Julia Peglow works as a speaker and author, writes books, a t3n column about life in the digital age and for her blog “Diary of the Digital Age.” She also teaches as a lecturer.
Her book was published in 2021”We internet kids — about surfing the exponential curve of digitization and the rift in the reality of a generation” by Verlag Hermann Schmidt.
Can you briefly describe which structures from earlier times still restrict us and our work today in the digital age and why?
What we rarely realize is that in the present world, we are of course always walking around in structures from the past. This applies to the physical world, in architecture, to old buildings that are being played with and used with new content; but also to the structures in our heads, corporate structures that date back to the time of industrialization. These are shaped by organizational principles that often run counter to the flexible, agile working methods of our time: silo-like departments that frequently fight each other, rigid hierarchies and chains of command, and the corresponding distribution of knowledge and power.
You could also put it this way: While the world is speeding into the future at exponential acceleration, we are stuck in our work, in companies, in structures just like a hundred years ago.
In your opinion, how should we transform the working world and the use of our digital tools in a meaningful and more sustainable way? In your opinion, why is it currently failing?
We have new tools, new tasks — and are trying to solve them with the old structures of organization and collaboration.
When the two come together, the old, rigid structures, the liquid knowledge in the form of data and the new, digital tools, there is inevitable a culture clash. And this also leads to this sense of endurance and strength that so many people in companies feel in our time.
In your opinion, should work and life be less separated and why? What could an alternative work culture and therefore also our everyday life look like that fits better into the digital age?
I started writing “Wir Internetkinder” in 2017, before the pandemic, and asked myself back then: Why are we actually doing this? Drive to the office every day only to check emails and be online all day? Sitting in pointless business meetings (for which we sometimes even fly to other cities or countries), in which everyone just scrolls through their emails and doesn't really talk to each other. There was an unquestionable “presence fetishism,” which was sometimes just about carrying your own body to the place that the calendar assigned you. During the pandemic, the pendulum swung to the other extreme due to the situation: We were just absent, “remotely,” and never met at all.
But the pandemic has also given us the necessary impetus to break out of our old habits of senseless physical presence. This focuses away from political dominance and power games in the office and in the back rooms and opens up new opportunities for women to reconcile work and family life. But the pandemic has also shown us which topics and events need the energy of a real meeting.
So now we know the full range. So we shouldn't fall back into an either/or discussion, either office or home office — for some reason, people or the public debate always lean towards this binary way of thinking. Instead, consider from case to case and come up with clever, flexible solutions about what makes sense in which situation and for which type of work. With the aim of productive, cooperative and creative collaboration. And that work fits in with life. And not the other way around.
What role can designers play in this?
All these new ways of working, formats of meetings, structures, knowledge cycles and intelligent creative processes, which serve to promote new ideas and generate innovation in the knowledge age, must be designed! Designers must stop defining themselves through the end and media formats they design: posters, products, interfaces. Instead, think process, not product! Experience Design or Design Thinking were already the first new approaches that show what design is capable of: With this unique way of thinking, to penetrate deep into the structures and be able to design everything: processes, structures or entire organizations, for example. This is where the future of design lies.
How have creative work and creative processes in particular changed in the digital age? In your opinion, is it really possible to invent new things in the age of the Internet?
Especially with regard to creative processes, we have actually experienced an extreme swing in the pendulum towards “swarm creation” in recent years: the first step in the creative process is often one in the collective image pool on the Internet, which is fed by the swarm: Google image searches, pinboards on Pinterest and Insta trends are all public formats. In this way, creation in the digital age means that everything that exists is repeatedly rearranged and sampled, but nothing really new is ever created. That is one of the reasons why designs are becoming more and more the same in all disciplines all over the planet, whether craft beer brands, corporate design for start-ups or automotive UX design. And if you're really mean, you could also say that this job of sampling could actually also be done by artificial intelligence — the creative people would have done away with themselves sooner or later.
What we have completely lost as a result of this permanent, collective, publicity of digital media is the privacy of our own world of thought. We retreat to it in order to outline a first, delicate germ of an idea from our very own associations, ideas and memories; I maintain that is the only way to create a truly original, new idea.
But of course, creativity is also possible in the digital age! In order to make this possible, it is not about either/or, but about recognizing the range between publicity and privacy and deliberately giving the creative process what it needs at the right time. In the end, the process swirls back and forth in this area of tension: concentrated privacy at the beginning, perhaps inspirational exchange within the team, then a retreat into concentrated privacy, up to an exchange with a wider public. Both are important for developing new ideas. But everything in good time.
When it comes to new technologies such as “big data, AI cloud computing, autonomous driving and augmented reality” and their use cases in people's lives, you write that we automatically assume that we will adapt life to technology and not vice versa (p. 33/34). Can you describe what a reality could look like for you in which the technologies are optimally adapted to our lives and support us in a meaningful way?
It just depends on which question you base every process, on which maxim we follow. I sometimes have the feeling that our approach is always exactly the wrong way around: We have this new technology here, for example AR glasses — and ask ourselves what applications could be in life? Instead of asking ourselves how we actually want to live. How we can actually live a good, responsible life. And use them to develop technologies that can help us do just that.
https://www.designmadeingermany.de/ddig/8917/
