Fusing Design with Technology 39
PreacherTom writes "Since the creations by Walt Disney of Space Mountain and EPCOT, progressives have attempted to show us a picture of how technology will affect our future lives. More often than not, these pictures become laughable after 20 years. Not for Royal Philips Electronics, who at their Simplicity Event in London unveiled their picture of the seamlessly technological future, including e-blackboards, cosmetic skintone scanners, and (sure to make the mouths of geeks water) the amBXT Immersive Gaming Experience."
Re:How many kinds of bad is that summary? (Score:2, Interesting)
You're going in the right direction with the World's Fair comment, but you can go a bit further back to 1851. Turns out the World's Fair has been running since then. Looking up the Great Exhibition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Exhibitio
It also appears the Great Exhibition was a British reaction to the French Industrial Exposition of 1844 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Industrial_E
I'm not sure what you meant by the italian furturists. Were you talking about the ones at the turn of the 20th century? Or the renaissance?
People Focus: It's a two edged sword (Score:5, Interesting)
PEOPLE FOCUS. Consequently, Philips is changing, says Stefano Marzano, CEO and chief creative director for Philips Design, "from a company in which technology called the shots to one in which the focus is firmly on people."
To some degree this has to be regarded as poppycock. The corporation will never be focused on people, because people are merely instrumental to profit.
What this means is that the corporation will abstract what it sees as the relevant details of you, then place you in a pigeonhole. Information technology allows many details to be extracted, and the number of pigeonholes to be much larger than the two or three that pre IT era companies had to content themselves with.
See what I mean?
The result can be surprisingly good. In just the context of the relationship between the consumer and the company, this is on balance a good thing. The corporation must have a strategy for making a profit, and this requires that they categorize their customers. More categories means better service.
In the wider context of society, there are dangers in this reductionistic view of humanity.
It is one thing to devise products that will fit the needs of specific groups of people, but increasingly marketing is focused on creating relationships and knowing individual customers. This involves a kind of surveillance, which is offered by companies like ChoicePoint. But information that may serve well to put you in a company's marketing pigeonholes, particularly when it is purchased by the government for security or other applications that affect you as a citizen. One of ChoicePoint's subsidiaries, DBT, was involved in the disastrous attempt to purge the Florida voting roles of convited felons in the 2000 presidential election. That effort improperly disenfranchised 8,000 voters in an election whose margin of victory was 537 votes.
The Future Ain't What It Used to Be (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, because of course in the future RPE will have been the first company to predict the actual future, not just today's future. They're just different from all the others, just because.
Unless they opened this exhibit in 1986, and predicted a future of cellphones ruining movies, Internet porn replacing TV, theocrats destroying science, and no flying cars. Oh, and a 1986-future-2006 with people still believing "* of the Future" exhibits are real predictions, instead of marketing whatever can't be justified to do in the present.