Talking about the future: People, technology and innovation

The world of computing is an incredibly vibrant space with exciting challenges ahead for technology achievement. The goal of this lunch presentation is to inspire researchers to open their minds, think creatively, and explore the myriad ‘what if’ possibilities at the intersection of culture and technology. How do you observe diverse sets of people of different age groups, professions, sex, and ethnicity in countries around the globe to understand how they use and think about technology and also extract deep consumer desire? How do you shape and deliver the technologies to the world to feed and ignite the customer´s imagination, set aspirational targets and compel the people to be on the journey with the technology companies? With each leap down in the size of computing, there´s been this interesting set of challenges. Was a smartphone just like a smaller laptop that made phone calls? Was a next-generation television like a big laptop? Smartphones only got interesting when people stopped thinking of them as phones. The central promise of a smartphone is that you´ll never be bored again. You´ll never be without something to do. Once people stopped being held hostage to the idea that smartphones were like old-fashioned phones, they could imagine that they needed to do all kinds of other things like good gaming and good photography. In this luncheon presentation, Dr Bell will discuss the future and what we might expect from it. This is not a talk about technology per se; instead this is a talk about people, and what makes us human, because ultimately we make our own futures. Drawing on 15 years of fieldwork and research with consumers around the world, Dr Bell identifies five areas where the biggest transformations in behavior appear to be occurring. She also outlines a series of open questions that might frame future technology developments.