A brief rant on the future of interactive design makes a claim that I find fundamentally interesting, that most visions of the future are too conservative, to similar to now. I find this quite interesting, because it seems that we have gone an awfully long time since Any new visions were seriously put forth. This article was written in 2011, and in the response he mentions that the iPad is good, but only if it gets replaced relatively quickly. 7 years later, and all of the handheld devices made by any company still are almost identical to the original iPhone, and with these companies current business models this is unlikely to change. I think this is a large part of the reason that progress has been relatively slow. Even at this time everything looks like what we grew up thinking of as “modern”, and so even without innovating much companies can sell their product as if it were a new and amazing thing, because it has the right aesthetic. No serious cultural force has put forth a competing image, and so we have entered a cycle where companies that benefit from our current image reinforce the image, and therefore benefit more, and therefore have more leverage to continue the cycle. There is simply no immediate money in competing views. This analysis seems quite pessimistic, but I think that is another aspect of what has changed. While commercial interest have always had a part in creating our image of the future, I can think of nothing in the modern day that takes the role of the first few generations of science fiction in portraying visionary possible(or impossible) futures. Most of the science fiction I see today is either simple repetition of visions of others, or heavily distopian. Something changed after the era of star-trek so that we seem to no longer view the future of a better, different place, but have become jaded and have lost the belief that a paradigm shift is possible.
P.S. I combined the two responses into 1 double length one because the two articles together address a single idea.