Digital design is in a good place as a practice and craft.
There are well-established patterns, guides, recipes, and abundant educational resources. Standards and uniformity exist where needed while leaving space for creativity and experimentation. Reflecting on the progress of digital design and the possible futures ahead exposes many remaining user experience challenges and uncertainties for designers, technologists, and product managers to wrestle with.
Framing these “Grand Challenges” helps bring purpose and clarity to nagging and unfulfilled needs that are not easily solved or overcome and have the expectation of hard work over a long time. There is no shortage of topics spanning many levels of abstraction to consider. I chose interfaces for AI, technical problem spaces, data visualization, spatial computing, and enterprise software, which we’ll explore further in a series of posts. Take them as provocations or nonsense. Please question, debate, reject, refute, or take action on them.
