Flying over Las Vegas
Timmer then asked me to head up Philips Design (or Corporate Industrial Design, as it was called then), and build it up so that we could spearhead the change – and not just the change towards developing more people-focused products, but also the required change in thinking within Philips, so that everyone would be pulling in the same direction. One of the first things I did was to draw up a manifesto, a statement of what I felt we needed to aim for, and gave it in 1992 as a keynote speech (which was later published), called Flying over Las Vegas.
Simplicity
In it, I pointed out that the increasing complexity of life and its accelerating pace would lead to a demand for greater simplicity as well as a better balance between the various parts of our lives, and between ourselves and our environment. The typically 80s focus on quantity would need to be replaced by a new focus on quality, and the celebration of the product as technical achievement would need to make way for its appreciation as provider of an enhanced quality of life: or, as I put it at that time, “hardware” will need to become “humanware.” Products needed to become more meaningful and relevant to people’s lives and easier to use. Of course, to many within Philips at the time, this was revolutionary, crazy or just ‘soft’ talk.
Research programs
Still, we set about working out how we could achieve this vision, developing a program of research involving not only traditional design skills, but also new ones, like psychology, anthropology, ethnology and social trends research – all with the aim of gaining what we now call consumer insights.
Methodology
We developed a methodology for combining our research results with insights into emerging technologies to develop innovative product concepts, and then show them to people, get feedback on them and trigger discussion. Essentially, precisely what we are doing with our contributions to these Simplicity Events. One of our first such exhibitions was about televisions: Television at the Crossroads in 1994. A year later we put on a much wider-ranging exhibition, which won awards and became very influential, called Vision of the Future. Since then, we’ve done many such visionary projects, and many of the concepts have later gone on to inspire or become commercial products. In the meantime, of course, our methods, tools and techniques have become ever more sophisticated and exact.
Secure basis
The fact that we’re now celebrating simplicity, and that Philips’ brand promise is formulated as “sense and simplicity” is the outcome of a process that began almost 15 years ago. You may say, isn’t 15 years a long time for an idea to take hold? Well, it is an idea that has been growing steadily over that time. I think we’d be very suspicious if a company the size and complexity of Philips seemed to have an overnight conversion to a new idea – it might well be only superficial, and disappear as quickly as it had appeared. It seems to me that, precisely because it has developed slowly but surely over a number of years, the new human-focused culture within the company has a much firmer and securer basis in the minds of Philips people than if it had all happened quickly.
Leader in the new millennium
In our Mission and Vision at Philips Design, written in the early 90s, we said we saw it as our assignment to develop a culture within the company based on the growth of people, living in harmony with their man-made and natural environment, so that Philips could leverage its existing competences and capabilities to enter the new millennium as a leader.
Refreshed and renewed
Today, the company is flourishing: we have come a long way since 1990, when the company was almost bankrupt. We have also come a long way from a culture in which we made superb technologies that no one wanted to buy. We are still at the top in technology, but we now take account of what people want and develop technologies accordingly. At the same time, we’ve developed research techniques and tools that generate meaningful insights into people’s behavior, their needs and their wants. And we have the processes in place that enable us to create innovative products that give people easy access to the benefits they want.
Our CEOs
I believe this is therefore an excellent moment to celebrate this remarkable achievement. It’s an achievement for the far-sightedness of our CEOs – in the first place, Jan Timmer, who saw what needed to be done; and then his successors: Cor Boonstra, who sharpened the focus on consumers, and Gerard Kleisterlee, who has brought us to where we are today, as a healthcare and lifestyle company superbly positioned for the future.
Philips people
It’s also an achievement for Philips employees all over the world, particularly in product divisions who’ve worked on visionary-type projects. And last but definitely not least, it’s an achievement for design. Philips Design, of course – and I want to thank all of my colleagues for their tremendous creative efforts over the past 15 years, which have brought us this far.
Design
But I believe it’s also an achievement for Design in general. Perhaps for the first time, Design has clearly demonstrated that it can play a key role in shaping a company’s strategy, and in guiding a complete transformation in a company’s culture. For all of us in the business of Design, I believe this is an important turning point. It shows what we’re capable of!So again, I welcome you all, and invite you to raise a glass… to Simplicity… and to Design!
Simplicity-led design
The “simplicity-led design” approach consists in three major steps.
Firstly to identify meaningful and relevant solutions that make sense for people, by researching people and trends foresights – and confronting them with Philips’ objectives. Secondly to design the experience, in other words new forms of interaction between people and products (people’s gestures and product responses); the challenge here is to define what the product should do and not do, and how simple and pleasurable the interface should be. And thirdly, to give shape with simplicity to what people first encounter with a product or service: its ”look & feel, “, that greatly influence people’s initial perception.
Gestures are a more direct, intuitive and memorable way of interacting with products, we therefore focus on physical interaction: pointing, touching, squeezing, tumbling, shaking, spinning, tapping, stroking, waving, twisting, pressing, turning, pushing, pulling, etc. We make a deliberate effort to attach the appropriate gesture to each product concept. These gestures are more easy to learn, easier to remember than complex keypad, menus and are more enjoyable and this would lead towards an future with advanced products that hardly need a user guide and that are easy to experience.
A healthy lifestyle
Within this context we decided to stimulate a healthy lifestyle thanks to enjoyable life patterns. The challenge lay’s in creating inspirational propositions that not only addresses healthy life patterns that would make sense in peoples life but also make life more pleasurable and even fun. People are less likely to be involved in a healthy however ‘boring’ activity.
How can we create product solutions that stimulate people not only to “try out once,”, but to regularly engage in healthy activities?
Next simplicity this year explores various pleasurable daily experiences that directly or indirectly contribute to a healthy lifestyle. Under this healthy lifestyle umbrella we are addressing five sub themes translated into tangible explorations that inspires for a positive future for different people. These propositions answering peoples individual values, needs and desires and are contributing to a pleasurable healthy lifestyle.
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