Lists seem trend and this time of the year trends come in lists. Although this may inspire resource and overall planning, it mostly does not cover existing or new questions around design practice. Let’s rather focus on some challenges for 2016 and beyond from an „Erfinder“ and designer perspective: 

• Phenomenon. A digital experience can easily adapt to a change of context and requirement. Like for future car interiors, where it’s not really foreseeable what people will do or require being driven autonomously. All surfaces covered with display and touch would provide maximum freedom on purpose and future developments. The challenge here is one that Marc Augé describes in his book „Nicht-Orte“. „Nicht-Orte“ are functional places like stations and supermarkets, often missing opportunity to instantiate feelings or build community. Even  transitions of phenomenon and objects purpose in the view of an individual, seems to not apply for digital and virtual experiences. Given this rigid nature, how can digital experiences be build to become „my community“ or even get a soul?
• Conversion. Data builds foundation for business potentials and models. Even though quality of data and value to a market is a big mystery. Corporations seem to have only a rough idea of what it’s worth and are reluctant to convert.  Because of uncertainty, data is not used to create value, it’s used as stronghold for established businesses to block creative use.  Trust building and a platform for owners and challengers is required, to benchmark and convert data for business models, experiences and technical solutions. 
• Algorithm. Freeing humans from practices understood is the sole purpose of technology. And to support humans in activities, which can’t be automized in the light of the state of knowledge. Algorithm will become a growing part of design to accomplish, may be not in all depth but in the understanding of the degree to prevent or minimize interactions and simplify dialogues. Algorithm will also influence the foundation for system behavior, hidden design and the concert of IoT. How does this influence design, will it become a threat, an interplay or design practice?  
• Modeling. With the role of humans changing from operator to administrator or pure user, it’s less obvious what she/he will actually do. Operational tasks define a user, using a system or even monitoring don’t. One way to narrow this gap seems modeling. The challenge is how far modeling can be applied. Can it be used to predict human intend or is it only a means for somatic behavior. As Asimov showed us in „Foundation“, you can model a group of thousands but not individuals. Can modeling provide insight, how an environment has to be designed or has design to inspire activities to limit the degree of varying activities? 
• Social. Social behavior is not what we identify with machine. In fact, social behavior of machine feels annoying and pretending. But the essence of social might be applied to systems. Developments towards autonomous machines, acting in a context of systems, will require behavior, social behavior. Social meaning communication and verification, not the whole of Maslow. Which might even become a necessity for machine-to-machine. Considerations in this direction will lead to new qualities of multi-party interaction, may change existing systems and might even help to clarify unanswered questions in human systems. A real design challenge for the days to come.