Clive van Heerden Senior Director, Design-Led Innovation
Products that react to people's emotions have started to hit the consumer market. But if they are to gain universal uptake they need to become more intuitive.
After years of championing gadgets that emulate human intelligence rather than human sensitivity, companies are finally beginning to see peoples' emotions as a driver for new products. Products that, rather than taking us away from our human self via keyboards and computer screens, reconnect us with the context of our lives. Ironically, the technology to sense someone's mood, through skin conductivity, heart and breath monitoring, voice patterns, social interaction and so on, has existed for a long time. But interpreting this information was not seen as a priority.
We are entering an era where the human body is increasingly regarded as a platform for electronic and bio-chemical functionalities. Of course, something like the Pacemaker has long been in use, but more recently we have seen increasingly sophisticated electronic medical devices being implanted. And beyond the medical sphere, it is already not uncommon for people to have an RFID chip inserted under the skin to remove the need for keys or money.
Since the late 1990s Philips Design has been looking at how signals obtained from the body can communicate to electronic devices. Heart rate, breathing patterns and electrical impulses passing through the skin are all indications of our physiolgical state. Combinations of these impulses can give us a sense of our emotional state or mood.
Technological innovation could allow this information to be processed and communicated from one body to another, opening up the possibility of new channels of interaction between people and objects that is neither conscious, premeditated nor programmed. Our bodies can speak in an honest, unguarded and articulate way that is sensitive, playful and mysterious and not at all utilitarian.
At Philips Design we are interested in projecting forward and exploring potentional outcomes in this field 15 or even 20 years from now. In order to do this effectively, we have to examine a broader field than technological development alone because we believe that ultimately, sensitivity is more important than intelligence in designing next-generation technology.
