The shape of design is changing. Add three new dimensions to the width, height and depth designers understand so well. We must graft motion, sound and interactivity to our traditional design elements, methods and materials to design electronic visual communications media and electronically enhanced products.

A suitable term for this new design universe is difficult to find. Multimedia is a term used often, but seems inadequate to fully describe design mutated by digital intelligence. Unimedia might be a more suitable term. Design disciplines and technologies are converging, collapsing into each other. Convergence may be the dominant design paradigm for this electronic era.

The tidy fences containing and defining the design professions are disappearing. Products are more and more a communications problem, as they become less mechanical, and more complex and programmable, requiring more than just physical knobs for their safe and effective operation. Both industrial and graphic designers find their communications knowledge in demand. Interaction design, an entire new discipline, is one result.

Evidence of convergence is in every field. Interactive television, home shopping, those often-promised five hundred cable channels and narrowcasting promise major reconfigurations in advertising. Television journalism blurs the boundaries between entertainment and information, fact and fiction. Selling is often mixed into this media soup. Docudramas, infomercials, magalogs, and educational games are terms that would once have seemed like oxymorons.

There is convergence in the design process as well. Designers are finding themselves and their work linked ever more closely to those that precede them in the traditional design process, and to those that follow after them to implement their designs. The link between writing, editing and graphic design is now seamless, with increasingly fluid connections to print reproduction processes. Digitally assisted product fabrication is changing product design. CNC, computer numerically controlled machining, and CAD/CAM, computer aided design/computer-aided manufacturing, are both productive tools and change agents.

Specialists converge and collaborate in the highly integrated teamwork required by hugely complex planning and production projects. Corporations are discovering the benefits of interoperability, simultaneous and parallel collaboration, strategic design and concurrent engineering.

Design is converging with our audiences. Interactivity allows the audience to "finish" our designs. Software can be customized, a CD-ROM publication is read differently by every user, television presentations will be scheduled on demand, electronic bulletin boards are the creation of their audiences. As audiences become authors, designers relinquish some control of the finished product.

Software is converging too, perhaps ultimately into one mega-application. Word processing incorporates page design, and vice versa. (Maybe I won't have to switch from Pagemaker to Quark if the two converge.) Operating systems approach each other already with the Power PC marriage between Mac and DOS.

Hardware is becoming increasingly difficult to label. Is it a fax, telephone, answering machine, a PDA, or laptop computer? Is it a TV or a computer? Televisions are plugging in and telephones are unplugging. Interactive television technology will be one of the greatest convergences with electronic downloading in the home.

Corporations, including hardware, software and media channels, are converging in strategic alliances for multimedia entertainment and information projects between the four C's: cable, communications, computers and content.

Simultaneously, divergence, the exact opposite, collides with convergence as another dominant trend. Even as we are knit together in a global culture by seamless instantaneous communications and unprecedented mobility, ethnic diversity fragments us into rival tribes. As global transnational corporations merge, corporate hierarchies decentralize into entrepreneurial cells and electronic networks circumvent centralized hierarchies. Work is dispersing geographically to electronic cottages in exurban and remote locations. The virtual office can be in your home, your hotel room, your car, a plane, a beach, or an island off the coast of Greece. The EEC and NAFTA are creating large new quasi-governmental trading zones, but long-standing countries splinter into tiny ethnic entities. Complex channeling is challenging mass communications: narrowcasting instead of broadcasting, subcultures instead of mass culture, tailored products instead of mass production. Demassification, a term used by Patrick Whitney of Illinois Institute of Technology, is a dominant cross-category global trend, ending the age of mass given us by the industrial revolution.

The economics of production and communication and the character of culture and society exhibit diversification, decentralization, downsizing, dispersion and even disunity.

It is important to consider the implications of extreme differentiation. Can the global or national consensus necessary for intelligent democracy be achieved in a world of subcultures? Groups focused on specialized interests, forming thousands of transgeographic communities through global communications, often show little interest or sympathy for others outside their frame of reference. Spectator sports, recreation, hobbies, moral and social issues and business concerns form special interest groups ranging from stamp collectors, fly fishermen, and survivalists to parents of children killed by drunk drivers, gray panthers and anti-abortion activists.

These interest groups tend to focus on single issues with less concern for national or global community needs. Our institutions of democratic government will be seriously challenged if we loose our communal overview. The leaders of subcultures find it easy to exploit oversimplifications and polarizations when their members are conceptually isolated into special interest ghettos. The growing forms of fundamentalism around the world may be evidence of this phenomenon.

American television broadcasting has gone from 3 channels to several hundred with highly specialized programming and narrow audience segmentation. Specialty magazines focus on arcane subjects, and your Time magazine increasingly contains different advertising and content than mine. Whole cities who read the same daily newspaper will soon have tailored personal electronic newspapers with preselected content based on individual preferences. Extremes of individualism, narcissism and intolerance could be one result of highly tailored electronic communications.

A threatening social scenario is a worst case projection of these trends. We face a potential socio-cultural divergence of grave concern-- a split between the technologically literate haves and have-nots. A widening and possibly uncrossable gulf between an overclass and underclass could concentrate all the skills, knowledge, education, access and affluence on one side. "Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps" may be impossible for a technologically disadvantaged underclass. The ghettoization of those shut out of the electronic communications revolution adds to an exploding dispersion of subcultures. This scenario evokes extreme images of Blade Runner and class warfare. With steadily increasing affluence on one side and an erosion of means and values on the other, the disadvantaged could target crime and violence on the new elite of the information economy.

But in a positive scenario, technology offers cause for optimism. Electronically-delivered education-- CD-ROM and laser-disc publishing for instance-- reduces geographic isolation for both rural or urban ghetto schools. Education can tailored to individual student's learning styles and cultural contexts. The convergence of games and entertainment with learning can harness the seduction of video games for hard-to-reach children. Interactivity could promote active participation, intellectual exploration and conceptual vigor. Information is power in the new communications economy, and nonhierarchical communications could prevent manipulation of the public by powerful vested interests.

We have all heard technophiles' excited proclamations of the new Atlantis, an electronic Age of Aquarius, a renaissance of personal freedom and intellectual democracy enabled by an electronic global net of interactivity. Contrast this to the Blade Runner doomsday tableau. What could be the outcome as the two forces of convergence and divergence collide and synthesize? Designers both make and respond to cultural change; we must proactively anticipate this new order and understand its consequences.

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© 1997 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com