25
lectures Cees van Dok MSc
Massive Passives
in augmented reality and (more) natural interfaces, he continued. Designers will increasingly have to contend not only with touch interfaces, but also with gestural and voice interfaces, and even with embedded functionality in the human body. Even objects that are valued for their design beauty - such as Jonathan Ive’s Apple products (which are physically based on the one-function electronics of Dieter Rams for Braun) - are actually grounded in the intangible. Apple, despite its highquality physical design, sees itself as a software company. It is software that largely determines the changing behaviour and identity of a device - with a little help from ubiquitous connectivity. Convergent system The biggest success factor for Apple in the end is not its great object design, nor its elegant software solutions, but what Van Dok called its ‘end-to-end focus’: “It’s not about the iPod, but about the ecosystem behind the iPod,” he said. Apple is a ‘convergent system’ in which iTunes, iPhones, computers, ads, Apple stores and even Steve Jobs himself are all
carefully positioned elements in the mix. A comparison of two e-readers, Sony’s and Amazon’s, reveals that they are almost identical. What makes Amazon’s much more successful is not how it looks, or even what it does, but the fact that it has a vast digital library behind it. “Designers have to think of the entire ecosystem,” said Van Dok, “No new product can be random anymore. They all have to plug into a system.” Massive Passives Naturally, there are huge challenges associated with this. Designers have to answer a range of questions before they can begin the process of developing a new product. “What is driving user behaviour, what are user motivations, what are the users’ unmet needs?” asked Cees van Dok, whose company Frog researches extensively into just these issues. He pointed out that the answers to such questions are far from straightforward: the picture of media consumption in the home, for example, produces an extraordinary variation, even a contradiction, with ‘massive passives’ (who are passively entertained by watching TV) sharing the same sofa with the laptop toting ‘tragically equipped’ and their compulsive, snack-sized media consumption habits. “They