As a media sponsor of 2012's DMI Design/Management conference, Core77 Design Directory is proud to present an exclusive conference preview.

What does the future hold? Designers are said to hold a bit of this magical future dust in their work, but at the upcoming annual DMI conference, the speakers and attendees will grapple with the looming question of What's Next? now that design has earned a seat at the proverbial table and garnered the respect of business leaders.

Edie Weiner, a futurist and one of the most influential practitioners of social, technological, political and economic intelligence-gathering has built a robust business consulting with everyone from the U.S. Congress to Fortune 500 companies on the facts and trends of the present and how they might impact the future. Here, she speaks with Core77 on how design will effect every aspect of business in the future, the importance of competencies over skills and how 3D Printing will disrupt our relationship with products as we know it.

DMI Design/Management Conference, Annual 37 NEW AMBITION: DELIVERING THE PROMISE OF DESIGN

October 23-25, 2012 Museum of Jewish Heritage New York City, USA

Core77: Thanks for speaking with us, Edie. Can you share a bit of background on what it means to be a futurist and the the work of your firm, Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.?

Edie Weiner: We study the future and we have been studying the future for over 40 years. I've had my own firm since 1977, and the way we do it is we do a lot of reading. We read a lot of things on a regular basis. It used to be all print publications, but now, of course, many of those have migrated over to online. So we read a lot of carefully vetted online publications, print publications, plus a lot of additional sources that come along. And we look at social, economic, political, technological, demographic and environmental content.

We abstract somewhere between 60-100 articles every month—they can deal with anything so long as they meet our criteria about somehow affecting the future. Every three months we stop the world and we save all we know about the future with the prior three months' worth of readings and we develop six new themes every quarter. We present those six themes at a quarterly meeting here in New York, which many of our clients and a lot of other interesting invited guests attend. We generate probably a thousand article abstracts a year and 24 new themes a year.

In more recent years, have you seen that things are shifting more rapidly within those 3-month cycles?

There's no question about it. In fact, one of our recent papers covered something that I'm going to talk about at the DMI conference, which is a concept that we call templosion, the implosion of time on an escalating basis so that even the biggest things now take very small amounts of time.And can that be attributed to technology and new ways of communicating?

Technology drives this, there's no question. But the communication of the technological advances and the ways of adapting them and using them becomes cumulative. That cumulative effect builds on itself, such that you need less and less time to get those things to happen.

Speaking of this layered effect, I read some of your work on the emerging metaspace economy and the idea of layered economies. Can you share a bit more about what this means?

I'll be speaking more in-depth about the metaspace economy at the DMI conference, but I will say that what we have been experiencing over the past few years is not what economists would have us believe. It's actually something much more profound and will have far more reaching consequence than just a notion of a cyclical rebound. In fact, a wholly new economy is emerging and the role of design in that economy will be critical.

What are some of the some of the skill sets that current designers are practicing that make design so critical in the coming economy?

The fact is that design thinking is going to be important in almost every aspect of business in the future. And so there's going to be a lot more attention paid to this idea of design thinking and there's no question that that is absolutely right as design thinking is not just about objects. It's not just about what we see and feel. It actually relates to everything that we engage with, tangible and intangible, products, services, and systems.

Even though we make tangible objects, there's no question that 3D printing is going to radically change everything. And we have been speaking about 3D printing for the past 20 years. When it emerged as an RPM tool back in the '90's, we said that it's only a matter of time now before we start using materials that allow for final production this way through nanofabrication. Because earlier on in rapid prototyping, they were using polymers and ceramics that were too gelatinous, too resonant for mass manufacture, but they were good for prototyping.

And that was actually foreshortening the prototyping process, which already was creating enormous tumult. But we said this is just a step in a direction that is going to completely revolutionize the way things are made, for whom and how, by whom and who designs them, not to mention the notion of intellectual property, competition, licenses, and issues of liability and law. It also disrupts the notion of whether you need a corporation or a cooperative to build some of the smallest to the biggest things. And now that we can actually create things in dentists' offices, and we can create weapons in people's homes, this changes the world forever.

It's actually quite amazing how the future is actually now in so many ways.

Yes, exactly. We keep trying to urge people to understand the speed with which change is taking place. We keep trying to make them understand that the skills that they have will become outdated, but the competencies that they have will become much more important if they can understand how to migrate those competencies across a wide range of areas. Because the skill of somebody who knows how to do, for example, CAD/CAM and design, well, an eighth grader can learn that now.

But the competency of the thinking, of the thought process, if we keep teaching to the test, nobody's going to have that design competency? So, we have to start making a distinction between skills and competencies and we have to start making distinctions between visions and strategies. Because skills and strategies will become rapidly outdated, but visions and competencies are what will underpin the new as they arise.

Edie Weiner, President of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., will be presenting A View From the Future on Wednesday, October 24th, at the DMI Design/Management Conference.