Core77

I couldn�t agree enough with your critique .....as it might be evident already I too had sent an entry .....What concerns me is that the BIG firm�s these days aren�t looking for the next REVOLUTIONARY paradigm shift as that would demand an expensive change right from their assembly lines to their supply chains, rather what they ARE looking for is QUICKbuck nick knack design ideas from us designers, the kind of needless ideas that street-smart hawkers conceives to make a quick buck killing �..put a blue-tooth in a fork let the noodle know he�s gonna be eaten which in turn can tell a counter on your lunch box to inform you how many individual noodles did you exactly slaughter today. Hah!!
Most of the concepts have no real scenario or persona thinking behind them, and this isn�t the first time this has happened another recent example was the NOKIA � eXperience design competition , ,which too ended up with a lot of gizmos which would fascinate a user till about 3-4 hours of buying them and then be a redundant artifact in a drawer of his living room�now that should be a familiar experience to all.
Perhaps its time these needless tweaks to existing things stopped and rather than designing for the top 1% of the world �.. we went a little down the hierarchy of Maslows needs (and ours too :-p ) and designed for the masses.

hi editor

please do add the link to the OTHER crappy competition...The Nokia Benelux DESIGN AWARDS...

www.designawards.be or www.designawards.nl.

You criticize the fact that these concepts include existing technology such as Bluetooth. Yes, future technology will have other capabilities but they also must incorporate good technology that already exists. I�m curious to know what your thoughts are on my submission, Ventana # 44. My strategy was to design a mobile computer specifically for Vista. Be sure to read my answered entry questions before replying.

Keep in mind that humans interact with computers and technology through our senses and that we will be staring at a screen for a long time to come.

My problem with calling out a technology, such as Bluetooth, in a competition such as this is that its a given that it will work. I could embed Bluetooth into anything: a chair, a car, a hat, a toothbrush. The question is why did I embed Bluetooth. If you want a real world example of this look at the multitude of USB drives on the market that are stuck into any form factor (sushi, furry animals, a finger). The point should be 1) what is the human interaction and 2) how is this better. This was not addressed in the majority of the entries. Technology should be a way to get that interaction, not the crutch that allows your entry to sound awesome (in the case of this competition) or keep up with competitors (in the case of most of the PCs on the market).

Another good real world example is Playstation 3 vs. Nintendo Revolution. Sony is selling ultra high-end processing power which buys you better graphics, but not better game play. Nintendo is saying right from the beginning "Graphics will be better, obviously." What concerns them is the interplay between the user and the game. To improve this, they developed a radically different control which promises to make games more easily approachable and natural to a wider audience. I could care less what makes that controller work, as long as it delivers on that promise.

In the case of your Ventana entry, it is a nice rendering, but nothing radically different from what's out on the market already. It's the logical next step of what technology will evolve to, but is still for all intents and purposes a standard PC. You added in your statement that your concept understood facial recognition. Why? For what purpose? Is it for the better? I would lump facial recognition in with Bluetooth. Plus, fuseproject already did this concept, but colored it red.

And as the case with yours and the other entries, if it is going to change the way people interact with it, your pictures should include renderings of people interacting with your concept. The human aspect is always more important than the shiny silver plastic aspect.

Ms is now just a giant bureaucracy so they are exactly like when an gov't bureaucracy announces they want to do it for the people but when they people talk, they are pretty much ignored as "we know better." Now because MS is insanely profitable in 2 of their divisions (nearly 100% of the billion & billions of profit every year), people still automatically assumes it's because they are some creative force when they are basically now the gas company trying to make furniture - they just don't really get consumers (as evident by the website, their "soft" ads and their aspirations to be the Buckminster Fuller & Apple" of computers but really, they are the GM of computers. Don't stand nearby when it falls.

Don--your on the money for the most part.

I think it would be cool if we started a new competition to try to find some creative ideas (Apple or Microsoft--in the future, that choice will be as important as the different milk varieties in the supermarket).

On a more important note, I think it is wise to advise that future computing will be the exact opposite. It won't be called computing, it will just be called 'doing' and it will be domain specific. Another thing I would like to note is that in all respects, it will probably be totally ambient and discrete. That's how it should be, it should do the jobs, but when it comes down to it--people hate computers, and they don't want to deal with them.

What do you think?

A design competition is just that; a design competition. Discrete and ambient computing may be the future but it does not make good eye candy. You think that Microsoft is going to hang a poster of nothing at the CES? Also, Ventana is quite different from fuseproject's computer and it is "the next logical step" in computing. It was submitted in the "personal productivity" category that serves many scenarios and purposes. It's easy to say that something has been done before.

Let`s think for a moment that himanshu is right about the fact that MS might be looking for quick ideas, but then.... why they gave me a 20 page brief about human design, experience design, sensible design, and then most of the chosen entries are superficial ideas with No conceptual background? I accept that this guy want to design for an actual superficial market, what I can�t accept is the fact that the people that chose the project ( the heads of the future industrial design) are thinking that way, or at least they agree with that kind of thinking. I think that all of us as designers have to forget, at least FOR A MOMENT, about technology and design more human experiences. I THINK that was the purpose of the MS contest.

Why are you designers so against making great looking objects? This was a "hardware" design competition with no emphasis on software. What would make computer hardware more "human" or "sensible"? Also, the scenarios are all legitimate and not necessarily wrong because you don't like them.