Frog Design takes a look at what 2012 has in store for us.
The 15 technology trends they decide to look at include:
Digital Discovery in the Physical Worldby Creative Director Scott Nazarian
The experience of the unstructured discovery of the physical world is about to get a lot more interesting in the next few years. 2012 will be a year of continuing to focus on the digital and material evolution of "search.” We're already familiar with a few of the functional (software) and representational (media) components involved through the introduction of Siri and services such as Gowalla or Four Square. The confluence of complex search and knowledge management algorithms, and the growing layer of location-based applications, gives rise to a highly fluid, seamless integration between physical and digital contexts. This evolutionary mixture of Wolfram-Alpha "smarts" and location–based, contextual intelligence is the (software) basis of all future "smart space.” Meanwhile, sensors and actuators of greater acuity may define new modes of physical and architectural expression. Of course this may seem an obvious progression to the Technorati, but for the work-a-day masses soon to be living in so called smart cities in Asia and elsewhere in the next decade, the expectations about how such integrated "findability" actually feels are already beginning to be set.
Connected Citiesby Chief Creative Officer Mark Rolston
The modern city is becoming a pointer system, the new URL, for tomorrow’s hybrid digital–physical environment. Today's Facebook will be complimented by tomorrow's Placebook. Explosive innovation and adoption of computing, mobile devices, and rich sources of data are changing the cities in which we live, work, and play. It's about us, and how computing in the context of our cities is changing how we live. A digital landscape overlays our physical world and is expanding to offer ever-richer experiences that compliment, and in emerging cases, replace the physical experience. In the meta–cities of the future, computing isn't just with us; it surrounds us, and it uses the context of our environment to empower us in more natural, yet powerful ways.
Original post with text for each slide can be found on Frog's blog:
Image Credit: Mofaha.com
