Prof. Dr. Hartmut Esslinger

The 70's were the decade of marketing
the 80's were the decade of finance
the 90's will be the decade of design.
(Business Week Magazine 1990)

Reading this quote from Business Magazine, New York, one may be inclined to look at design like a magic medicine.

I feel that the prominence of design today has more to do with market reality. Today, basically great production and functional quality is plentiful technical performance is exchangable, be it computers, automobiles, TVs, clothing - basically it's all the same. The markets and product-features are transparent like glass-houses, the customer knows nearly everything, even the margins lay in the open, there is no feature the competition doesn't have have very soon too, no major technical differentiation has been left in High-Tech. Except innovative, human culture, adapting products to people's specific needs - escpecially emotional ones, DESIGN, Integrated Strategic Design to be precise.

Our own market research shows us, that in the field of TEDology products (Richard Wurman: Technology-Entertainment-Design as the new global industry)

• Ten years ago 4 in 5 potential customers looked at technology and price, and only 2 in 5 cared for design, ease of use and ergonomics.

• Today 4 in 5 potential customers make a buying decision based upon design but they expect the price to be about 30% lower than the "elite-design target-group" would have accepted 10 years ago.

Design however is not defined by qualified aesthetics alone, some people list design as a visible principle of quality, some people define design still as a matter of prestige, and some just look at the level of excitement that design will provide.

Design is becoming different, democratic, open, free Design is reflecting our open society; many dreams, many ideas, many truths. With design being considered a popular issue, no artificial add-on is considered competent anymore, no stylistic exclusion of the masses for the benefit of an elite will be tolerated.

DESIGN is requested, feasible and available in what futurist Alvin Toffler calls the "individual mass product".

We all know Commodore and AMIGA meant as High-Tech brands: Commodore was an affordable way to get into personal computing, the first AMIGA-machine actually was created just one mile off my house in Los Gatos - and personally I know some people who created the machine very well. But for some not so trivial reasons, the brands were managed out of the market.

Now - after ESCOM acquired them - NOW

• what will happen to the legendary brands?

• what will be the future products?

• how will they look and feel?

• to whom will they appeal?

• and will there be a new legend?

We have set three goals:

Our new product will emerge from what Richard Wurman calls TEDology, or what Nicholas Negroponte calls the new domain of "creative digital life"

• Technology
  • we will apply the best of Microsoft/Intel

  • we will apply the best of Macintosh/PowerPC

  • we will apply the hottest Technology in Games

  • and we will apply the newest in Digital Television, Audio and Video.

• Entertainment
  The new Commodore and Amiga products will be accessible by innovative and cultural software-interface solutions, which will be easy to use and powerful tools. I personally feel that our new products will create a new standard for people-oriented high-tech consumer products.

• Design
  Our new products will be high-tech-fashion statements, some will appeal to young people, as statements of a new culture, some will appeal to women, emotional and elegant, some will appeal to power-hungry web-surfers, some will appeal to machine-crazies, we will introduce colour on a bigger scale, and we will create the opportunity of design-customization.
  As we just started to conceptualize and design the new product lines, I cannot show you anything concise or descriptive at this time. I can only explain our "way of design" a little bit and illustrate it with examples:
  • historic frogdesign breakthroughs, which were then assumptions of the future or became huge successes, changing High-Tch into High- Fashion.

  and as I am also a teacher,
  • the way students look at the future, they will live in as designers soon too.

  but you will not feel left out completely
  • because at the end of my short presentation

  I will show you the new brand identities of Commodore and AMIGA and one short 3 second peek into the design-work under way.
  Let me also remark shortly on the new way of doing business in Computing, (which since about 20 years is at the centre of my professional life):
  • It is very competitive, but due to standards it's based on Win - Win

  • It is about working together, repecting people and nature

  • It is about building alliances, rather than destroying common ground.