Ten years ago, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of this magazine, Communication Arts sat down with Paul Saffo, a noted forecaster based in Silicon Valley. We asked Saffo to look ahead at what the coming years would bring. At the time, the Web was booming, you couldn’t find a parking space in San Francisco and, if you could write HTML and sign your name without drooling, you could command a six-figure salary. At a dot-com startup like...Pets.com. Kozmo. Or Dr. Koop.

A decade ago Saffo looked out and saw: ubiquitous sensors, inexpensive flat screens and a rise among person-to-person interaction over the Internet. He even said, “The Internet is going to spawn other forms. We’ll have some things that look like TV, but are interactive.

At the end of that interview, almost as an afterthought, Saffo pulled out a black and chrome gadget about the size of a matchbook. “Oh, this might be interesting,” he said. “It’s an MP3 player. Holds about 40 songs. You can download them from your computer and play them back.”

Today, we’ve got smart phones and GPS sensors in our cars, our phones and our cameras. We spend countless hours interacting and connecting on MySpace and Facebook; iPods and iTunes have revolutionized the way we listen to and buy music. Meanwhile, participants on YouTube produced more video programming in the last 6 months than all of the big three television networks combined in the last 60 years. In the ensuing ten years, we've ridden out Y2K, the collapse of the dot-com industry, the rise of reality TV and watched bubbles develop and burst in stocks, finance and real estate.

In short, it’s been a wild ride. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Communication Arts, we once again asked Saffo to forecast what future designers might inherit in the coming decade. (Check back in ten years to see if he got it right.)

As a forecaster, Saffo is paid by some very forward-thinking organizations in information technology, financial investment houses and product design to look out-way out-over the horizon to plot some possible outcomes of current trends. The goal isn’t to predict the future. It is to illuminate a full range of possibilities, the better to take meaningful action today.

As a working methodology, Saffo says he’s trained himself to develop a deep intuitive sense of what's coming. “I look for things that don't fit. I try to find the flat spot of the S-curve. That's the inflection point, where things are about to change, where anomalies pop up and can't be ignored.” These things that don’t fit are indicators, what Saffo calls threads hanging down from the future.

Case in point: robots. Most of us might think of robots as inhabiting the realm of science fiction, or if robots function at all, performing a poor imitation of human-powered skills. According to Saffo, who teaches a course to Stanford engineers on the future of robotics, on the same day robot cars were successfully negotiating a 60-mile course in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge race, a few miles away there was a horrendous highway accident in which dozens of cars smashed into each other. Rescue workers reported cars crashing into the tail end of the pile-up even as the people in the front were being treated. For Saffo, that bizarre incongruity is what a forecaster looks for. The lesson, he says, is that, “Robots can understand the California Vehicle code better than human beings, and we cannot trust people to drive.”

By 2030, Saffo thinks, 50 percent of our driving will be done by robots. Lest you think this is too futuristic, too much the realm of science fiction, remember DARPA’s track record: These are the folks that brought you the Internet.
Today, the leading edge of design is moving faster than ever. Saffo points to four factors driving change. Moore’s law, which predicts that integrated circuit processing power will continue to double every two years; software algorithms are getting better; sensors are proliferating; and we are increasingly living in Cyberspace. In the face of these factors, Saffo says the role of the designer must change. “In this vast new world, designers need to be the heat seekers, the iron filings being drawn to a magnet.