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Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 2004
Anton Andrews, Senior Consultant, Philips Design; Marco Bevolo, Design Director, Philips Design
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Anton Andrews and Marco Bevolo, both of Philips Design, believe that design research can anticipate, stimulate, and nurture paradigm shifts in the worlds of technology and culture. After all, over the past 50 years, contemporary art has often reinvented and shifted its paradigms based on the emergence of new media: witness the video art of the 1970s, which was itself a reaction to new media.
In the recent past, Bevolo and Andrews have noticed two new cultural trends that seem to be related--a trend toward “crossover” events and platforms that marry seemingly disparate types of art; and a trend toward more collaboration and co-creation of works of art. The authors mention, as an example of the first, an exhibition about “the dialogue between Genoa and Antwerp through silk and textiles,” which features an installation composed of sophisticated fashion shoes juxtaposed with a display of Baroque paintings on the walls. As an example of the second, they mention a piece of “collective artwork”--a character from a Japanese video game, called AnnLee. Two French artists purchased the rights to AnnLee and made her into something of an open platform for a number of artists and designers working on the topic of identity. It’s a method that might work for the creation of a corporate identity--a living persona designed by a community of co-creators.
Philips Design considers trends like this when it uses its “strategic futures” methodology to envision societal trends and translate them into innovative design strategies and concepts. This kind of big-picture thinking is crucial to keeping up with cultural change and consumer expectations for products, services, and enabling technologies. As the authors say, “Traditional factors such as features and functionalities are no longer sufficient to meet these new needs. This calls for a new focus and a different approach to technology-based experience design. We believe it requires a design research program with a scope and depth capable of investigating and possibly redefining current creative industry paradigms in a fundamental shift toward a human-focused design.”
Philips Design has directed its resources to such research under the umbrella of what they call New Solutions Development--a program that aims to identify and develop new business and improve the company’s global competitive position. Within this context, Philips Design has devised a “design paradigms” cycle that, over a three-year period, is used to identify and develop new design principles and strategies. The current cycle, for instance, is called Understanding Digital Experience (UDE), and it focuses on the emerging networked and digital world.
Bevolo and Andrews explain some of the key precepts and tools behind the program and offer a mini case study of a project Philips initiated to study the creation of a corporate identity for a fictional company. The basis of the visual identity for this company was a square shape that worked like an extremely mobile and “morphable” pixel and could be used to make up a word-mark. The color, shape, and size of each pixel are fluid and can be used for a whole spectrum of combinations.
The UDE project, conclude the authors, “proposes a new and fluid system thinking, a fusion between design and business worlds that will allow future audiences to participate in both the co-creation and reinterpretation of solutions.” Designers can help by designing participatory, enabling platforms that will draw from the ideas of customers and other stakeholders and transform them into future products and services.
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