I'm wholly under whelmed by the entries to Microsoft's Start Something PC competition. Microsoft set a somewhat lofty and broad goal: "Rethink the Windows-based PC experience today and the role it plays in people's lives. Envision how form factor influences the digital lifestyle-from personal productivity at work or home, to entertainment, mobility and lifestyle. Think big, be bold, be inspired, but pay attention to sustainable technologies, and ecological and environmental innovation."
The majority of entries ignored this premise and explained in their concept statements that they added Bluetooth, or USB 3, or a "paradigm shifting" feature (most of which computers already do) to a mobile tablet of sorts. To be fair there are a couple interesting ideas or forms but for the most part they are either copies of Apple internal concepts from the 80s/90s or boring. Check back January 5th see what the jury, Bill Gates, and the public pull out of there as winners.
(And another thing!... if the Start Something competition website is any indication of the usabilty of their future operating system, Vista, Microsoft is screwed.)
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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?
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.
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.
please do add the link to the OTHER crappy competition...The Nokia Benelux DESIGN AWARDS...
www.designawards.be or www.designawards.nl.
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.