Technology Forecast

As a way of providing context for the scenarios that follow in the next few pages, we’ve identified and described a set of key technological advances that we expect to have a significant impact on architectural education and professional practice by the late 1990’s. We’ve divided our technology forecast into three different sections. The first focuses on hardware advances that we think are imminent. The second deals with emerging software trends. The last, deals with tablet computing.

The basis for our predictions is quite simple. We’ve extrapolated existing capabilities into the near future, and then imagined how architectural practitioners and educators might make use of the resulting technology. We assume that all the hardware and software we describe already exists in some crude way. We also believe that the economic potential of today’s computer technology is so obvious that its swift development is all but certain. By the late 1990’s we believe that today’s crude prototypes will be developed into a set of complimentary products that are wildly popular and highly disruptive. See for yourself…

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