Trilogy Part 1 -
Future of Technology: A New Perspective

Voices from the past and present provide insights on the future of technology

Compiled by Designfax editorial team with the assistance of many, many others

The editors of Designfax asked questions of industry visionaries regarding the future of technology as we enter the new millennium. We asked people both inside and outside the industry for advice and insight for both the Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) industry as a whole and the design engineer him- or herself, in other words "the humanity behind the technology."

Many people responded. We're grateful for their help. We feel that those who came forward did so, so that we, in turn, could help you. Isn't that what life is all about? And so it goes...

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up?...

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

- William Faulkner, 1950, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature

Trilogy mission: to be the design engineer's prop, pillar.

"The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth."
-- Henry David Thoreau

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