If we are what we use, then it seems the elderly people in today's society are cranky, stupid and tacky. Of course, looking at products made for the elderly really says more about what product designers and manufacturers think the elderly are. Even as technology has gotten smaller, more powerful and cheaper, the design aesthetic for the pre-Boomer generation is still exemplified by orthopedic shoes. But this won't last for long. As our society matures, and Baby Boomers start swelling the ranks of the "elderly," we will have to start coming up with better-looking, more useful products for seniors.

The number of people over the age of 65 is going to double over the next quarter-century, thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom Generation. The people who came of age in the late '50s to early '70s watched a man land on the Moon and lava lamps gurgle; they aren't going to be satisfied with products that are as utilitarian in form and function as the ones their parents currently use. Boomers will bring their great influence and purchasing power to bear on businesses and demand experiences that are more elegant and agile. As a result, the engineers who currently dominate design for the elderly must learn to work with designers, just as they have in the high-tech product world.

But we owe it to today's seniors to start making better products that meet their special needs now. Recently I've been designing medical devices aimed largely at the elderly, and I've begun to realize that our collective understanding of their needs could use some refinement. When we talk about the needs of seniors there is a tendency to imagine someone whose eyesight, dexterity and hearing are so impaired that they are incapable of having an experience; it's therefore assumed that they will make do with, or perhaps even prefer, a mechanistic, bulky product that smells like a hospital. Orthopedic shoes haven't changed much in 40 years, even in color. Wheelchairs for the elderly tend to look like erector-set robots, with exposed motors and oversized wheels. A doorknob handle meant to help those with dexterity issues may give grandmother leverage, but it also screams out to houseguests, "I'm losing my grip!"

Specialty online retailers, like Gold Violin and Senior Shops, eschew the traditional e-commerce catalog structure in favor of a more practical set of categories like "Handle Better," "Hear Better," and "Work Better." This is a step in the right direction, towards making online shopping easier for seniors by focusing on value rather than jargon. However, the products offered tend to be "after-market" accessories to help seniors cope with things that weren't designed with them in mind: Button and zipper closers, seat pads and magnifying glasses dominate the offerings.

One encouraging trend is the development of products that aren't explicitly designed for the elderly market, but cater to their needs nonetheless. The OXO/Good Grips products, for example, have influenced culinary product design to be more usable for everyone. These products feature oversize handles and non-slip materials molded into pleasing shapes, which appeal to chefs regardless of their physical faculties.

Mobility products are also becoming better designed, allowing the disabled to become more self-sufficient—not to mention more stylish. Sports wheelchairs are starting to influence motorized versions, introducing more color and modern shapes that move beyond the hospital aesthetic.

But these are small improvements, and we need to do better. Product designers and developers can start by creating products and experiences that both function well and blend into the aesthetics of a household, rather than sticking out like ugly sore thumbs. Natural materials and refined colors make products feel more human, addressing a great deal of the "techno-phobia" ascribed to the elderly. While older people may not be comfortable whizzing around a PC, they aren't strangers to technology. Seniors today are used to accomplishing many things through people, not machines. If our machines worked more like people, using natural language and more welcoming user interfaces, our elders might find them less intimidating. We need the next generation of technology to take after seeing-eye dogs, not robots.

We need exercise equipment for the mind and body, not just products that treat the inevitable decline. Products that help older people travel more easily, and social networks that help seniors volunteer and cooperate will make sure that they stay connected and involved. Classes and education for seniors are critical, and featured prominently at senior centers and JCCs. We can use technology to bring education to more people, and re-imagine it as the purpose of life for the elderly—to grow their minds and stay engaged. Our seniors will be living longer, as well as better. Our challenge is to make their lives meaningful.

Gretchen Anderson is a Senior Design Analyst for frog design.

Read more frog Design Mind.

Remember the time when a widget was simply an abstract concept in your math class? Your teacher probably tried to stump you with a question like this: "A company has ten machines that produce gold widgets. One of the machines is producing widgets that are a gram light. How do you tell which machine is making the defective widgets with only one weighing?"

Widget have since been redefined as downloadable, interactive, virtual tools. But they still have a connection to math—just add up the numbers. Let�s imagine for a moment that you are Brian Deboer. He�'s the creator of an Apple freeware widget called Sudoku based on the popular Japanese numbers game.

• Number of weeks in Apple�s Top Five: Six
  
• Number of total downloads: 290,000
  
• Amount of money made from his first �freeware� widget: $50

  Fifty bucks barely pays for Brian�s servers, which make the widget available for mass consumption. But, perhaps more important than the money is the mindshare. Whether on the airplane, in a Starbucks or at work, Sudoku graces the personal lives of nearly 300,000 people. You may not know Brian, but it�s likely that you will. That's because Brian has created the ultimate, addictive, portable experience.

  Welcome to the Widget Economy. It�s the online version of the Experience Economy, posited back in a 1998 Harvard Business Review article by James Gilmore. No longer, Gilmore suggested, would mere service offerings be enough for companies to maintain a competitive edge. Instead, they needed to combine those services with experiences that would foster an emotional attachment between the company and the consumer. Retail outlets like REI built 60-foot rock climbing walls, McDonald�s kept the kids happy with gigantic playscapes, and, let'�s face it, Disneyland has been selling experience since 1955.

  The Widget Economy, like the Experience Economy before it, represents a triumph of affluence, globalism, and multiculturism. You can view job listings in Japan, a live video feed from Venice, realtime quotes from the Australian stock exchange, and homes for sale on the Isle of Wight.

  Even more significant is that while the Experience Economy was able to commoditize the �third space� (the term used by sociologists to describe places other than home or work), the Widget Economy capitalizes on the fourth dimension—that is, our online life. What used to be the physical space of retailers is now the digital space of e-tailers.

  When I asked Brian in an e-mail why he made the Sudoku widget, he responded: �First, it was the challenge and the fun of creating it. Plus, his wife loved playing the games in the paper and was bored when she'�d finished them all, so he decided to make a computer version for her.�

  Thus, widgets are the last layer to make our online life complete. Instead of sipping coffee at Starbucks with your Sunday paper and single Sudoku, you can take your Sudoku widget with you everywhere. And not just one Sudoku, but an infinite amount of fresh content, Sudoku-oriented or otherwise.

  While some widgets, like the Chicken Lickin� Yahoo widget, have limited value and a short �new experience� span, there are plenty of widgets that provide a continuously updated and engaging experience.

  

  Take, for example, the Akamai Net Usage Index for Retail, which enables users to monitor the world's online retail consumption from their desktops, providing realtime insight into the trends of consumers� online buying habits.

  Finally, let'�s address the hardcore question: Where is the real �economy� in this? Most widget bloggers and creators agree that widgets are shareware. A recent entry on MacObsver.com illustrates this point: �I won'�t pay money for any widget, unless it changes my life. I just don�t see a business model based on widget-creation.�

  But let�s keep in mind that critics once scoffed at the ridiculous notion of buying bottled water. Today those same critics are swallowing Ozarka and their pride. In a similar trend, consumers now pay for the customized experience of �owning� what had been free television viewing by subscribing to TiVo, and exchanging the free radio experience for Sirius.

  Will we pay for widgets one day? Absolutely. Widgets will go the way of ring tones, downloadable music, podcasts, and VOD. Any widget that offers an experience deemed not just desirable, but necessary, will be deemed worth the expense.

  Consider the eBay Watcher widget, which costs $5 per two downloads. I emailed its creators, Richard �Jordy� Jordan and �Hawk,� his raptor-named coding colleague. I specifically asked them why, with an infinite number of shareware widgets, the eBay watcher widget was launched with a price tag.

  �"A huge amount of our personal time has gone into the widget, and it still does," Jordy replied. "It continues to give us some incentives to continuously update and improve on the widget for everyone. We also use this to see if there is really a need for the widget.�"

  It�'s clear that Apple, Yahoo! and Google �get� the widget economy. Current value is measured in the emotional attachment and mindshare they receive from coders using their development environments, and in the number of consumers using their operating systems. Yahoo! acquired Konfabulator for an undisclosed price, marking the formal launch of its Developer Network. Eventually, every traditional retailer will have a widget. Retailers like Pizza Hut, Krispy Kreme and eBay already have widgets created on their behalf. I jokingly asked Jordy if he hoped that eBay might one day come knocking on his door. Jordy'�s response? �"We are certainly interested if eBay would like to talk to us.�"

  Once widgets pick up momentum not only on the desktop but other platforms, like VW�s Gypsy in-car computer system, the fourth dimensional Widget Economy will become obvious with cafeteria-style widget plans for the masses. It remains to be seen if we would pay for the privilege of a portable Sudoku. And since it�'s really a numbers game anyway, I think I already know the answer.

  Laura Richardson is a Senior Design Analyst in frog design�s Austin studio.

  Read more frog Design Mind.
  

DRM Doesn't Have to Suck (Part 1 of 2)

As more and more consumers have become aware of digital rights management, they've taken to spitting out the technology's acronym, rather than merely speaking it. Oh, it s that darn DRM again! a consumer will screech, flecks of saliva spewing from his mouth. Stupid DRM won t let me do this! It's a level of venom usually reserved for overzealous traffic cops, or really annoying telemarketers.

DRM has been around a long time in the form of copy protection for software and games, so why such animosity now? The answer lies in the audience. Copy protection has expanded to content your average consumer cares about: movies and music. But DRM doesn t have to be a swear word. By implementing some clever design choics, content owners can actually turn DRM into an asset, one that gives consumers greater access to digital media.

Music labels and movie studios currently view DRM as the silver bullet to prevent illegal copying of their products on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. As such, DRM in its current forms is so highly restrictive that it prevents even fair use. Fair use includes right to so-called first sale—that is, the ability to resell content you have purchased. Since DRM schemes are most often tied to the device on which they are used, there is no way to resell that Coldplay album you purchased on the iTunes music store unless you sell your computer along with it (save for giving the buyer access to your iTunes account). It s problematic at best. In the latest blow to fair use, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently decided that ripping your CDs for backup, or even to digitize music for your iPod, infringes on copyright laws.

Content owners fail to realize that trying to fight P2P file sharing is like trying to fight the rising tide: utterly pointless. They are desperately trying to hang on to outdated business models when the overwhelming popularity of P2P file sharing and the success of MySpace point to new business opportunities.

Consumers want the abundance of content and convenience that P2P networks offer. They are interested in discovering new, smaller artists that appeal to niche markets. Instead of hindering consumers' needs, DRM could help content owners cater to them. This is already happening with subscription services like Yahoo! Music or Napster, which use DRM to lease consumers all the music they want for a monthly fee. The Apple iTunes Music Store offers the twin conveniences of an easy purchase process and of FairPlay, the least restrictive DRM scheme on the market. But there is room for improvement. The subscription services require a shift in how consumers think about their music libraries. And FairPlay, with its limits (you can only burn a playlist to CD up to 7 times, you can t use your music on any portable player other than the iPod, etc.), still feels arbitrary and intransigent.

Consumers are accustomed to being able to take the CD they bought and play it in their car, in their home stereo, at work, or at a friend s house. And that s what they expect from digital content, too. Why not give them what they want? Promote new TV shows by giving away the pilot unprotected. Make different DRM schemes play nice with each other: if consumers could play the episodes of Lost they purchased on iTunes on their PSP, they would buy more TV shows. Give consumers streaming access to all the music in a catalog without the monthly fee; they will discover more artists and purchase more songs.

Perhaps most importantly of all—and here's where the design aspect starts to come in—content owners need to rethink the the interactions between DRM technology and users. When you run out of allotted minutes on your cellphone, Verizon doesn t just cut you off in the middle of a conversation with a message stating, "You have exceeded your minute-usage limit, please wait until next month." So why are DRM systems being designed to do exactly that, to treat users like either infants or borderline criminals? If DRM let consumers exceed limits when they needed to, the technology would feel more flexible, more like it s on the Average Joe's side. And, as a result, there'd be a lot less rage directed against it.

The bottom line is that consumers will consume more if DRM is done the right way, and everyone will come out a winner. So, how can content owners design better DRM schemes? And who's leading the way? Stay tuned for the next frog Design Mind to find out.

Mathilde Pignol is a Design Analyst for frog design.

I must have walked by hundreds of mall kiosks this past holiday season. You know, those carts set up in the aisle-ways, designed to maximize rental revenues. Although I generally walk right by, this year my wife stopped in her tracks and exclaimed, "Look at the cute TVs!"

TVs? I thought to myself. On a kiosk? Sure enough, right in front of us was a colorful kiosk full of flat-panel LCD TVs from Hannspree. Hannspree is a new division of an established Taiwanese company seeking to extend its product and brand presence with a lineup of highly stylized TVs. What s really neat about these products isn't necessarily the design, however, but rather the fact that Hannspree has decided to eschew traditional retail channels.

As we have increasingly become an experience-driven culture, smart brands are responding to this shift with branded retail locations, pop-up (i.e. temporary) stores, and kiosks. These outlets can be thought of as "brand boutiques," places that sell a brand by creating an experience designed to engage, inform, and entertain the consumer. Far more than a traditional end-cap or store-within-a-store, the brand boutique allows for unprecedented control of the brand at the most critical customer touch point: the point of sale.

Many of today s consumer electronics and other products roll off the same assembly lines used by their competitors. Huge companies like Flextronics crank out gadgets and gizmos for nearly every top consumer electronics brand. In Taipei, a single factory might make Dells in the morning, and then Macintoshes during the night shift. Similarly, when you boil it down, there is very little service-level differentiation between providers of services like cable and wireless. Companies like Apple know very well that the experience, the suite of products and services offered and how they work with each other, is just as if not more important than technical innovation in order to differentiate from the mass of similar products and services in the market.

The realization that consumers primarily seek experiences, as opposed to specifications of features and benefits, is now extending beyond the creation of products and into the sales channel, impacting how products and services are sold. Packaging, websites, and support are becoming more important; and so is the retail presence.

It wasn t so long ago that boutiques were strictly the realm of luxury retailers like Chanel, Gucci, and Coach. The retail trend for most other products was in the direction of big-box retailers ranging from Wal-Mart to Best Buy. Eventually, brand-centric organizations craving differentiation, like Gap and Nike, started to establish branded stores.

As companies have become more concerned about brand, they see a need to control how their products are sold and how the brand is perceived. Third shelf down in aisle four at Circuit City is no longer sufficient. Through direct one-on-one contact with buyers, manufacturers can also learn about consumer preferences very quickly, and finely tune their products and experience in response.

There has been a recent surge in brand boutiques, both temporary and permanent, for an incredible array of products and services, including Song Airlines, MTV, Sharp, Suave, Purina, and Palm. While Apple was not the first technology-centric brand to open brand boutiques (Sony and Gateway were faster out of the gate), it was arguably the first successful one due to the complete experience its stores offer. More than a sales channel, brand boutiques provide a brand identity for consumers to associate with.

So, do they work? Yes, but only if handled the right way. My friend Nish Nadaraja, a San Francisco-based marketing executive, helped Method Home with their brand boutique strategy in 2004. Method Home sells a line of home cleaning products mainly through Target Stores. While sales were good, Method felt it didn t have enough exposure. Being a new brand and a startup on a tight budget presented quite a challenge. In an effort to gain maximum exposure while still controlling the brand experience, Nish suggested that Method dip into the marketing budget and open a Union Square pop-up store; that is, a branded, interactive retail store that pops-up for a limited time and then goes away. The results were better than anyone could have imagined. Aside from creating buzz and sales, Method was also able to gain valuable customer feedback and even rotate employees through the store to get them more in touch with their customer base. For the budget of a decent print-marketing campaign, Method generated buzz, gained new customers, and even earned a profit. Nish says one of the secrets to a successful brand boutique is having the right evangelists out there supporting it, and planning exclusive fun events like wine tastings targeting specific demographics and engaging seminars in the space.

These efforts can clearly result in a better consumer experience. Boutiques are obviously more pleasant, approachable, and visually diverse than big box retailers. This adds to the fabric of neighborhoods that have been increasingly trying to keep big-boxes out. Aside from being nice places to shop, brand boutiques generally have salespeople that are incredibly knowledgeable about the products they are selling, and how they compare to those offered by competitors. As consumer electronics and services grow increasingly complex, boutiques may very well be the only way these products can be sold. Obvious drawbacks are that it s not as easy to compare competitive products when they aren t located in the same store, and of course it s not in the brand boutiques salespersons interest to have you buy anything elsewhere even if it is a better match for you.

Companies that establish successful brand boutiques will be able to use them to introduce new and complementary products and services. Just watch over the coming year as Apple takes advantage of its brand boutiques by launching a cellular phone and service.

Brand boutiques are catering to the notion that people want to be entertained, engaged, and informed. As consumers, we can just sit back and enjoy the show!

Mahin Samadani is a Business Development Director for frog design.

Read more frog Design Mind.

Mashups for the Masses: When Mom Meets Gadget

Everywhere I look recently, I see possibilities for personalizing or customizing products and services. I m not talking about choosing a nice skin for your media player or downloading ringtones for your Razr. I'm talking about a quantum leap that's occurring as consumers morph into creators. But as our creative will to shape the world around us grows stronger with each new device we use, will the technology encourage or hinder our efforts?

We're no longer content to passively use products and systems as they were designed for us; there's now an inherent belief that we can and should have exactly what we want, when we want it, our way. We don't watch live TV anymore, we TiVo our shows and watch them at our leisure, minus the annoying commercials. We don't listen to the radio, we create our own stations on Pandora that only play music perfectly attuned to our specific tastes. We read ReadyMade magazine to learn how to MacGyver a solar tower in our backyard. And there's a lifehack for just about every activity you can think of, from using your cell phone as a check register to getting down to one remote control.

I'm all for doing it my way, but it feels like things are about to get out of hand. For example, we recently had a debate in our office over Yahoo! s newly released Open Shortcuts. The idea is fantastic (using the search box to tell your computer where to go or what to do for you), but the implementation left some of us with a bad taste in our mouths. To operate an Open Shortcut, you have to type the Yahoo exclamation point "!" before your shortcut. So to go to Yahoo! Mail, you d have to type "!mail." Doesn t that feel a bit like old-school computer language to you? Creating an Open Shortcut is even more esoteric, requiring users to find the instructions page, go to the search box and type a command, the name of the shortcut, and then copy in the URL.

Fortunately, I'm a consumer who understands search technology, toolbars, shortcuts and scripting. But how is my technophobe mom going to understand how to use an Open Shortcut, much less create one? She doesn't have the same understanding that I do of the technical reasoning behind these shortcuts. But like anybody else, she'd like to be able to walk up to her computer and just say, "Computer, open my mail!" Why should she be frozen out of these kinds of personalized, powerful features?

Open Shortcuts made me wonder: have we reached the limits of "widgetization?" Have our interfaces become so crammed with personalized features, tools and icons that we ve literally run out of space? Is our desire to have things just our way and our imaginative power for creating new tools moving so fast that the applications for building these tools can t keep up? As designers and coders continue to build personal tools like Konfabulator widgets, Google Maps mashups, and Flickr hacks (like the one for the Kodak EasyShare-one wi-fi camera), a divide grows between those who can build the technology and reap its benefits, and those who are left behind.

It's time for designers to step back and take a collective breath, to take stock of what they're doing and who they're doing it for. Gone are the days of applications and devices with finite feature sets. Designers and their employers are no longer the sole arbiters of users' needs; at this point, every user's "need" is only limited by her imagination.

Designers have to think beyond typical product usage and capture the essence of consumers innermost goals and wishes, and then empower those desires. Today's designers and technologists are no longer simply building search boxes for web browsers or wi-fi connectivity within digital cameras. They're also creating the interactions that consumers will use to build their own processes and commands inside those browsers. They re developing the technical architecture consumers will use to make their camera talk to whatever and whomever they like.

The most intriguing and successful products will have to accommodate varying levels of technical skill in other words, my mom as well as myself. Google took a step in the right direction when it released the code for its maps. Letting loose what had always been proprietary information for the likes of Microsoft, Google encouraged scores of free coders to create new tools such as real estate listing maps (Housing Maps) and maps with real time locations of commuter trains (dartmaps). Ning.com has gone one step further by offering a web application that helps you build social networking internet applications, something previously reserved for those with deep coding knowledge. Now I want to see the product that lets my mom create a social networking site for her walking group, complete with her own Google maps walking routes and Flickr photo links of the latest gathering.

As companies look to develop more robust products that include democratized personalization tools, they'll have to serve consumers desire for creative control over their technology. Designers will have to rethink the limits currently imposed on those desires by size and scale, iconization, and "widgetry." The next great gadget producers must understand that they're creating products for a world in which the next mashup is always just around the corner.

Denise Gershbein is a senior design analyst with frog design.

Read more frog Design Mind.

Made for CES

The ubiquity of the iPod was the most notable thing this year at CES. Standing in the Microsoft booth at the Playsforsure kiosk, an attendee looking at the 40+ MP3 players before him said, "Where's the iPod?" "Apple doesn't come to CES," the flummoxed Microsoft responded. "They have their own show." Looking around CES, it was clear that Apple didn't need its own booth, since the iPod was everywhere. Companies either have an iPod product (like Bose speakers, the Griffin iTrip, or Belkin cup holders), products that work with the iPod, or products with the "iPod look" (think Sonos). Apple sets the standard for design.

According to the NPD Group, iPod peripherals will have a market north of $2 billion in 2006. That's a nice little industry as it is. But look for this to grow as product peripherals develop around video like they did for music. Made for iPod, a program which will apply an Apple "iStamp" of approval on products that work with iPod, is gaining ground just as quickly, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Apple's intention to monetize the program. iPod has officially joined the ranks of products where the company's brand name has replaced the actual product name and become the product: you use an iPod to listen to music in the same way you use a Kleenex to blow your nose, you make Xeroxes with a copy machine, and you Google for information.

The iPod's success has inspired a deluge of compatible products. At this year s Macworld, for example, Apple announced a car stereo deal with the Chrysler Group. Apple s vice president of Worldwide iPod Marketing says that in addition to the 3 million Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge automobiles, "over 40 percent of all cars sold in the US in 2006 will offer iPod connectivity." Wow. So in addition to the iPod accessories, cassette adapters, FM adapters, cables, headphones, and cases that are iPod compatible, the entire car should be added to the list. iPod integration into cars isn't new, but the sheer number of cars is astonishing. I wonder how many people purchasing a car consider how well integrated it is with the iPod? Perhaps just a few of the Apple faithful.

There are also numerous products that have adopted the Apple aesthetic. Companies seem to think that if their products look like an iPod or an Apple, they are also recreating the entire User Experience—a supposition that simply isn't true. It's one thing to look like a product, it's another to behave like one. This point has been made by a number of people, but it s worth repeating. The iPod is successful because of a combination of things that look-alikes can t deliver. It's clean and easy to use (see "The iPod and the Bathtub"). It is backed by iTunes that has integrated e-commerce, and iTunes is supported by relationships that encompass, essentially, the entire music industry.

The iPod has succeeded far beyond what anyone expected. When it launched, everyone said, You re kidding right? Another MP3 player? But here s the thing. You can t just encase your product in white plastic, call it a day. Companies have to look deeper than that. From a design perspective, it s clear that many companies think that if they follow this pattern, they can achieve what Apple has with the iPod. But the pattern they see is one of imitation. The pattern I see is one of imitation. Apple is clearly engaging design where most other companies are not. In order to get closer to what Apple has achieved, companies can do several things:

A. Hire a competent designer at the C-Level in your company, and trust her/him to help integrate design into your infrastructure. Apple follows this model, as Jobs serves as the CDO (Chief Design Officer). He has a great aesthetic and works closely with his design team to build superior products.

B. Take a user-centered approach to product design. Seek out real people and engage them in the design of your products by asking them what they need, prototyping the possibilities and getting feedback from them on the result. I m not talking about focus groups, either. Groups end up being ruled by one or two strong-willed people, and the rest of the group will defer to their opinions. Do one-on-one interviews in people's homes to get their personal opinion, and observe their surroundings. What they say and how they live will tell you more than the lemmings that comprise most focus groups.

C. Craft a distinct look and feel for your entire product line, thereby
setting your products apart. NAD has such a distinct look, and one could easily pick them out in of a line-up of components. The design isn't award-winning, but at least it's recognizable.

Hannspree, which had its first appearance at CES this year, has a very distinct line of flat screen TVs that are all crafted to match a particular taste: basketball, racing cars, etc. Seen together, they comprise a unique Hannspree brand, but individually, the products take on the persona of their specific design. I wouldn't think "Hannspree" if I saw the Buzz Lightyear TV, I would think of Pixar instead. It remains to be seen if the Hannspree products will sell well and if their brand will emerge from this variety, but at least they stand apart from the sea of gray/black/silver flat panel TVs. It's a start.

Which brings us back to my discontent with the iPod. With the iPod, Apple has achieved an excellent design which has been brilliantly marketed and has transformed the consumer electronics industry. We're all very proud, but I'm sick of talking, hearing and reading about it. Is there a product besides the iPod that we can hold up and say, what a brilliant and well-executed design this is? No. Not at this year s CES. Companies seeking to innovate like Sony, who s recent failures have made them look really bad (see Sony rootkit) need to be willing to think more about solving customers problems by incorporating a user centered design to achieve what the iPod has. Who has the guts to step out on the dance floor, ask design to dance and shake their thang?

David Hoffer is a Senior Design Analyst for frog design.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Many companies are convinced that the market for new products has become increasingly bi-polar, split into high tier (high price) and low tier (low cost), with the middle market drying up. This would be exemplified by the Porsche driver who always buys her groceries at a high-end delicatessen, and the driver of a cheap import who always shops at a discount super market. As a result, companies believe they have to decide to turn one way or the other—either aim high, or aim low.

Yet in the aftermath of the "customer revolution," in which consumers have grown increasingly explicit about what they want (which is not yet what they necessarily really need) simply aiming high or low isn't the smart strategy. While it used to be sufficient to offer a product spectrum tiered into high, medium and low, today's offerings have to be carefully targeted at sharply defined customer segments in order to be successful; the entire notion of a linear feature-to-price ratio no longer exists (it still does for feature-to-cost, though!). As a prominent chief marketing officer quipped to me the other day, "Tiering doesn't work anymore."

Traditional "tiering" works through color, finish, materials and feature sets; for example, real aluminum is used for high tier, painted plastics for lower tier products. (We talked about tiering with authentic vs. synthetic materials in an earlier Design Mind column. New technological features are initially introduced in high-tier products, then mature down to commodity features over time—for example, anti-lock brakes.

Those tiering mechanisms are now pass . Many execs see the middle market fading. Take razors, for example—the addition of three- and four-blade razors on the high end where a single replacement shaving head costs more than a set of five from the cheap use-once-and-throw-away models. Indeed, a recently published McKinsey report (McKinsey Quarterly 4/2005; The vanishing middle market by Trond Riiber Knudsen, Andreas Randel, and Jorgen Rugholm) demonstrated that mid-tier growth rates lag substantially behind the average by 7 percent per year.

So, for the gadgets we ll see in 18 months to 2 years from now it shouldn t be just high or low anymore; companies have to really understand what makes a winning proposition to individual customer segments even before they know it themselves sometimes. At the same time, consumers struggle to be conscious (and honest) of their needs, which is necessary to select precisely the right product.

Some industries learned decades ago that products had to be designed for future customer segments and specific applications: Mercedes expansion of product offerings from limousines to convertibles (adding SLK and CLK) to SUVs (G, M), compacts (A, B) and family vans (Vito, Viano, Vaneo, R) is an example of a targeted product range. They always maintained the high-tier pretense and targeted customers with very specific needs before tiering into SMARTs, Chryslers and Maybachs.

Modularization is another approach to targeting individual customers needs. Take a look at the PC industry. Here, the consumer s need to define a matching product has spurred an entire industry of "shopping consultants"—PC product configurators and neighborhood stores—who help buyers make educated choices and configurations for their PCs.

Other industries cannot exploit such targeting techniques; airlines, for example, could only add low-frills city lines initially, before finally going low cost all the way, like JetBlue and Southwest. Others, such as Lufthansa, upgrade their services value by adding designated first-class terminals and tiered frequent flyer lounges for Silver, Gold and Black frequent flyers. However, envisioning airlines that target specific customer segments beyond business travelers only, such as singles or outdoor enthusiasts, might be a fun exercise. Hooters Air in the US could be considered such an attempt.

The trend of research-based customer segment targeting has slowly trickled through all mass-production industries, arriving at integrated high-tech gadgets such as laptops, cell phones and handheld GPS devices. More features and more performance do not translate into competitive advantage for large customer segments anymore. This creates a big shift in the industry, which has grown on the idea of one size fits all .

Ironically, the largest targeting success in the handheld GPS market, Dutch TomTom s Go, was succeeded immediately by a string of merely tiered derivatives (300, 500, and 700). It appears now that they did not actually pursue a targeted approach in the first place but quickly learned from their consumers. TomTom could arguably be attributed with creating a new market when they perfectly targeted the casual GPS user such as soccer moms and driving-for-pleasure-retirees with their conscientiously friendly, not-too-technical products. This starts with the outside of the packaging - the cool black cube with the black lacquered maze on it appeals to more style-conscious buyers rather than the typical technology-driven user. It continues to the friendly, potato-shaped housing of the product without all those numerous (i.e. scary) buttons and a cool (and costly) aluminum logo on the back.

Other GPS vendors quickly followed into this new market, introducing ever more targeted, casual GPS devices (including the game console Gizmondo). TomTom seems to have realized their wrong turn and recently added two targeted devices, a weatherproof unit for motorcyclists and a portable slim line model. Only the 700 is highly advertised; the other tiered versions 300 and 500 can be found at discount stores in Europe.

The value promise for the targeted consumer comes from a very specific and balanced mix of features and attributes or services which represent value for that consumer, like the camera in a waterproof housing, the ability to play games with a phone or the seamless integration of a media player with an online music store through the home computer (we know to whom I am referring). Gadget producers have to look outside their home turf to find those winning combinations which create a rewarding, holistic experience for consumers, be they technical features, feature/service combinations, or purely emotional content. Customers are quick to learn that making a purchasing decision tiered solely on their initial budget alone will not yield a rewarding and loyalty-creating experience. Companies who do not go the extra mile today to understand their customers conscious and unconscious needs will waste time, money and resources developing boring products.

Today you see Porsche drivers being proud of their discount bargains and you see meat and potato -Joe enjoying a latte macchiato tiering simply doesn t work anymore.

Dr. Michael Schachler is frog design s head of Business Development for Europe. He has worked in leadership positions related to product development for US software firm PTC and Management consultancy McKinsey in Europe and Asia before joining frog design.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

The Shock of the New: Designing for the Post-Consumer (Part 2 of 2)

Last week, as I was chatting enthusiastically about a new style to my (very cool) hairdresser Amanda, she pulled out a Blackberry to retrieve an email from her tattoo artist in New Haven. Somewhat taken aback, I asked her about her new accessory. She wryly answered: "I'm a businesswoman."

On one level, I m not surprised that Amanda has a Blackberry. She is successful, and certainly Blackberry functionality is useful for a busy stylist. Dressed in her Tokyo-Goth street-couture, it surprised me that Amanda seemed so much cooler and more interesting than my conception of the typical Blackberry user.

We re socialized to recognize products as signs of particular character attributes. Cultural critics hypothesize that consumers acquire particular products to project the attributes associated with those products—in this case of the Blackberry, social importance and business cachet. A product like a Blackberry (or a Louis Vuitton bag, or a Hummer, or any number of such markers) signals social status by proxy.

But in our current cultural vernacular, the Blackberry image has actually become a caricature of itself — the Crackberry addict or the businessman actually feels more self-conscious than esteemed. The irony with which Amanda answered my question made me appreciate her use of the Blackberry as a way to highlight how overly simplistic product-as-social-marker theories can be. Contemporary consumers are not one-dimensional, and their decisions about the gadgets they choose to represent themselves are complex.

Conventional design organizes materials and forms hierarchically in order to appeal to different audience types: authentic materials target more sophisticated and moneyed consumers, and synthetics are generally used for lower-priced goods; the more curvy the form factor, the greater appeal to a younger crowd, while sharper edging and harder corners jibe with maturity. While these conventions&mdashbased on legions of previous products—are still applicable, the canny postmodern consumer's fluency with mass media enables him or her to decode the network of signs used in our product-design language. What emerges is a new consumer type—a post-consumer—who enjoys playing with conventions and roving through social strata.

In our postmodern context, products no longer have essential, innate worth; instead, their value is fluid and determined by context. For instance, Amanda inverted the Blackberry-as-business-marker through use—first highlighting its caricature with her ironic disposition, and then recasting the device as an anti-fashion fashion utility. Forms and materials are less likely to straightforwardly dictate product attributes; now the user's intervention determines its value.

On a higher level still, the aesthetic or artistic modding (DIY) trend demonstrates the momentum post-consumers have built around using products as a canvas to create identities. The modding spectrum ranges from blinged PSPs to retro treatments of PCs and cellphones. These innovations are unique and clever, and their value is measured in social currency in the creator s community—in other words, people mod their gadgets in order to get props from their friends for having something cool.

Rather than having products with fixed status, now the social connotation is much more fluid. When products can stand for anything, the author of its meaning is the user of the product, not its designer.

For product designers, this means the target market is more equivocal than ever before, but it is also more playful. For product developers, the potential buying audience is bigger, but it's also consuming with a more critical eye. And for consumers, while before, the product typed the user, now the user dynamically creates the product through context and use.

Soon we ll see platforms rather than products, open-source systems rather than proprietary networks, limited editions rather than mass production, and models for creating meaning that integrate designer and user. Digital design tools like Ajax and open APIs already allow users and designer to collaborate; hard products are soon to follow. In the words of cultural critic Howard Rheingold, the future is not in hardware devices or software programs, but social practices. And our most defining social practice is creation of self-identity.

Valerie Casey is Creative Director of frog design in New York.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Navigating Complex Waters: Product Design s Perfect Storm (Part 1 of 2)

It wouldn t feel like the proper end to 2005 without some sort of dramatic, sensational prediction. So I ve taken it upon myself to declare the following:

Product design, as we know it, is finished.

An audience of product fetishists might find this assertion unthinkable, given all the pop-business literature declaring "design" as the new black. Yet despite the most glowing laudations about the growing importance of design by business gurus (and even some of our favorite bloggers), the fact remains that professional designers are responsible for less than 2% of our constructed environment.* That means that most of the products you surround yourself with are not designed: the user experience is not crafted purposefully, the aesthetics are often haphazard, and the functionality is less well thought out. (This is not to say that designers always execute well on these fronts—think: Windows—but with designed products, there is a greater likelihood that you ll experience some sort of organizing logic.)

So why should you be worried about the deteriorating state of product design? Design is a measure of cultural evolution; it manages the chaos that naturally surrounds us; and it provides an emotional benefit to those who interact with it. But more than representing aesthetics and utility, design is truly an expression of the social climate of the times—the proliferation of PDAs and cell phones, for example, highlights the era of the mobility, and the boom of gaming marks our national fixation with identity-, context-, and reality- shifting. Design is also a critical competitive advantage for the U.S.; since we can't compete in quality manufacturing and economic efficiencies of scale, design is our sole competitive edge. To say that we are in the midst of a crisis in design is to draw attention to a larger cultural crisis. This is a crisis of creativity.

A confluence of three cultural factors is transforming how we think about and design products:

Manufacturing Pressures First, there s a greater rush to market for products than ever before. Many times, the key directive is to get product on the shelf before competitors. When the marketplace revolves around time rather than innovation, "to-market" pressures trump creativity. The end-result is a landslide of sameness—clearly illustrated in the proliferation of the iPod s ugly stepchildren (not to mention the clones-gone-awry from Tekram Systems and Luxpro).

The push to get products into stores also often leaves critical decisions to be made by non-designers. The more designers skills are bypassed, the less likely products will evolve functionally, aesthetically, and creatively. We need only to look at our architectural landscape of big-box stores and suburban sprawl to gauge the destructive force of "non-design" design. The ubiquitous metal-painted plastics and semi-curved rectilinear form factors indicate a potentially similar fate for consumer products.

It's a vicious cycle. While bringing "me-too" products to market rather than something innovative may feel safer to developers, those products ultimately can compete only on price. As a result, their audiences are more demanding, less forgiving, and often more jaded. While eliminating creative design may save pennies and minutes, its cost is a loss of market share and a diminished reputation for the brand. The success of B&O and Sony certainly demonstrate that consumers are willing to pay for good design. And truly artistic designs can command especially high prices as evidenced by the limited edition Sidekick by tattoo artist Mister Cartoon, and Bas Koster s Bugaboo.

The China Syndrome Next, the burgeoning non-Western design industry is transforming the design world in subtle but powerful ways. The growth of design schools in China—450+ at last count—has designers bemoaning the end of American design as they predict a future of creative outsourcing. But what s more interesting is the light this movement sheds on the state of Western design. While there are sporadic innovations, the industry norm is largely deterministic designers follow their predecessors rather than creating something new. Take, for example, the monotony of the consumer electronics simulacra in a Best Buy or mobile phone store.

Our fear should not be of China s mobility, but of our own stasis.

Our Beautiful Mashed-Up Culture The final factor is the increasing sophistication of consumers. As end-users have greater access to creative tools and continue to generate more of their own content, the role of product design is not to structure the experience but to open it up. Our remix culture aggressively alters its wares: a Unix hack of the Nano enables video play; installation of a hard drive in an Xbox permits a user to save games; and the PSP homebrew movement transforms a mobile gaming gadget into a communication and creation platform.

Creating smart convergent products is well within the designer's purview, but imagining "off-label" uses requires new thinking. Designers need to imagine the relationships across, among, and between products, and recognize their use not form creates meaning: for example, thinking about how a podcast can re-shape perception of a museum exhibit by exposing non-sanctioned content, envisioning how a group text message can spawn a political action, or planning the way a wireless hub can create community among modern-day nomads.

The fundamental notion of the (closed) design object is defunct: the "thingness" of a product no longer determines its value. Extreme product manufacturing pressures, the new profile of the design community, and the increasing sophistication of end-users are shaping the future of design. In this perfect storm, product designers are on a trajectory to irrelevance and ultimately, invisibility. The diminishing commitment to creativity and the changing habits of consumers are creating this new world where design will be in the mind, not the eyes or hands, of the user.

* Saunders, William. Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Valerie Casey is Creative Director of frog design in New York.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Question (is) Everything: Design that answers unimagined questions

It s a key truth about design: the questions you ask limit the answers you can come up with. If I m working on an MP3 player, the question can it help me find a good slice of pizza? isn t likely to be one that I think about — any more than I d consider playing music on my oven. But usually the questions that don t get asked are subtler ones. What underlying problems that the consumer faces will this product solve? Are there new problems it will create? Good design is as much about asking the right questions as it is about beautiful forms. It s about expecting your users to pose new questions about whatever you create, and making it easy for users to answer those questions themselves.

Think about the mountain bike. As Eric von Hippel points out in his book Democratizing Innovation, this multi-billion dollar market grew out of a small community of young bikers who wanted to ride off-road. Their bicycles couldn t handle the terrain, though, so they ended up having to hack together bikes they called clunkers out of the materials at hand. It took another decade for mountain bikes to reach the mass market in 1982, and even today, the (ahem) cycle of user innovation and new products continues as extreme-sports riders use their bikes in more and more complicated stunts and jumps. The riders ask new questions of their bikes — and sometimes parlay their answers into second careers as bicycle designers.

Software has an advantage over physical products here — if there are issues you missed in the initial design process, you can put out an updated version. Smart web service developers have started releasing their products with open APIs (application program interfaces, the building blocks of software applications) or even just simple embeddable components. These tools let their customers use their services in all the ways they want to — sometimes in ways that no amount of user research could have come up with in advance. Who could have guessed that someone would want to use Yahoo! Maps to create a pirate map? And would anyone but the person who did it want to put the time into creating it?

What would the equivalent be for users who wanted to customize their gadgets? Manufacturers could start by looking at the video game industry. Special controls for particular games, whether a fishing pole for the full Bass Landing experience or a dance pad for for Dance Dance Revolution fans, allow for a fully immersive game experience the likes of which couldn t be accomplished with just a standard controller. Third-party accessories for the iPod have come close to this level of customization, allowing the user to adapt the player into a recording device, integrate it into their ski jacket, or use their bag as a boombox. But Apple hasn t been particularly friendly to these third-party developers — the new generation of iPods made many accessories instantly obsolete by changing the headphone jack, and Apple is reportedly seeking a 10% royalty from device manufacturers to ensure that their accessories will continue to be forward-compatible with future iPod models.

A different sort of device manufacturer could take the opposite route, and open their gadget up to add-ons, accessories, and interoperability with devices that haven t even been created yet. The rise of custom fabrication tools such as eMachineShop, not to mention the personal fabricators being dreamed up by MIT s Center for Bits and Atoms, could be a tremendous opportunity for this hypothetical manufacturer. Along with the software development kit for their open API, they could offer a product development kit — specs for developing tools and add-ons to work with their device. Giving home tinkerers the same access to tools that weekend codemonkeys have long had would lead to some ridiculous devices getting built, of course: the product equivalents of all the obscure-obsession sites on the Web. But it would also lead to the creation of accessories that no one who built the original device could have known would be so useful, because they wouldn t have thought to consider them. After all, who could have known that some 1,500 New Yorkers would want

piPod to help them find a good local pizza joint? Custom hardware tinkering isn t for everyone, of course, anymore than most people want to hand-code their own blogs or write video-game levels. Eric von Hippel calls these tinkerers lead users — people like the would-be mountain bikers who have needs that aren t met by the product on the market and who have the motivation to do the work to create the precise thing they want. But lead users creations can be important for the users who follow them, in the same way that plug-ins get added to new releases of Movable Type, or Counter-Strike began as an amateur mod for Half-Life — just ask anyone who s ridden a mountain bike lately

Thomas Pynchon, offering advice to aspiring writers, said that as a corollary to writing about what we know maybe we should be getting familiar with our ignorance. Pynchon s advice resonates not just for writers but for thinkers and creators of all sorts. Getting familiar with our ignorance as product designers should mean, among other things, that we accept that our creations will wind up as the answers to questions that haven t been formulated yet, and that we find ways to let users write what they know on our creations as well.

Michele Tepper is a senior design analyst at frog design.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

If It Feels Good: Skateboarding toward the future of digital user interfaces

When I'm not busy creating user-interface prototypes, I'm co-director of the local Public Skatepark Action Committee. The two gigs aren’t as dissimilar as you might think; a skatepark, after all, is just a user interface for skateboarders, and one with a lot of design challenges. But instead of dealing with code, I have to think in terms of steel and concrete. On one side you have a myriad of choices from prefab to design-built concrete and steel. On the other side you have vocal “consumers” that will let you know when you get their UI wrong—leaving you with an empty park marked up with free, um, “market research reports” in spray paint.

Anyone using, designing or selling a product with a digital user interface can identify with this scenario. Not that someone will walk into Best Buy and tag “This MP3 Player UI Sucks”—at least not anyone who wants to stay out of jail. But just as new trends in construction have changed skatepark design, so, too, has technological progress enabled us to build better UIs. This is helping us design products—whether it be skateparks or game controllers– that don’t just look good, but feel good, too.

Devices are getting more powerful, and buzzing technologies (like AJAX and many other acronyms I won’t make your eyes glaze over by listing here) are allowing designers to create new possibilities from better-looking designs to rich animation.

These technologies are demand driven, sparked by the trend away from modular solutions–easily configured, pre-produced pieces (whether they be pieces of code or pieces of a ramp)–into more engaging and full experiences. Skateboarders are already onto this trend. There are nearly as many devoted to fighting modular skateparks as there are building them.

These new technologies focus on the ability to create custom UI experiences, and with good reason. Both iTunes and Google’s photo application Picasa quickly attracted fans by breaking from the standard controls and interface you find on most Windows-based applications. This is not merely another skinning trend; both applications also employ unique control behaviors and animation. As technology enthusiasts we have all experienced the attraction and perils of animation (“skip intro,” anyone?). Animation allows sexiness and innovative ways of navigating around a screen, but also runs the risk of simply adding unnecessary, time-consuming clutter to our devices.

The skatepark gives us a tangible reference. Think in terms of “feel.” As the skateboard wheel rolls across a park, surfacing, smoothness, transition radius and other factors are not processed consciously by the skater, but are reduced to a single subconscious impression of user satisfaction; an overall impression of how the park “feels.” In the case of browsing menus on a set-top box like TiVo, the equation for “feel” will include things like timing, transitions, and even inertia and elasticity.

In terms of timing, anyone who has skated a bowl with too much flat bottom (or used a Sony Ericsson T300) knows that slow responsiveness is a design flaw that can totally kill the user experience. The same can be said for animation in UI. Transitions should never block the experience or the information a user is seeking. A common complaint among cell phone users, for example, is animations that harm the UI. A quick search of “slow UI” in Google yields many such gripes, including an entry from mobile-review.com that simple states: “LG U8180 very slow UI.”

Effective use of animation in UI is not arbitrary. For instance, the menu transition from the right to left on a TiVO or an iPod helpfully implies that navigation to the left will take me backwards. Gadgets that use an animated transition just because their hardware can finally support it run the risk of annoyance once the novelty wears off. Better still is UI that incorporates simulated physics. Take the Picasa Scroller. The further you pull down, the quicker it snaps back into place. This elasticity naturally communicates its relationship to moving you through the library; the “harder” you pull, the faster you scroll photos.

In the not-too-distant future, that elasticity will be more than simulation. Haptic technologies–those dealing with the sense of touch, like force feedback mice and attenuated asymmetrical offset direct current motors– will actually give the UI “feel.” There are a lot of haptic devices available now for gamers, from steering wheels to the Xbox 360 controllers. But the technology is becoming more than vibrating motors. Soon you’ll know you are committing an important change to a document not because a dialog prompts, but because the cancel button is physically harder to push and has a longer throw, like the main power switch on your house. Cell phones will have jog dials that will be paired with animation, and will let you know with a moment of resistance as you pass each item in your address book; it will then stiffen and stop as you approach the end of a list. We won’t just look at the user interface, we’ll feel it—the same way a skateboarder feels a concrete transition.

As gadgets gain more animation and the feel of haptic technologies, designers will need to start thinking like the builder of a skatepark. Incorporating flow, feel, transition and speed, not just look and layout, will bring consumers enhanced usability and build an emotional connection between users and their gizmos.

Jared Ficklin is a Senior Design Technologist in frog’s Austin, Texas studio.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Tamagotchi to Xbox: Why The World Can t Resist Phatic Technologies

Phatic communication, a term first coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, is the international linguistic phenomenon of small talk; that is, exchanges meant to provide a social connection rather than transmit information. Think about your last ride in an elevator: did everyone suffer silently, or did someone attempt a connection by offering some idle chatter about the weather? That man was engaging in a bit of phatic communication.

The need to connect phatically is almost, but not quite, universal. A recent study from the University of Kansas, for example, found that Germans don t typically engage in phatic rituals. But the researchers found that phatic gestures are commonplace in the United States, Japan, and even Iran. And our tendencies to exchange social niceties influence the sort of products we design and use.

Some of today s most successful products have phatic properties that allow us to connect socially.

Consider iChat; often the content of the messages is secondary to the fact that people simply appreciate being pinged by their online pals. And sometimes just seeing your pals in the list, knowing they are there, is enough to feel socially connected.

Our innate affection for phatic interactions is best exemplified by the Tamagotchis. First introduced in 1996, these Japanese virtual pets satisfied the profound, hitherto untapped phatic desires of 14 million people to connect to lifelike avatars - hatched, grew, ate, and pooped before dying a slow death, only to be reborn with the click of a button like some digital phoenix rising from LED ashes. Today s Tamagotchis, equipped with infrared technology, can marry or create offspring by connecting with other pets in close proximity. So now we can connect to other owners, not just our virtual pets. These new Tamagotchis have upped the phatic quotient.

Phatic interactions abound in the wired community space as well. The advent of camera phones and sites like Flickr only reinforce the trend to moblog the world with mundane photographs. We are wired to connect socially with others, so of course sharing photos is addictive. Similarly, the Xbox Voice Communicator encourages phaticism between gamers. Most of the chatter consists of nothing more than sound bites like Nice shot! or Die, sucker! Meaningless verbal exchanges can occur during game play, on an elevator, or while out with the kids. A mom can use a walkie-talkie wristwatch to stay connected when her children are out of ear shot You there? Okay, just checking. Love you.

Products with phatic properties also allow us to connect with our inner selves. Like an updated Tamagotchi for the health-conscious consumer, the StressEraser relies on biofeedback to improve a user s breathing patterns and ultimately reduce stress. How s the weather in there? we ask our body, Are we sunny or cloudy today?

Clearly, manufacturers and consumers alike recognize the profound response to phatic technologies, but ironically the mass consumption, proliferation and market penetration of so many phatic devices herald the tipping point of their acceptance.

As phatic devices deluge our daily lives with cheery interpersonal messages, we will eventually develop an immunity to the power of the social network. Just like email, the more messages we receive, the shorter, more selective and delayed our responses will be. Even now, some people choose to hide behind their headphones, brandish their iPods like Harry Potter s Invisibility Cloak and donate their Tamagotchis to Goodwill. For phatic products to have a place in society s future, they need to allow the device user to choose an appropriate level of phatic engagement—we might not be able to turn off the guy in the elevator, but we should be able to turn off the banter of a fellow gamer or the bleeting of our own virtual pet.

Laura Richardson is a Senior Design Analyst in frog s Austin, Texas studio.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

The Ever Evolving Product

A previous frog Design Mind article discussed the design complexity of technology systems, and how more sophisticated systems aren t always great for consumers. But not every additional layer of intricacy is a net negative for end users. That's especially true when designers create systems that enable products to keep evolving, even after they ve left the factory floor.

Take the latest BMWs to roll off the assembly line in Bavaria. They feature TeleService, a system that uses an embedded phone in order to stay connected to an authorized service provider. The auto shop can thus be alerted when signs of trouble are brewing, giving its mechanics ability to predict failure before it happens. The BMWs automatically send their vital information to a service advisor who will then call you to set up an appointment. This may seem a bit big brother-ish, but when you consider that BMW is offering four years of free maintenance on its cars, there is certainly an advantage to the company in keeping tabs on that responsibility. It may well become the standard for luxury cars in the near future.

Another example is Rolls-Royce s product service bundle for its jet engines, called TotalCare. Rolls-Royce guarantees trouble-free engine operation (or flight time) based on an hourly rate. Rolls-Royce has designed a diagnostic system that continually monitors the performance of the engine; it communicates to a central Rolls facility via a satellite network, to spot engine performance issues before they adversely affect uptime and costs. Rolls-Royce is now number two in commercial jet engine sales, which is pretty impressive considering company s engine division was in a death spiral just a few years ago.

While both TeleService and TotalCare are good examples of product-service couplings that ensure customer happiness and loyalty through trouble free use, they can only engender evolution in the product once it is back in the hands of a skilled mechanic. The next level of evolutionary product being replicated in the consumer electronics space can remove the human factor entirely, in a scheme similar to Over-the-Air Provisioning in the wireless handset world. OAP allows a wireless handset user to permit the network to push down software updates or new software that can fix problems, or can add features or improve a product's interface.

Look at Sony's PlayStation Portable, which offers integrated WiFi so gamers can battle each other while in close proximity. That connection also offers a way for the device to receive network updates to the firmware, or plug security holes that allow tinkering hackers the ability to port games to the platform outside of the formal channels. I ve downloaded a few updates for my PSP. The most substantial was a web browser which significantly increased the usefulness of the PSP to for a non-hardcore gamer like myself.

Another form of evolution we'll undoubtedly see more of is TiVo s adaptive technology. Anyone familiar with the pioneer video recorder knows that it features a very effective system for receiving software updates, which regularly tweak the user interfaces for the better—though it's probably better known for merely downloading the next day's schedule of programs. Adaptive systems by nature monitor the product's use and environment, and alter their behavior to best accommodate those changes. While TiVo's adaptive nature is primarily limited to suggesting and recording content, the system could be capable of deeper forms of adaptation in the future. Although a tricky proposition, an active area of research is an adaptive UI that optimizes to your personal patterns and habits.

All of these systems eventually lead to discussion about privacy concerns, and for good reason. It's an Achilles heel for the product-service coupling, especially when offered into the consumer market. A manufacturer or provider that inadvertently compromises the confidentiality of its users can do lasting damage to the company s public image and bottom line. Ultimately these concerns will not stop the super-functionality these systems can offer, but it is a responsibility that manufacturers obviously cannot take lightly.

Does ever increasing product complexity mean that we should shun fixed physical interfaces that can t evolve? No. While there is arguably little or no physical interface for TeleService and TotalCare, the physical nature of a product is still very important. Increased system design complexity forces deeper collaboration between designers, technologist, and partner companies. To me that means easier to use products that stay fresh and useful longer. Given that, I d say we are rapidly heading towards the day when connected ever-evolving products become the standard rather than the exception. That s good news for gadget junkies like me.

Jim Phillips is Director of Innovation Processes in frog s Palo Alto studios.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

A World of the Insatiably Enabled

My friend Randy is a technical consultant for IBM. He codes Java and provides user feedback for internal development teams. Like most of us, the majority of Randy s work involves communication through phone or by email. And like most of us, his mobile phone is an essential tool for business and personal communication.

Randy has also been blind since he was 18 months old, due to a rare childhood eye cancer, retinoblastoma. As a result, he s very keen on seeking out handsets designed for maximum accessibility—handsets that, in truth, benefit disabled and non-disabled users alike.

A 2004 survey by the American Foundation for the Blind lists the top two mobile phone accessibility needs as keys that are easily identifiable by touch and voice output — that is, the phone speaks menus options and settings, like the current time. Randy s last phone had both features, but his current phone, a Sanyo SCP-200, lacks voice output — his phone no longer talks (back) to him — but it does have voice input features, such as voice-enabled dialing.

When I asked why he gave up voice output, Randy said the technology is not yet good enough to be truly useful for a blind person; not enough programs and settings were voiced. Also, he mentioned, when I used the voicing feature to check the time in an especially long business meeting, the meeting organizer gave me a funny look. (Did I mention Randy has a good sense of humor?) He now checks the time on a Braille wristwatch.

Though he can live without voice output, any phone Randy buys must have accessible features such as voice dialing and tactile keys. With rare exception, these design considerations make a handset more usable and desirable not just for the disabled, but for everyone. That s because accessibility is really just usability, a concept that should concern everyone — especially designers.

The most ubiquitous example of accessible design is the curb cut. Required in the US by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), its intended purpose is to provide sidewalk access to the mobility-impaired, particularly those in wheelchairs. But think who else uses a curb cut: parents pushing strollers, bicyclists, delivery personnel, travelers with luggage, and a slew of other people. It s a design for accessibility that benefits every user of public resources.

Who benefits from an accessible interface design? You. Have you ever used voice dialing? Do you feel the raised nibs on your mobile phone s 5 key, or on your computer keyboard s home keys? Ever bumped up your font size to read an article?

Imagine you re running late to the airport. You are driving in rush-hour traffic but need to check your flight status. If your smart phone had voice output and the software to support it, you could. Most importantly, you could keep your eyes on the road while you did.

Dean Kamen invented a revolutionary gyroscopic stabilization technique first used in a wheelchair-like device called the IBOT. The IBOT allows paraplegics to go up and down stairs, and even stand upright by balancing on two wheels. Why should you care about the development of a gyroscopic stabilization device for the disabled? Because the technology was integrated into Mr. Kamen s most famous project, the Segway Scooter.

The Joint Optical Reflective Display, or JORDY, is a video magnifying goggle named for the Star Trek character Geordi La Forge. The visually-impaired use JORDY to view art museums, attend sporting events, and otherwise enjoy normal lives, but it s easy to imagine how future variations of the technology may be used to augment the vision of pilots, or other non-disabled people.

Dr. Alex Cavalli, of the IC2 Institute, envisions a time when all physical disabilities will be of no more consequence than myopia is today, a world in which biological and cybernetic enhancement yield the same final, improved result, no matter the recipient s original condition: With the advance of bio- and nanotechnology, coupled with modern convergent media, we can look forward to the possibility of having the word disabled retired from our vocabulary. We will speak, instead, in terms of how enabled we are.

Scooters, video magnifiers, voice dialing, curb cuts—technology advances and interface designs for the disabled almost always evolve to enable the needs and desires of the non-disabled masses.
The question now is, how enabled are you?

James Craig is a Senior Design Technologist in frog s Austin studio.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Designing Technology Systems: The Evolution of Increasing Complexity

"Complex mechanical devices can go wrong in many ways," writes Don Norman in his book Emotional Design. "And many a person has fallen in love—or become outraged—over the transgressions of automobiles, shop equipment, or other complex machinery."

Norman is speaking about individual devices. The automobile is a great example. People love their cars when they perform well, but hate them when they end up in the shop once a month. However, there is a much bigger picture to consider. Your car must interact in a multi-faceted and varied context. You parallel park in between two cars that haven't left you enough room. You drive to work and merge onto a highway with hundreds of other cars, and that darn truck just won't let you merge. Traffic is horrendous and gas is expensive. You may love your car, but the other parts of this system piss you off.

This is because cars, complicated mechanical devices in and of themselves, operate within an enormously sophisticated system. When advanced devices must interact on this level, they become increasingly more complicated and the user experience usually suffers.

Examples of complex technological systems abound. For example, there are often four or five remote controls for your home entertainment system. While house-sitting recently, my friend gave me some very detailed instructions:

-To turn the TV on, use the silver remote -Use the white remote for volume control -Use the grey remote to change channels
 -Do not touch the black remote (I was afraid to ask why)

"What does the middle one do?" I said, kidding her.

She shook her head. "Don't joke" she said seriously, "I'm still training my new boyfriend."

Every time a device gets added to your home entertainment system, another remote gets added. And this product deluge is a recent phenomenon. It used to be that you turned the TV on, chose the channel, and watched the program. Too loud? Turn down the volume. Today, though, you need (at least) four remote controls. On top of that, people always complain about how unnecessarily difficult their systems are to set up. During user research conducted by my firm, we've talked to a number of people about their technology. One family had to make five trips to the store to set up their TV. Another bought a TV, had the store come set it up, and then had the cable company install the cable. The system was so new that the cable guy took three visits to complete the installation.

Manufacturers, in their relentless drive to compete and innovate, have steadfastly ignored a key element of the big picture: systems design. Effective design requires examining the relationships that exist between all the pieces within a system. Ask yourself the following questions: Is your system in the living room, the bedroom or the basement? How does your system fit on the shelf, the dresser or the home entertainment center? Do you have cable or satellite (or, in the not-too-distant future, Internet Protocol TV)? Most importantly, how do you use the system? How many of the channels do you actually watch? How many remote controls do you have?

Manufacturers have ignored these questions for too long, instead focusing on building a device that has a great new feature that the competition doesn't have. They've ignored the system as a whole, and this is what needs to be fixed.

In the case of the TV/remote control problem, we can eliminate at least one issue right off the bat by removing the Set-Top Box (STB) and replacing that technology with a cable card that will plug into your card-ready TV. This technology hasn't matured yet and doesn't provide the breadth of functionality that your STB does, but that will change. One down.

A huge part of the solution is to provide better user interfaces. These interfaces could easily be modular to accommodate older remotes and variable systems. The remote should work seamlessly with the on-screen interface as does the Digeo MOXI>/a> and TiVo. Both of these systems have spent a great deal of time integrating the controller and the screens they control.

Other systems we've examined have typically chosen to add buttons onto their remotes, rather than attempt to leverage the on-screen interface. Fewer buttons would make the system simpler by placing the burden on the software. Apple is on the right track here with the iMac G5 with Front Row, which has reduced 60 buttons down to six. This is exactly the right idea.

Additionally, given the hundreds of channels there are to choose from, scrolling through huge lists of programs to find what to watch may soon be dinosaured. Several vendors are beginning to offer solutions to this problem, among them Aptiv Digital (formerly Pioneer Digital) with what they call an Interactive Video Mosaic. Seeing what's on helps the viewer decide what to watch and having a larger screen to work with facilitates this type of interface.

Companies also need to work together to provide standards for interoperability. Currently the Advanced Television Systems Committee, an international non-profit, is developing technical standards for digital television. While important, technical standards don't take the user into account as part of the system. User experience standards are essential; until they are included, the system will be broken and the consumer will suffer.

The most important part of the solution, however, is for companies to engage in systems design. They need to think about the product as part of a greater whole and design their pieces to fit into the puzzle seamlessly.

The winners in this space will be the companies that provide the most cohesive implementations with systems that ensure the best possible user experience through reasonable system design. The losers will be the systems that crash with a "blue screen of death," with no way to recover. Although it's unclear where they'll fit Ctrl+Alt+Delete on your remote.

David Hoffer is a Senior Design Analyst at frog design San Francisco.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Hearing Is Believing: Make It Sound As Good As It Feels

—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man's heart.

With the lights off and murder in the air, sound is the story in Edgar Allen Poe s classic The Tell-Tale Heart; groans, shrieks, and heartbeats paint a picture of sinister madness. 162 years after that story s publication, it is still sound that tells the story. It shapes how we interact in, feel about, and respond to our lit-up, digital world. As a result, aural aspects are key to establishing the identity, character, and emotional resonance of products. Yet sound too often remains a secondary consideration for designers, overshadowed by visual and tactile concerns. Unless sound is more fully understood and integrated into the design process, we risk ignoring its tremendous potential to create rich and meaningful user experiences.

Our brain pieces together a picture of the world from information delivered by our five senses. Sound provides an array of crucial information that helps us understand what we are seeing and experiencing, as well as what we cannot see. Reverberations from a round of applause, for example, tell us about the size and quality of space and materials, and about how the sound was made. The standing ovation of classical music fans produces a rich aural texture that describes the mid-sized, wood-paneled hall and the adult audience. The applause at a magic show in a grammar school cafeteria, on the other hand, fills the air with the tinny echo of little handclaps. Eyes closed, we still see both scenes clearly.

Sound also impacts how we feel. It carries emotional weight conditioned by lifetime experience and technical history. The original telephones rang when an electrical current triggered the tapping of a tiny bell—a sound that remains a figurative icon of the telephone call, and holds a visceral quality that elicits an emotional response. Whether it brings back the memory of a grandmother s kitchen, or simply recalls a clip from a favorite film, the ring sparks emotions in us conditioned by both its history and our own experience.

Today, our products are digital, portable, and pervasive. We live with them and around them, absorbing information and filtering noise at the periphery of our aural focus. We continually communicate with the devices in our lives, processing direct and ambient sounds in order to glean important information about the world. My mouse and I communicate, for example. Containing a Piezo speaker, Apple s Mighty Mouse emits subtle ticks and clicks when it is squeezed or pressed; these sounds augment the tactility of the mouse itself, and my interaction with it. They also integrate with and further define the product identity.

Music, for instance, has long been important in defining product identity. Microsoft wisely retained Brian Eno to create the 3 1/4 second long Windows startup piece, a composition Eno later referred to as a tiny little jewel. And in his recent book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Donald Norman cites the implementation of sound in Richard Sapper s kettle with singing whistle by Alessi— it creates a chord of e and b when the water boils. Our history of musical literacy has conditioned us to an appreciation of musicality in sound. Its sophisticated integration into the design of products infuses the user experience with dimensionality and pleasure, and amplifies the product s emotional resonance.

Emotional resonance shapes both product and user identity; we wear the sounds of our products like audible badges. Our mobile phones, music players, and video games are as integral to our sense of self-expression as our clothes and hairstyles. A phone owner s ring tone selection, for example, is at once identifier and descriptor it tells us who the owner is and what she or he is like. The designers of the Hiptop (aka Sidekick), understanding this, enable users to roll their own ring tones by simply emailing sound clips in any format to the device. As the constraints of the medium shrink, the complexity of our audible identities will grow. Imagine spaces demarcated mostly by sound; we only hear the size, quality, and borders of rooms. The devices we carry or wear transmit history, preferences, and location information—even sound itself—shaping and shifting the aural environment. Future products that accommodate the need to express ourselves through sound will strike the deepest chord.

The immediacy of the visual obscures the power of sound, as well as the necessary role of sound in design. Yet sound is significant in shaping user experience, impacting a user s perception of a product. Without more careful consideration of sound as part of the design process, our experience with digital devices will suffer. More importantly, we will fail to design for a future where communication among people and devices is seamless, even transparent. After all, it isn t your imagination— It is the beating of his hideous heart!

Claudia Bernett is a Senior Design Analyst in frog s New York studio.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Closing The Loop

Much has been written about the cultural revolution being wrought by computer gaming. Game consoles are in 150 million homes and counting, and the pending release of Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Revolution will soon bring richer detail and more realistic gameplay. But the impact of these developments may be different than you expect.

Game designers have long focused their efforts on rendering a virtual world that rivals our own in detail and behavior. And as processor speeds increase, we re getting ever closer to that goal. James Cameron has famously noted that, someday soon, he will be able to make movies entirely without live actors, using computer-generated characters instead of real ones. The recent game development deals signed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, as well as game budgets that exceed $20 million, indicate increased momentum in the cross-breeding of film and game paradigms.

While Mr. Cameron is working out all of the rich painstaking detail for his next digital starlet, we are seeing the opposite trend in the real world: we are rapidly stripping away detail and variety in our world to better reflect these computer-generated simulations.

Virtual experiences have the potential to add a great deal of richness to our communications and imaginations as they mature. But our fascination with the promise of a new world can blind us to its limitations. It is ironic that, as we perfect the algorithms for simulating facial expressions in 3D software, we are embracing cosmetic treatments that reduce the fidelity and individuality of our own facial expressions. Over the last few years there has been a 20-50% annual increase in the number of minimally-invasive cosmetic procedures (depending on the procedure). And there has been an utter acceptance and celebration of cosmetic surgery in the media with shows like Fox s The Swan and ABC s Extreme Makeover. It is easy to imagine a point in the future when these two trends converge and we all look like Angelina Jolie errr, Lara Croft.

What happens then? As these graphs indicate, someday you ll likely encounter more realistic detail in the actors in a virtual gameroom than you see in the people walking around the mall. After all, it is easier to sculpt pixels than pores. Or is it? One of the first non-game applications for the Xbox, Yourself!Fitness, is a simulated aerobics class with a virtual instructor who shows you how to sculpt your body to match hers.

This feedback loop between physical and the virtual experiences is shaping our imaginations even more than our bodies. Through the seduction of CGI and gaming, our culture has thoroughly fetishized the (limited) qualities of computer-generated forms and surfaces. On the heels of Volkswagen s re-launch of the Beetle, there has been a wave of designs that exploit products from our recent past that have a distinctive history — from the Mini Cooper or The Warriors — and re-render them to suit a virtual sensibility. In the process many of the distinctive qualities of these products have been replaced with stylistic elements that have the exaggerated feel of a 3D game experience. Products like the Plymouth Prowler and the PT Cruiser exemplify this trend — the drive to WalMart feels one step closer to Need for Speed. These products are the equivalent of laser skin surgery for the great American hot rod. And they re-appear as characters in computer games themselves, further closing the loop. MTV has turned this trend into reality TV with Pimp My Ride, the equivalent of Nip/Tuck for industrial design. Watching this show you have the uncanny feeling that you are seeing the constructor tools of a 3D game come to life. The vehicles that emerge at the end of this process don t belong on the Grand Central Parkway, they belong in Grand Theft Auto.

The convergence of 3D rendering tools for creating physical products and virtual environments has us trapped in a closed feedback loop of industrial design. This has created a new form of d j vu when we see someone walking down the street with a cyborg-like Bluetooth headset and Oakley sunglasses, or we walk into a new high tech glass office park that has a parking lot full of H2s. There is something immediately familiar — we have been here before.

The mass appeal of DWR mid-century modern furniture is consistent with these trends; your average Eames fiberglass chair looks like it stepped out of The Sims. After all, it is no coincidence that these products (which were the first to apply industrial, mass-production technologies and materials to furniture) bear a striking resemblance to the simplified forms that are possible within emerging technologies for virtual mass production. The pleasing, formal qualities of these design icons shouldn t blind us to the fact that they are slowly emptying our environment of a great deal of detail and variety.

The digital tools that we use to create new products are perfect for churning out stuff with the virtual mass appeal of bad science fiction. As designers, we cannot allow ourselves to be overly-seduced by the ideas that we can easily render on our computer screens. Fortunately, there is a growing movement that celebrates handcrafts and DIY technologies. We should design products that invite input, adaptation and dis-assembly — which was the subject of last week s frog Design Mind.

Robert Fabricant is Creative Director in frog design s New York studio.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

One Possible End of the End User

As we spend more time communicating, playing, and working in the digital world, our expectations and ways of acting will transfer to the physical world. Digital objects are, above all, plentiful, easily copied and easily shared. And they are beautifully malleable. We transform them, recombine them, share them some more. Photos are Photoshopped, music is remixed, code is developed co-operatively, web applications with open APIs are mashed together.

The digital world is, in part by its nature and in part by thoughtful design, flexible. But the physical world not so much; by comparison it seems frustrating in its intractable and resolute thinginess. Physical things don t duplicate with the right keystrokes, can t be instantaneously shot around the world, and command + Z never fixes them.

We want to treat physical objects like digital objects. And designers should oblige. But how?

Part of the answer lies in one of the more troubling aspects of our consumer-driven culture: more and more things appear everyday. Like the digital objects, physical objects are becoming almost absurdly plentiful. But they don t delete into nothingness. Things stay around. Jay Samit of Sony Mobile Connect has estimated that four-hundred million cell phones will be thrown out this year.

It s as if the plenitude of things, which should make it less likely that we need to make anything ourselves, is instead inspiring people to do just that. Physical things, like digital objects, are being remixed, recombined, collaboratively re-invented. It s as if the science-fiction post-apocalyptic hacked and re-wired world of Road Warrior arrived a little early.

The first signs of this thinking might be found in the new popularity of the crafting DIY movements. Make Magazine, which provides instructions for building and modifying everything from kites to cars, has been immediately successful. But more interesting, and more promising, are the labs that bring people together with different areas and levels of expertise. Of course, we aren t all engineers, we don t all have complete toolsets, some of us don t even have much space to work in. So it seems as if DIY not every end user can become a mid-point user.

But places like Squid Labs</>, Eyebeam, Sparqs , and the PIE Network all rely on shared knowledge and space: collaboration and cooperation are essential. In fact, Squid Labs recently launched instructables.com, a site meant to document the how-to of projects and let those projects be freely shared (even if some of them require currently expensive fabrication tools).

It s possible that these places suggest an interesting model for a future type of space and interaction—the neighborhood lab, a place to drop off old products, assemble custom tools, create one-off devices, and educate children who, because of the influence of the digital world, are more likely to think: I am going to change this.

Designers should pay attention to what is written in Make magazine and what comes out of places like Eyebeam. Products may be developed with an eye to these secondary markets and with new questions in mind: what potential life does this have outside of its intended and immediate use? What essential functionality does it encapsulate? What can be salvaged and used elsewhere?

The real icon of this sort of age might be the ubiquitous and simple Altoids mint tin, which has seen its range of re-use extend from holding rubber bands to housing iPod rechargers, serving as an emergency stove, and taking pinhole photographs. Of course it s flexible because it has a simplicity that few consumer products can achieve, but it remains an admirable product in its possibilities and a clear lesson that re-use adds value for the both the users and producers.

Clay Wiedemann is a senior analyst in the frog design NY studio.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.

Is It Real? The Trend toward the Authentic in Product Design

This gum, Mr. Wonka went on, is my latest, my greatest, my most fascinating invention! It s a chewing gum meal!

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl toyed with the concept of simulating the authentic when a three-course meal was replaced by a single piece of chewing gum. While Wonka s magic gum has (so far) been confined to fiction, we are exposed every day to products simulating an authentic experience. But has the time for simulated materials passed?

After decades of being surrounded by synthetic, mass produced, generic products, consumers are yearning for the authentic: For the tactile sensation of genuine materials, for the real thing. For goods that make an emotional connection with the artisan who crafted them. This yearning is evident in both marketing and product design, where perceptions of quality are strongly associated with the presence of authentic materials. (See last week s frog Design Mind for our discussion on how materials shape consumer perceptions.)

Until recently, designers and manufacturers have been constrained in the materials they could draw from to respond to the consumer demand for authenticity. Plastic, the magic material of the 1950s, has dominated product design with its synthetic versatility. With its ability to mimic almost any material, the choice for designers has often not been which material, but which plastic?

As a result, many products compensate by using plastic to simulate genuine materials. For instance, the trend of silver colored consumer electronics products has been fueled by manufacturers desire to raise perceived value of plastic devices by mimicking real metal. Using a patented 3D embossing technology, laminate giant Formica creates products which combine plastic with the simulated characteristics of wood, stone and even metal. Formica Stone hard surfacing material references classic Italian stone patterns and promises natural beauty with a truly luxurious aesthetic." In a time when it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the real from the fake, consumers want to be certain of what is honest and genuine.

The rules are changing with the advent of new manufacturing processes. These allow a wide variety of authentic materials to be applied to plastic injection molded components without the complex secondary processing that currently precludes their inexpensive use. Designers and consumers now have access to a richer palette of materials such as fabric, leather, wood and metal to find creative expression. And it is not just the blinged-out, jewel-encrusted Paris Hilton phone that s indicative of what s to come. With the special edition IntelliMouse, Microsoft took advantage of a patented over-molding process to create a more tactile mouse experience, swapping the feel of plastic for the feel of genuine leather. Or, the Tulip E-Go laptop which uses fabric, leather, wood and metal covers that are easily interchangeable by the user to fit mood or outfit.

These examples could be described as mass-craft, a trend that is spreading its influence across design domains and is coming soon to a gadget near you. Creating a craft-based aesthetic in products has normally been the domain of luxury goods. Hand-made is now equated to premium as well as limited edition and unique. Thus, higher selling prices have been justified. The Rolls-Royce car is largely hand-assembled; haute couture clothing is hand-stitched; and super premium wine is handcrafted. (3)

Mass-craft products on the other hand, have a craft-based component to give consumers emotional, artisan connections to gadgets that are mass-produced to deliver the predictability and accessibility consumers have come to expect from mass-market providers.

One of the latest examples is the Marcel Wanders-designed stereo equipment for Holland Electro, a Dutch home entertainment brand. Components are crafted like fine furniture, enclosed in authentic wood cases with decorative leg treatments. The smooth, egg shaped speakers have artistically carved screens with an ornate scroll pattern.

After decades of being surrounded by simulated authenticity, we ve arrived at a design turning point. Designers and manufacturers of mass-produced consumer electronics now have access to new manufacturing processes and a richer palette of materials to create an emotionally compelling, authentic look and feel. Simulation is out. Authentic is in. Now there's something to chew on.

Luke Williams is a Design Manager for frog design s New York Studio.

3. Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, Trading Up , Portfolio 2003.