Another year, and I’ve got another set of predictions for how things may change for us this year. Some of this is just observations of trends, and some are from my personal wishlist. This is what I think we’re going to see more of in 2012.

more real world interactions

We’ve moved on quite a way from vintage 80s clap-initiated bachelor-pad lighting systems, in fact we can now control all manner of media with an array of devices. Now I know it’s not particularly new, but this is only going to become more and more endemic. The internet is going to cross over with real life like you’ve never seen it this year.

The Wii has been around for ages, and it was revolutionary in introducing a new way to control games. Now Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Play are waging war in your living rooms vying to be your next generation entertainment console of choice. You can tell it to play a certain song or launch a TV channel, and then change the volume or switch channel with a gesture.

In the world of mobile, Siri is changing how you deal with your phone. It’s not just a one way conversation any more – you ask your phone to do something, and it has a think about it, and tries to react accordingly, often with unexpected, and unwanted results.

More and more devices will be able to communicate with you (and it’s not just one way traffic) and with the advent of things like raspberry pi, and the cost of chipsets dropping, we’ll start seeing people experiment with computers in everything. Forget talking fridges and cars, everything will start talking to each other, and it will proliferate massively. We’ve already been there and done it with apps, and look how huge that has become.

So my first prediction, and this is definitely one that’s on my own personal wish list, is that you’ll start to see the potential of making anything connected and smart this year.

more social integration

You’d have to be a blind and mute recluse not to have noticed the buildup of tension and war of words in the arms race that’s developing between Google+ and Facebook in the last year, and expectations are high (and possibly slightly overhyped). In scenes reminiscent of the US and USSR plundering German missile experts after the end of the second world war, the 2 giants have been fighting even more bitterly for the best grads, the smartest business and tech heads, and the most aggressive strategies to own the social media zeitgeist.

This year will undoubtedly see both players pulling out all the stops to try and win your attention, and your all-important ad revenue-generating clicks. Whether it’s ambitious creative projects to capture your imagination, streamlining and upgrading services, better video chat, or more relevant search, you can be sure that they will be neck and neck trying to come up with the next game changer.

more smartphone advances

Stats on mobile access around the world are showing that uptake and usage of smartphones is only going to go increase. In the UK, A recent study by Pyramid Research highlights that by 2016, 90.8% of all mobile phones sold will be smartphones. This is another symptom of the fall in chip and battery prices and sizes, and we’ll start to see feature phones dying out on us, even in the developing world. More people will have the computing power of a smartphone than they will have a home computer or laptop and this is a powerful force that will have inevitable changes on human behaviours.

In the developed world, mobile retail is increasing, I’ve certainly massively upped my use of traditional e-tailers like amazon and ebay on my iphone in 2011, and I can only see this increasing in the future. Stats on mobile wallets show take-up is on the up, and it’s not surprising, we’re a lazy bunch accustomed to taking the path of least resistance, and you can see this in the fact we’re already used to paying by swiping with things like oyster cards, no more queuing. For brands trying to avoid falling behind, it’s especially important if you offer any form of search and/or purchase, you’ve got to make it easy for people to buy when they are out and about, as a busy consumer bombarded with messages and swamped with priorities, you never know when you get a free moment, so every moment out and about is as valuable as when you’re trapped at a desk or in a meeting.

So… pretty soon, everyone will have a computer in their hand, how then, are we gearing our work as an industry towards this? Clearly our design processes need to be more complex in terms of the types of platform we naturally plan for, but we need to also deliver more streamlined services for our audience depending on how they consume the services we create. Developers will need to be more au fait with platforms like Wapple or Netbiscuits for optimised mobile browsing, or for app development with development platforms like PhoneGap (and hence HTML5).

Everyone wants to be a Creative Technologist

I’ll keep saying this, and it should be obvious, but any agency without a Creative Technologist on the books is dead in the water. And by Creative Technologist, I don’t mean someone who simple knows about technology, who’s created a few banners, done a facebook campaign and used the word HTML5 in a presentation, it’s someone who can actually code, who can actually hardwire something, someone who can make ideas into reality.
It’s a sign of how sought after this role is by the number of people (not, in my view creative techies) who claim to speak to language of creative technology and sell themselves as such.

Building on the cloud

The cloud certainly isn’t new, but there has been a progressive shift in how people work. Certainly in the last year, W+W have moved everything into the cloud, from using services like dropbox more for team collaboration and sharing of development files, to github and subversion via services like codesion for production code, Google apps and docs for collaborative document sharing (no more “final_2b_20120113_finalfinal.doc” file names!).
If you haven’t already experienced the workflow benefits in your day-to-day lives, then this year make it a priority to check it out because it could make a big different to how you manage your data and how you work with your colleagues. Certainly for us, it’s very liberating, and makes working for our clients, wherever they are, much easier, and more secure.

Logistics

This is a slightly leftfield one, but I’m firmly believe that there’s a gap in the market, and it’s one that I think everyone would like to be filled. When was the last time you were waiting for a package at home (or at work), and were told that the delivery will be between 8am and 6pm, only to pop out for 5 mins, to then come back to a card pushed through the letterbox telling you to go to a delivery office 2 days from now, 150 miles away at an ungodly hour of the morning. It’s happened to me a lot. Why can’t they deliver when I’m at home, or when I’m out? Rory Sutherland talked about a future where you can be anywhere at any time and have a parcel delivered straight to your hand if you want it there, you’d even be able to see the package on google maps on your mobile homing in to your location as you see a courier round the corner package in hand delivering it to you in the last leg of the relay, no more waiting around. Someone make it happen, otherwise @DHL, call us, we’ll help you.

TV

Finally, TV. Again, nothing new, but this is the year that it’s all going to start happening with the next generation of TV as we know it. after big delays in coming to market due to box manufacturing issues, we should see the advent of YouView -originally the flagship of next gen TV on demand and freeview services, the one box to rule them all – as it enters a market that will soon feel crowded as BT, Virgin and all the other big players introduce their take on future TV. Tv viewing will become more like browsing, with more social apps appearing (forget the red button), more gaming, more interactivity to show, and the best of all, more on demand programming via the iPlayers and 4ODs of the world, all available on 1 device!
This will of course be more counterbalanced with the web becoming more TV-like in places. With sites like YouTube pushing the “channel” analogy as a central pillar of its business plan, we’ll see this logic being pushed across more internet properties, it just makes plain sense.

So in summary, I think it’s going to be an interesting year, not just for W+W, but for you and the technology you start (and stop) using. Happy New Year!