Digital thinking

Digital technology is ubiquitous and has transformed many aspects of domestic and business life. At a personal level there is an ĝ€ app for everything', in commerce banks are shifting online and even the heat and oil of the factory floor is being transformed by industry 4.0. In some cases, the changes are incremental, simply making existing process more efficient, or allowing online access to previous face-to-face services. However, there are also more radical changes. Some of these are within the methods of digital production from the perpetual beta of Web 2.0 and A-B testing of user interfaces to agile software development. Other changes are enabled by digital technology, such as more flexible industrial processes due to digital fabrication and applications of AI in medicine. There is a distinctly digital eye that allows us to think differently about the world, for example greater levels of personalisation in consumer products, or more dynamic sensor-rich industrial processes. Sometimes these innovations happen by accident, but we can explicitly adopt this viewpoint to prompt more radical design practice. In this talk I will draw out some of the facets and design heuristics of this new mode of digital thinking.