This week, the Design Museum’s director announced the opening date for its new home in Kensington, London to be November this year. A long awaited, overdue occasion. Divulging the contents of some of the exhibition spaces (in particular the permanent display ‘Designer Maker User), Deyan Dusjic outlined why particular content had been selected,
“Design is the way to ask questions about what technology is doing to us, to explore how the world will look and work as well as to define new aesthetic approaches”
A chord was struck when I read this statement. It is a beautiful way of articulating why design matters – why it matters historically and why its development is equally important. It drew me to reflect upon other news this week regarding Micro Bit - a web hosted computer chip that is enabling British school children to be trained in simple coding practice. A fantastic tool aimed at equipping the future generation with a contemporary technological literacy that will indeed shape our future world. Not just within the context of product and consumer, but also in terms of social infrastructure and its expression, a flag-bearer for which is Twitter (Happy birthday Twitter, welcome to your teens.)
I’d like to think that in enabling children to ‘play’ with technology with the same sense of novelty that Gordon Pask sought in his ‘Maverick Machines’ in 1971, the future of technology lead design is a very exciting one.
Image: Gordon Pask and his 'electronic brain' Eucrates I.
Source: http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-tech-a-look-at-63-years-of-computers/20110826.htm#6