Designing for Mixed Reality

Chapter 7. The Near-Future Impact on Society

The first resistance to social change is to say it’s not necessary.

Gloria Steinem

The Near-Future Impact of Mixed Reality

It is an incredibly exciting time to be a designer. Quite a few of the shackles of our professional history are about to be thrown out the window. This is at once both a blessing and a curse because designers have come to enjoy and respect constraint imposed by those ever present rectangles embedded in our lives. But a new chapter of human-computer interaction is beginning, and so the early design approaches that emerge around mixed reality (MR) will continue to evolve and change for some time ahead. This report only intends to help frame what’s ahead—there are no best practices at this point.

What we can say today, though, is that MR, if adopted into common use, will eventually have a profound impact on our relationship with things—our world, our work, our lives. It could potentially turn us into the augmented superhumans we have always liked to envision ourselves evolving into. At the very minimum, we will all be more closely bonded and reliant on technology. We will really all be cyborgs then. Of course, the potential impact on society should not be underestimated; we may not look at the world the same way, and our understanding of what is reality and what is not might come into question. Designers will be coerced to evolve from being the mechanics of the interface, routed deeply in logic, to the spell-casters ...