工业设计专业英语飞利浦课文原文

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 allocate funds for long term envisioning. “—Tom Hardy, IDSA.

What will life be like in 2005? What will people want to do? What will interest them and make their lives more fulfilled? As a worldwide producer of consumer electronics, Philips is in a position to propose ways to use new technology to improve the quality of people’s lives.

It is difficult to predict the future because people’s perspectives change and technologies develop and merge. Traditionally, technological innovation has been responsible for most new products. However, to make products and services come closer to meeting human needs and desires, we need to redress the balance and look more carefully at the increasingly complex relationship between people and technology.

Philips initiated the Vision of the Future project to investigate developments over the next ten years, because we have to look far enough into the future to see the steps we need to undertake next.

The project’s broad aim was to explore what people will perceive as useful, desirable and beneficial in the future and to create a technological road map to realize this goal. This goal required a new approach to discern the latent needs and aspirations of people, in particular what qualities they would value 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 emerging attitudes, preoccupations and concerns within society, and research into emerging technologies came from both within the Philips organization and with reference to global forecasting done in Japan and Germany.

Our next step was to set up multidisciplinary teams of cultural anthropologists, ergonomists, sociologists, engineers, industrial designers, interaction designers, exhibition designers, graphic designers and video and film experts. In a series of creative workshops, these teams developed more than300 scenarios based on the findings from our socio - cultural and technological research.

We based these scenarios (short stories describing a product concept and its use) on five basic parameters: people, time, space, objects and circumstances 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 would they be applicable to the social and cultural area we had defined?

From these scenarios, we developed 60 well - defined concept descriptions. To make the project more manageable, these 60 divided into four domains representing all aspects of everyday life: Personal, Domestic, Public and Mobile. A panel of futurologists assessed the concepts, which were also reviewed for ecological impact.

Our next challenge lay in developing and enriching the basic concepts and making them more easily understandable to a wider audience. To do this, the ideas for future products and services had to be manifested in the form of tangible models, simulations of interfaces and short films.

The product models used a simple, harmonious design language, with extensive use of visual metaphors to support communication on both a functional and an emotional level. In addition,