another presentation's title suggests a strong backlash is forming against the "we're all designers" attitude. "Throwing Client Collaboration Out of the Window: The Stalinist Web Design Model" clearly means to address, and denigrate, the idea that design decisions should somehow be "democratized," and is powerful evidence that some designers continue to believe that design is, well, an art, like cooking, not a process, like canning.
So what is the future?
The future will be quite like the past, frankly-not in the current inventory of technologies or tools, but in the sense that it is part of a continuum, not a separate entity of some kind. One "gets to" the future via the present, from out of the past, which should at least throw enough light on the subject to keep you reading, designing, experimenting and thinking about it all if you work in the field of web design and/or development.
There will always be new tools to learn, new techniques to master, new approaches to take-and wrong predictions to live down. There are far too many variables in the mix to get many details right, although the "big picture" is already forming around the aforementioned areas of change. There will be different collaborations, more technically capable designers and new kinds of collaborative relationships, certainly. There will also be people going at a single problem in multiple ways, with arguably equivalent results and no clear winner being crowned. Whatever happens, of course, the future will inevitably arrive. The only sure and certain prediction we can make is that we will get a few things right, most of it wrong and still, forever and always, write these same kinds of articles anyway.
