The Future of design will Look to Entertainment. For most of modern history, designers followed the principles of engineering. Designers wanted to make things work better. The engineers showed them how. During Industrial Revolution, designers learned from engineers. Function, efficiency, reliability were the metrics of success. During the Digital Revolution, designers learned from cognitive scientists. Usability became the priority. Designers reduced complexity to make interactions feel frictionless.
So the question is:
What will designers learn from next?
Entertainment.
Not because we need more entertainment. But because entertainment has been mastering design’s toughest challenge for hundreds of years: capturing and sustaining human engagement.
Designers have been thinking in terms of usability for years. How can we make this easier to understand? How can we make this simpler? How can we remove friction? But tomorrow’s challenge will be different. How do we design for humans who are naturally distracted by billions of other things? How do we design something people want to come back to? These are not usability problems. They are engagement problems.
For hundreds of years, the entertainment industry has been honing their approach to engagement. Filmmakers have studied pace and suspense. Game designers have experimented with reward systems to keep players coming back for more. Composers manipulate emotional energy with peaks and valleys. Broadway directors know how to time a showstopper. Authors know that humans are hardwired to remember stories far better than they remember facts. Hollywood is no longer the only show in town. These techniques are becoming fundamental to design.
Brands like Duolingo didn’t invent games. They borrowed the rules of engagement from games to build a habit forming learning platform. Apple stole the show from Hollywood by making a product launch an event millions of people queue up for overnight. Fitness apps, banks, and even hospitals are starting to learn the same lesson. If a company truly wants to hook you, it won’t come from how well something works alone. It will come from how hard it is to look away.
Welcome to the age of AI. Artificial Intelligence will take this trend to the next level. When AI can generate logos, UX, websites, and products in minutes, how you execute on the technical side will become commodity. Making something that just works will be ordinary. Beautiful design will be everywhere. You’ll differentiate yourself by creating connections with people. But to do that, you need to grab people’s attention and earn their engagement. Good luck pulling people into a product if everyone can build something as easy to use as Instagram.
To compete, designers will think more broadly about the creative tools at their disposal. Film students will learn about composition. Game designers will study how personalities are developed in novels. UX designers will think about how to guide people through experiences, not just interfaces. AI may have changed how we make products, but entertainment is changing how we design them. In five years, open up Twitter and you’ll see it.
The designer of the future will look less like a maker and more like a director. Directors don’t simply create entertainment. Directors know how to direct your attention and keep you engaged. They spend entire movies designing moments for audiences to peek up at the screen. When you think about the experience you want to create, start to direct.
The End of Products?
By Aaron Hurst, entrepreneur and author of The Purpose economy, traditionally business has been predicated on a relatively simple idea. Design and engineer a better product and people will buy it. Companies competed on craftsmanship, marketers communicated features and sales measured success by shipments. Products were finite. They had a beginning and an end. First you designed them, then you built them, someone bought them and eventually they were tossed out or upgraded.
Branding was about convincing people to replace their car, washing machine or laptop every couple years. Innovation was cyclical. And the product was the core of the story.
That’s changing. What we buy is no longer designed to simply end.
Software updates add new features. Artificial intelligence creates products that learn and adapt to us. Cloud connectivity allows objects to grow beyond their physical dimensions. The products we own will continue to update, evolve and improve long after we purchase them. They never really reach the finish anymore. This isn’t just an incremental shift. It’s revolutionary. For the first time in history, designers aren’t building finished products. They are building products that evolve every day of their lives.
Design hasn’t replaced marketing. It’s marketing. While technology companies have lead the charge towards this new economy, the trend is spreading to every industry. Healthcare isn’t about curing patients once and sending them on their way. Technology is enabling us to focus on continuous wellbeing through monitoring devices, preventive insights and personalized health. Education isn’t about learning something once in school. Learning is becoming a lifelong pursuit with courses updating as your career changes. Cars are no longer cars, they’re software you drive. Homes become platforms that intelligently learn your family’s routines. Banks are transforming into personal advisors that help us manage our money better.
What’s tying these industries together isn’t new technology. It’s a new understanding of where value lives. Competing doesn’t mean building the best automobile. It means building the best relationship with your customers over time. This doesn’t just impact how companies think about products. It impacts how brands are built.
For years brands have asked one core question: “Why should I buy this product?” Moving forward, brands will need to answer a different question: “Why should I continue choosing this brand?” The question is slightly different. But it changes everything.
Traditional branding was focused on attracting customers. Branding of the future is about continually earning their loyalty. Every software update, recommendation or interaction is an opportunity to gain trust. Building loyalty isn’t about logos and memorability. Its about creating value years after your customer’s buy your product.
The most important “product” companies will design in the future may not be physical at all. It will be the relationship they create with their customers. Everything else will be wrapped around it. Marketing tells the story of that relationship. And product provides the interface. As products gain the ability to learn, adapt and care about the things we care about, design challenges will shift from how do we build a better widget to how do we build a better relationship.
Maybe that’s why products are ending. Not because the reign of the physical object is over. But because we are quickly moving to a world where the product is simply the start. Not where value stops, but where it begins.
