Q101 The Alternative
Q101 (formerly on Chicago radio @ 101.1 FM) The Alternative - Chicago's New Rock Alternative - Everything Alternative - Chicago's Alternative - Gen X - Generation X
You can normally describe any new consumer electronics device or service with one of four words: bigger, smaller, smarter, faster.
Just looking around last week’s IFA event in Berlin, a whopping great 4K television set from Sony that comes in at 84 inches across; a Windows handset from Samsung that’s a “crazy thin” “powerhouse.”
What is changing?
Basically, product designers are becoming much more aware of the need to foster intimacy between the things they make and the people who use them—and we’re seeing a new vocabulary of ideas and services emerging that do precisely that.
Why? We often feel ambivalent and distanced about mass manufactured goods and try to find different ways to make them feel special, intimate, and personal. Now new methods (in both design and manufacture) are being developed to capitalize on that desire.
At a design level, creators are learning lots of new ways to foster intimacy before customers can even get their hands on the end result. They want to involve people.
That’s one reason Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have been successful—they create a level of intimacy between the product and the customer. Partly, people are buying into a dream, supporting people they are fans of, or just paying for the entertainment value of being part of a movement—but they’re also joining in because they want to have a personal relationship with a product (and the product’s creators). They want to imbue it with a story.
Crowdfunding is really about a method of service design that creates intimacy while the product is still on the drawing board.
READ MORE
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-05/what-do-future-products-look-like-personal-sensual-intimate#r=hpt-ls
Thanks to the pace of mobile-network expansion, new audio and video technologies, the expansion of Wi-Fi, and more-capable hardware that runs longer on a single charge, the tablet may begin replacing the smartphone within the next half a dozen years.
Kevin C. Tofel of GigaOm, defends his predictions and gives several reasons why he thinks this will happen.
Our dependence on mobile media consumption is growing. This won’t surprise anyone, but now that traditional video—think movies and TV shows in addition to YouTube (GOOG) content and the Olympic Games—is more readily accessible on mobile devices, screen size and video quality become more important. Why watch the content on a small, low-resolution screen when you can watch it on a high-definition screen that’s still easily portable? There’s just no point in doing so, nor is it likely to be preferred.
Voice on a tablet isn’t as bad as you’d think. He knows this because he’s done it. Kevin took his Galaxy Tab 3G with a data-only SIM card and used it as a primary phone for a few months and later did the same with his Galaxy Nexus phone. To do this, he had to set up Google Voice and Skype forwarding, but in the future it won’t be a difficult prospect. In fact, the original Galaxy Tab actually has cellular voice capabilities, but the U.S. carriers stripped it out.
The user interface is moving beyond pocketable screens. Look at how voice interaction is starting to become part of our digital world. We’re in the early stages—from an end-user consumer view, that is—of speaking to our devices and having them follow our commands or look up information.
Naysayers are still judging based on today’s use cases, not tomorrow’s. So the obvious main retort to Kevin’s thought process is surely going to be, “But you can’t put a tablet in your pocket. Who’s going to carry a tablet everywhere?” And his answers are, “So what?” and “You will, and if you don’t your kids will.” Simply put, we can’t think about today’s constraint of needing to put a mobile device in a pocket. We only put phones in our pockets when we’re not using them. Guess what? We’re using them more and more, which means they’re in our pockets less and less.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-02/heres-why-tablets-will-replace-the-smartphone
There are currently no events to display.