Mechanical Snowflakes in Salzburg

If it's Tuesday… this must be Salzburg?!

I was recently asked to make a detour to Salzburg to do the keynote for Autodesk “TechCamp”, the annual meeting of all the partners in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) who are serving the manufacturing and mechanical CAD division.

Jordi Portella, Autodesk's Director of EMEA Manufacturing Solutions and his team put on an excellent almost week long event that was attended by over 550 mechanical and manufacturing partners and specialists.

While this is something that I was  delighted to do, unfortunately I had to sandwich this between meetings in San Francisco on Friday and Orlando on Wednesday, so I was only in Salzburg for about 18 hours, but it was a great reminder of the phrase “short but sweet”.  I landed in Munich and took the train to Salzburg. It was one of those magical rides on a gorgeous spring day through the green hills of Austria and Germany, complete with church steeples marking the small villages and towns, and with freshly snow-covered mountains in the background.

I titled my keynote address “The Snowflake Effect: Unique is What We Seek”. I used this opportunity to highlight the trends, directions, and patterns that I feel are leading inevitably to a universal focus on the uniqueness of not only each of us as individuals, but even more so, the uniqueness of every moment, situation, and project.

Given this audience, I put this in the context of:

• Getting to “just right”, as in finding just the right people, content, context, mediums, etc.
• How learning is becoming an imperative to most organizations
• The increasingly new and expanded roles that design is playing for all of us as “prosumers” (simultaneously being producers and consumers)
• The converging patterns of economies of abundance, the right-brained economy, and the Long Tail effect

You can see more details of each of these in the slides I used as shown here:

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As I see it, the future of design will be predominated by the following characteristics:

• Project based
• Multi-discipline
• Collaborative
• Holistic and heuristic
• Right-brain dominated
• Design for the economy of abundance

And we will see the “redefining” of design to include such things as:

• Functional design
• Emotional design
• Design of everyday things in a world of abundance
• “Do good” design with such things as green design and sustainable design
• Design of and for the “virtual world”, moving beyond the design of “physical things”

My closing thoughts were that we need to be:

• Thinking more UNIVERSAL, rather than NATIONAL when it comes to the skills, knowledge, and capabilities of the future.
• Developing execution strategies that adapt and adopt these to leverage local, national, and cultural contexts.
• Shifting towards RIGHT BRAIN dominance in our jobs and skills. Our left brain still very necessary, just not sufficient.
• Ever wary that we are very busy “perfecting the irrelevant”.

I’ve previously covered some of these topics here on Off Course – On Target and will be addressing much more to do with the role of design, skills for the future, and some of these profound and powerful trends that are affecting the future for all of us. Stay tuned for more, send in your comments and suggestions and look forward to seeing you here more often.

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Comments

[lisa lavy]

It’s the end of the year.

My vacation days are long gone, spent on moving into my new house and installing flooring.

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[ghd straighteners]

Tomorrow is another day , should have new features.

[atlantic city windshields]

When a good job is done for you then you should not be annoyed or shy of telling people about it.