The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design
Trendwatching.com was the first, so far as I know, to pick up on the existence of Generation C [I’ve written more about Gen C].
Gen C is a generation of people defined not by age but by activity.
They form communities easily. They are connected both socially and to the internet. They expect to be involved in the creation of their products and media. They like control. They generate content… they have bands, they photograph, they write blogs. They are comfortable with complexity.
There are lots of C words here. Generation C.
It’s sounding terribly familiar.
This is the internet sensibility.
We know – you know – exactly what I’m talking about. It’s responsive dev teams, it’s social software, it’s mash-ups, and niche, long tail websites. We – and I expect that everyone here is a paid-up member of Generation C – we now carry that expectation to the products we buy and the media we consume. We want to know who writes the videos we watch, and we want to have a say. We want to customise our mobile phones, and watch TV whenever suits us.
More than that, we’re happy making things ourselves. Look at the success of Make and Craft magazines, and the Etsy craft website. We’re happy to put homemade objects next to mass-produced ones, in our homes. The stigma of amateur is going—and for good reason: We are powerful with our tools and knowledge, and a home-made, or short-run manufactured t-shirt or teddy bear is likely to be more exactly what we want than anything that can be bought in a big store. We’re making and adapting products to fit our lives, instead of fitting our lives around the products.
These are enormously significant, these two trends: One, the creative slice of the population is expanding. Two, the reach of the creatives is leaking off computer screens, Photoshop and knitting to things that used to be the preserve of big companies.
What we’re looking at, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, is: