What an experience. As I already wrote in my previous post, right up until shortly before it started, I was genuinely unsure whether I should go at all.
Why?
First, because I had never been to an event of this scale before and I find networking difficult.
But more than anything, because I felt extremely intimidated by the topics, the speakers and the sheer amount of expertise. So many people who are incredibly specialized and qualified in AI, UX, UI and technology, working on the present and its potential futures.
I work with all of these topics professionally, too, but nowhere near the depth that, honestly, most job descriptions seem to require these days.
What occupies me just as much as all the people at the event – and probably most people around the world – is, of course, the question of what our future will look like. How will we live, what will we do, but most importantly:
Who will we be as human beings, now and in the future?
In conversations with some of the speakers, I was told that the number of people expressing their fear of an uncertain future and a present that is changing at incredible speed was higher this year than ever before. Fear of too much technology, moving too fast, becoming too intelligent. Fear of becoming replaceable and losing their jobs.
It feels like a cynical race driven by fear.
New technologies seem to emerge almost every week. In response to trends, as answers to new developments, or simply because others are doing it too. Desperately, we try to keep up; to stay up to date through courses, workshops, studies and training, only to realize that by the time we finish, the next technological phenomenon has already arrived.
Like flies, we humans currently seem to be circling around the phenomenon of technology.
Over the past week, I have heard Product Designers ask how we can design better products, UX Designers ask what the User Experience of tomorrow might look like, User Researchers ask questions specific to their own field – and all of them, together, ask what the big technology of tomorrow might be.
And at some point, I started wondering: if we want ro put humans at the center – why do so many of our questions begin with technology?
I was afraid of the Future Product Days. Afraid that the talks wouldn’t mean anything to me and that, in return, I would have nothing to say to all those highly qualified people there.
Now I am very glad that I went, because I came away with an important realization:
I can set out in search of an answer through the things that personally interest me, the things move me and the things I am good at. In search of an answer to the questions of what the future is and who human being of the future will be.
As I mentioned before, I work with UI/UX and Product Design, but I have never really felt at home in any of these fields.
All my life, there has really only been one thing I wanted to do: create beautiful things. Things that inspire, touch and enrich.
Whenever I have gone deeper into some of the fields mentioned above, I have encountered an enormous amount of technology and optimization. So often, it is about optimizing products, User Experiences and interfaces further and further: making them more efficient, more intuitive, more frictionless, more scalable or more commercially successful.
But where is the beauty? Where is the thing that truly touches me as a human being? That enriches me, that makes me grow, think and feel?
I was always frustrated because I wasn’t happy and because I thought I had to fit in somewhere in order to be able to do exactly that.
That was roughly the emotional state I was in when I arrived at the Future Product Days. Not exactly the best starting point when you’re attending an event where the majority of talks revolve around UX, AI and Product Design, right?
But then something very important happened for me.
At first, that realization was frightening, but then it became incredibly liberating.
I don’t have to fit into these circles. I am free to approach the question of the future through what interests me and what I am good at.
The beautiful thing was that Don Norman said something similar in one of his talks: Do what genuinely excites you.
What exactly this approach – or rather, this search for answers – will look like, I don’t know yet. I will probably read a lot and spend a lot of time thinking. But that’s okay if it feels meaningful.
Not because I think I already have the answers. But because I am curious about what might happen when other people contribute their thoughts, experiences and perspectives.
If these questions occupy you too, if you have read or experienced something that might relate to them, or if you completely disagree with me at any point:
Write to me. Challenge me. Think further with me.
I am not looking for confirmation. I am looking for perspectives that expand or challenge my own. I would love to hear from you.