Early on in my Razorfish days I coined a phrase that became a marketing slogan and mantra for the company: Everything That Can Be Digital, Will Be.
When I first said this, I wasn't quoting Benny Landa (who said it in 1993), I was riffing on what Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park says:
"If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, well, there it is...All I'm saying is that life finds a way."
What I meant is that technology was like life -- it can't be contained and expands to new territories: analog phones become digital, analog thermostats become digital, analog mail becomes digital and so on. So, everything that can be digital, will be. Not everything should, mind you.
Digital technologies are invading almost every device we use with a vengeance: cars, ovens, refrigerators, phones, toilets, tvs, boats, planes and more. Digital technologies are also being embedded, both visibly and invisibly, into almost every contained space, from hotels to airports to houses. As more and more objects talk to each other digitally, our world changes.
Most digital experiences in the past were mediated by screens with keyboards (e.g. computers). We have recently entered a new age, one in which digital experiences are mediated by other objects or just by our motion. Everyone who plans or manages a physical space, be it a restaurant, store, house, hotel, health club, church or other needs to figure out how to use digital technologies to impact its inhabitants.
Case-in-point: the award-winning projects at the annual advertising event in Cannes in 2009 all had a digital component and a physical component, highlighting how digital is just a "technology" or a "channel" (like TV, Radio or Retail Design) that allows a company to interact with a customer.
