In 2006, Philips won seven domestic and overseas design awards for its digital photo frame, a product for which the Taiwanese branch, Philips Design Taiwan, has received the greatest commendations in its 18-year history.
It's just seven inches from corner to corner, with simple, modern lines, a translucent, pure-white frame, and, like a traditional picture frame, no buttons on its surface. Just insert a memory card into a slot in back, and it will display photo after photo clearly and in sequence. Dispensing with daunting, complicated functions makes it easier for grandma and grandpa to look back upon fond memories of their lives, and this product has captured half the market in Europe.
Simple design is not simple
Indeed, the Sony Corporation released a digital photo frame seven years ago, but it induced barely a ripple in the market. It became a challenge to Philips Design Taiwan not to repeat the same mistake.
Chen Shi-kuan, branch director of Philips Design Taiwan, says that they analyzed the cause of the failure of their competitor's product, which was that the company created the photo frame as a small, secondary monitor, and stressed that it could be connected to a computer, thus giving the impression that it was yet another computer peripheral. So Philips designed their digital photo frame so that one could browse through photos without hooking up to a computer, so that people over 35 who had never touched a computer could start using it right away, calmly and without the need to study.
"Simplicity is a relative term: if 50 buttons give complete functionality, there's no need for 100. It's more difficult to design a simple-to-use product than a complex one," Chen explains. If reducing ten buttons to five also cuts back on functionality, this leads not to simplicity, but confusion. Simplicity should not reduce the functionality that a product should have; rather, it should meet the individual needs of the consumer and provide an intuitive user interface. There should be no need to consult a 50-page user manual. The digital photo frame is a tangible response to Philips' new mantra of simplicity.
In October 2004, Royal Philips Electronics replaced its ten-year-old slogan "Let's make things better!" with "Sense and simplicity."
Simplicity Event
Philips launched a world tour entitled Simplicity Event to spread this idea as well as enhance its brand positioning, starting out in Paris, stopping in Amsterdam, New York and London, and in March of this year coming to a final stop in Hong Kong.
The company demonstrated 18 concept products at the exhibition, covering five main themes: "Listen to your body," "Move your body," "Relax your body," "Relax your mind" and "Share experiences." The products included a faucet with a UV purifier and carbon filtration, and a bed lamp that both helps you wake up and improves your sleep.
One product receiving rave reviews is Drag Draw, a light pen and eraser set that lets kids draw whatever they want on the wall via a laser projector.
Using multimedia imagery, kids can select a tool from a container filled with amazing implements and draw wherever they please. If a kid throws a yellow teddy bear into the container, the magic brush immediately responds, transforming into a yellow pen. If not satisfied, the child can erase it and repaint. After completing the drawing, he can press a button on the pen and the image on the wall becomes a 3D animation. Kids can stand, sit and even run while painting; whatever makes them happy. The walls of the house will be the kids' own virtual canvas.
Philips, with its goal of creating healthy living, believes that emotions can be affected by light and color: yellows, oranges and reds impart excitement, warmth and romantic feelings; greens, deep blues and violets are sobering and relaxing. Many people look forward to having a living environment that can be changed according to time, mood and circumstance.
Another product designed with this in mind is a remote control device that can change and manipulate the spectrum, filling the home with the brisk, gorgeous light of sunrise, the warmth of sunset, or gentle, crisp moonlight. And when friends come over, or if you want to relax, you can choose a scene to go along with the light--green vines, white clouds and babbling brooks which change with the light source, appearing on the ceiling or floor.
These are not movie simulations, but real concept products that will be released within the next three to five years. These futuristic gadgets are not the result of unfettered imagination on the part of Philips Design, but are the product of a global survey of consumers conducted after Philips announced in 2003 a switch from a manufacturing orientation to a market orientation, from which they learned in great depth about the living environments people sought. From this data, gathered bit by bit, they pieced together a portrait of the future.
Tailored technology
"When I was a boy, I learned a great lesson from my grandfather. He was a tailor in a small town in Italy. Customers would come to his atelier when they needed a new suit: he would talk to them, show them different fabrics and styles, and try, through structured dialogue, to piece together the ideal picture that was in their heads. As I played under his cutting table, I heard how he got to know them, understanding their hopes and the context in which they lived. Later, when the customers returned to try on the finished suit, I saw how delighted they were with the result. It taught me that getting into your customer's mind can help you meet and exceed their expectations."
This is a concept expressed by Philips Design's CEO, Italian-born Stefano Marzano. During his introductory speech at the Simplicity Event, he described his expectations for Philips Design--an insistence on custom design in this age of mass production.
Marzano understands that it's not possible for major corporations to interview all of their customers individually, but it is still possible to dig deeper. In his view, traditional market surveys are greatly flawed, being too broad and not delving into details such as values; they are also overly focused on product use and purchasing behavior, and regard individuals too much as isolated entities without connection to living environment.
In Marzano's 15 years as CEO, Philips Design has searched for ways to overcome the drawbacks of traditional consumer research. The company marshals psychologists, anthropologists, field research specialists, sociologists and trend analysts, working together to find more human-oriented approaches toward research. In the end, they set their sights on "real life" rather than mass or target markets, not passively observing consumers, but letting them repeatedly participate in the design process.
So that the interviewees are clear of their behavior and aware of how to make abstract, vague concepts concrete, they must first do some homework, including scoring the product they would like to buy, recording their living environment, and keeping a video or audio journal. Through such a questionnaire, it is easier to dig deeply into their values, likes and daily activities.
Their very detailed Persona Database includes information on the consumers' background, values and living particulars, including age, nationality and culture; their surroundings, interpersonal relations, and thoughts and opinions on major trends; their outlook on life and views toward education; the manner of their work and private lives, their leisure preferences, the technologies they use, the music they listen to, the magazines they read, their hobbies and favorite things, and so forth: data presenting an actual person in his entirety. After several years, Philips has accumulated thousands of entries to their vast global database, which is updated annually.
Building brand genetics
Philips Design has used this database to devise a set of tools for regulating design creativity.
Chen takes out a New Value Sign Tool, resembling a large deck of cards. Each card bears a photo of an interviewee and describes the products he frequently uses, as well as words describing the three major elements of design.
"After Marzano took charge in 1990, we started developing a variety of design tools for use by Philips' global design centers. The Persona Database and New Value Sign Tool are only the first among them, and are available to the public," says Chen.
"Without standard tools, if we have ten designers from different backgrounds and ask them to put their heads together and within two hours design, say, a razor for sale around the world, then the result of two hours would be the same as that of 200 days: in the end they wouldn't know how to choose," he says. With cultural attributes as a framework, they can effectively demarcate the boundaries of their creative work so the consumer can discern, even from afar, that it has a Philips flavor. This is a sort of "genetic engineering" for brand positioning.
Once the product has been designed, the R&D department will revise the details based on market attributes. For example, the digital photo frame developed by Philips Design Taiwan's R&D team was first tested in Philips' stronghold of Europe, with the result that quite a few older folks felt nervous upon seeing it. But at first they did not voluntarily explain what concerns they had with it.
After a round of discussion and consultation, the company learned that older people commonly felt that this was yet another electronic gadget and lacked confidence that they would learn how to use it. The R&D team kept pondering what the problem with the digital photo frame was. They never thought that it would be the Philips logo on the photo frame.
Europeans like to look through photo albums, placing their most cherished photos in frames displayed in their living room or dining room. But on ordinary frames there is no brand of a technology company. When older people saw the Philips logo, they figured they would have to read an instruction booklet to operate this digital product.
After lengthy debate, the R&D team decided to dispense with the in-your-face Philips logo in the European market, placing it instead on the back. "For a century-old brand, you can imagine the resistance and agonizing going on inside the company at the idea of not displaying the logo on the front of the product," says Chen.
Market comprehension
The digital photo frame was a hit in Europe, but its price at over NT$8,000 was unpopular in Taiwan. It also sold slowly in the US and Japanese markets because of too many competitors.
"Taiwan holds a key position in manufacturing and technology. People here generally have a high degree of acceptance for high-tech products, and also a sensitivity toward price," Chen points out. If a digital photo frame is sold on Taiwan's electronics market, many will feel that with 17-inch monitors selling at just over NT$5,000 and the functionality of the digital photo frame already in computers, the photo frame just wasn't impressive enough.
In contrast to the design function in most Taiwanese companies, where either the in-house design team is beholden to company management or design is outsourced, the framework of Philips Design is special. Several years ago it became independent of the Philips headquarters, having its own human resources, finance and management systems, and being responsible for its own profitability. By contract, Philips delegates full responsibility for all products to Philips Design, but the latter is not to accept projects from other companies, maintaining a relationship of close interdependence and equal footing.
"Our authority to determine how products are pitched is very great because Philips Design's CEO is the chairman of the corporate headquarters. It's like we're the gatekeepers of the Philips brand. To ensure the sustainable operation of the company, Philips Design needs to anticipate what the company will sell a year from now and how the company will survive in the market five years hence; it must constantly come up with proposals. Otherwise if the head office fails, Philips Design will have no more projects. This is a sort of 'balance of terror,'" avers Chen, who often serves as a judge for domestic design championships. Taiwanese designers have strong design skills, he says, but they have little ability to conform to the brand requirements. Sometimes they design for the sake of aesthetics without allowing the design to become a means for proclaiming the brand or flaunting the brand's style.
In Chen's view, the difference between design and art is that art is the creation of pure, personal symbols for the viewing of those who understand it, while design is arranging symbols that the maximum number of people are able to accept. This is because design is a type of consumer culture--which is something that all designers should always keep in mind.
