Barry Katz was educated at McGill University in Montréal, the London School of Economics, and holds a doctorate from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and formerly Adjunct Professor in the Design Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Stanford University. As IDEO Fellow Barry worked for more than 20 years with the world’s leading design and innovation consultancy, and continues to consult with governments, companies, and academic institutions worldwide. His writings on design as a strategy of innovation have appeared in many academic, professional, and popular journals. His current interests include postwar reconstruction in Ukraine and the post-pandemic workplace in Silicon Valley.
There have been three major transformations in modern history: steam power, which sparked the transition from craft to mass-production; electricity, which transformed the way in which we perceive the external world; computers, which accelerated the pace of life in every domain. These were not merely inventions, but what economists refer to as “general purpose technologies” – technologies that transformed every industry and touch every aspect of life. It has been widely reported that we are now in the midst of what the World Economic Forum has called a “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” driven by recent developments in artificial intelligence.
Borrowing the old Chinese slogan of the “four great things” (四大件) we will propose in this talk that we may think of this trajectory in terms of four great impacts: on the human body, the human senses, the human intellect, and today, the human mind. The implications are staggering.
1、A broader perspective than is usually found in day-to-day professional practice
2、A sense of the urgency with which we must confront today’s realities
3、An appeal to design professionals to step back from the details and think long and hard about the implications of their work