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1995-06-09
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5KB
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75 lines
Dr. Hartmut Esslinger
Founder and president of frogdesign
Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen,
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 exchangeable, 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 very soon too, no major mechanical differentiation has
been left in High-Tech. Except innovative human culture adopting products to people's specific needs -
especially 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)
Ñ 10 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.
Ñ Today 4 in 5 potential customers make a buying decision based upon design but they also expect the
price to be about 30 percent lower than the "elite-design target-group" would have accepted 10 years
ago.
Design however is not defined by qualified esthetics 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 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
for an elite will be tolerated. DESIGN is requested, feasible and available in what Alvin Toffler calls the
"individual mass product".
We all know what 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
Ñ What will happen to the legendary brands?
Ñ What will be the future products?
Ñ How will they look and feel?
Ñ To whom will they appeal?
Ñ And will there be a new legend?
We have set you three goals:
Our new products will emerge from what Richard Wurman calls TEDology, or what Nicholas
Negroponte calls the new domaine 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
color on a bigger scale and we will create the opportunity of design-customization.
As we just started to conceptualise and design the new product lines, I cannot show you anything concise
or descriptive at this time, I only can explain our "way of design" a little bit and illustrate it with some
examples:
Ñ Historic frogdesign breakthroughs, which were then assumptions of the future or became huge
successes, changing high-tech into high-fashion.
And as I am also a teacher,
Ñ The way students look at the future, they will live in as designers soon too.
But you will not feel left out completely,
Ñ 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 center of my professional life): a life life it myself now for more than 20 years:
Ñ It is very competitive, but due to standards it's based on WIN-WIN
Ñ It is about working together, respecting people and nature
Ñ It is about building alliances rather than destructing common ground
Champaign-Urbana Commodore Users Group / cucug@prairienet.org