Very Strange
Transcript from Escom presentation …
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Professor Hartmut Essling
Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen
The 70's were the decade of marketing
the 80's were the decade of finance
the 90's will be the decade of design
Business Week Magazine 1990
Reading this quote from Business Magazine, New York, one may be included to
look at design like a magic medicine. I feel that the prominence of design
today has more to do with market reality. Today, basically great production
and functional quality is plentiful technical performance is exchangeable, be
it computers, automobiles, TVs, clothing – basically it's all the same, the
markets and product-features are transparent like glass houses, the customer
knows nearly everything, even the margins lay in the open, there is no feature
the competition doesn't have very soon too, no major mechanical differentiation
has been left in high-tech Except innovative, human culture, adoptoin products
to people's specific needs – especially emotional ones, DESIGN, Integrated
Strategic Design to be precice.
Our own market research shows us, that in the field of TEDology products
(Richard Wurman: Technology-Entertainment-Design as the new global industry)
* 10 years ago, 4 in 5 potential customers looked at technology and
and price and only 2 in 5 cared for design, ease of use, and ergonomics
* Today 4 in 5 potential customers make a buying decision based upon
design, but they also expect the price to be about 30 percent lower
than the "elite-design target-group" would have accepted 10 years ago.
Design, however, is not defined by qualified aesthetics alone,
some people list design as a visible principle of quiality,
some people define design still as a matter of prestige,
and some just look at the level of excitement design will provide.
Design is becoming different, democratic, open, free.
Design is reflecting our open society:
many dreams, many ideas, many truths.
With design being considered a popular issue,
no artificial add-on is considered competent anymore,
no stylistic exclusion of the masses for the benefit for an elite will be
tolerated.
DESIGN is requested, feasible, and available in what futurist Alvin Toffler
calles the "individual mass product".
We all know what Commodore and Amiga meant as High-Tech brands. Commodore was
an affordable way to get into personal coputing, the first AMIGA-machine
actually was created just one mile off my house in Los Gatos and personally I
know some people who created the machine very well. But for some not so
trivial reasons, the brands were managed out of the market.
Now – after ESCOM acquired them – NOW
* what will happen to the legendary brands ?
* what will be the future products ?
* how will they look and feel ?
* to whom will they appeal ?
* and will there be a new legend ?
We have set three goals:
our new products will emerge from what Richard Wurman calls TEDology, or what
Nicholas Negroponte call the now domaine of "creative digital life"
* Technology
we will apply the best of Microsoft/Intel
we will apply the best of Macintosh/PowerPC
we will apply the hottest Technology in Games
and we will apply the newest in Digital Television, Audio, and Video
* Entertainment
the new Commodore and Amiga products will be accessable by innovative
and cultural software-interface solutions, which will be easy-to-use
and powerful tools. I personally feel that our new products will
create a new standard for people-oriented high-tech consumer products.
* Design
our new products will be high-tech-fashion statements,
some will appeal to young people, as statements of a new culture,
some will appeal to women, emotional and elegant,
some will appear to power-hungry web-surfers,
some will appeal to machine-crazies,
we will introduce color on a bigger scale
and we will create the opportunity of design-customization
As we just started to conceptualize and design the new product lines,
I cannot hsow you anything concise or descriptive at this time,
I can only explain our "way of design" a little bit
and illustrate it with some example:
* historic frogdesign breakthroughs, which were then assumptions
of the future or became huge successes, changing High-Tech into
High-Fashion
and as I also am a teacher,
* the way students look at the future, they will live in as
designers soon too
But you will not feel left out completely
* because at the end of my short presentation
I will show you the new brand identies of Commodore and AMIGA
and one short 3 second peek into the design-work under way
Let me also remark shortly on the new way of doing business in Computing,
(which since about 20 years is at the center of my professional life)
* It is very competitive, but due to standards is based on WIN-WIN,
* It is about working together, respecting people and nature,
* It is about building alliances rather than destructing common ground
-sja