1. The Future Is Now—Philips’Vision of the Future( Part 1 )
“ In this era of short - term thinking, it’s refreshing to see a company allocatefunds for long term envisioning. " —Tom Hardy, IDSA.
What will life be like in 2005? What will people want to do? What willinterest them and make their lives more fulfilled? As a worldwide producer ofconsumer electronics, Philips is in a position to propose ways to use newtechnology to improve the quality of people’s lives.
It is difficult to predict the future because people’s perspectives changeand technologies develop and merge. Traditionally, technological innovation hasbeen responsible for most new products. However, to make products and servicescome closer to meeting human needs and desires, we need to redress the balanceand look more carefully at the increasingly complex relationship between peopleand technology.
Philips initiated the Vision of the Future project to investigatedevelopments over the next ten years, because we have to look far enough intothe future to see the steps we need to undertake next.
The project’s broad aim was to explore what people will perceive asuseful, desirable and beneficial in the future and to create a technologicalroad map to realize this goal. This goal required a new approach to discern thelatent needs and aspirations of people, in particular what qualities they wouldvalue in future products and services.
Our first step toward such a vision was extensive research in socio -cultural trends and developments in technology. Trend - forecasting institutes,such as the Risc Institute for Social Change, provided information on emergingattitudes, preoccupations and concerns within society, and research intoemerging technologies came from both within the Philips organization and withreference to global forecasting done in Japan and Germany.
Our next step was to set up multidisciplinary teams of culturalanthropologists, ergonomists, sociologists, engineers, industrial designers,interaction designers, exhibition designers, graphic designers and video andfilm experts. In a series of creative workshops, these teams developed more than300 scenarios based on the findings from our socio - cultural and technologicalresearch.
We based these scenarios ( short stories describing a product concept andits use) on five basic parameters: people, time, space, objects andcircumstances, then refined and filtered the scenarios using four criteria:Would they clearly provide people with genuine benefits? Did they fit with Philips’majorareas of competence and interest? Would they be technically feasible? And wouldthey be applicable to the social and cultural area we had defined?