In my "Engineering Design" class, we have to figure out what the world of 2020 will be like. Specifically, we are figuring out design processes for globally distributed design and marketing environments. I am curious what you all think of how 2020 will turn out, and the professor encourages us to ask people with opinions varying from our own. I can think of no greater variety than the Memestreams readership. What do you think? What issues (either same or different) are we likely to face? What will drive the above environments?

Some of the ones I have so far include:
communication
information availability
geographic location
government structure
language
outsourcing

I am interested to know what you have to say.

-janelane, obliged