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From ETC-Architect » Security Architect Global | Software Architect, Global | Security Architect, Global
The economy of the last hundred years was driven by growth and a young generation with lots of needs helped to fuel that growth. Unless you life in Africa this is going to change as the demographics are changing. This means that latest in eight years (usually earlier) the economics will change and as such also a lot of architecture. You will see that the time of high interest rates is coming to end, the rapid time of recovery after a crisis is gone and many other changes, such as that less people are interested in training, as there are fewer people entering the the workplace. This all will continue and more change similar will follow.
The really bad thing here is that most of us are just comfortable with the skill set we have and do not want any retraining in our advanced years. When you look at the many studies on the ageing population and what this means you will see all the big analysts agree that the main motor of growth will be in efficiency, so less of new things, but all the services done today at a much lower unit price through change in the way they are performed, not by lowering cost via quantity. For architects this will mean changed requirement with less fancy interesting GUIs and more towards efficient entries. Also the pace of changes will get less as older people do not like it. The only time to change will be that we can increase efficiencies.
Now efficiency in itself creates problems mainly to do with organisational management, that again will create lots of problem with a older more settled workforce. The point is that it requires us all to rethink all the patterns build up in the time of expansion. Since the ageing process will affect all economies we will also need to change many perceptions on industrial produce as the classical countries of produce and outsourcing such as China and India are also facing the ageing of their population and as such will have less young people to fuel the hard work, as the older people will no longer be able to do the jobs.
Even if this phase of ageing will be transient in time as once all the old people such as myself have died off, it is nevertheless the reality that everyone will have to face for the next 30 – 50 years depending of how old we get. So all architects will have to get ready to face this new reality and I would advise everyone to start rethinking sooner than later, as we all will have to work much longer as an ageing population means less demand and lower interest rates with governments unable to supply stability.
