Articles, Explorations

How will this shift and change the way products are defined, shaped, and made? Will it make products or services easier, better, more enjoyable, more intuitive or more meaningful to use? Consider the following scenarios:

Mobile Location Based Services: You’re tired and cranky after another distressingly long subway ride to an unfamiliar part of town. Your mobile senses this and recommends you take a break at a nearby coffee shop. The device points the way, checks the complex menu and suggests three items best suited to helping you relax and restore your physical-emotional balance.

Fashion/Apparel: You’ve purchased the latest Under Armour Sport Tactical Vest for the players on your team and linked them to the coaching staff’s integrated performance optimization system. The system monitors individual and collective bio-emotional and physiological stats while sending just-in-time haptic ‘coaching cues’ to players during practice.

Navigation & Browsing: You become eligible for a cable or Internet service upgrade and decide to have your provider install the latest integrated multi-touch bio-emotive program guide. You ‘surf’ like never before as the system recognizes and establishes a personal, empathetic connection between you and your preferred content.

Health & Gaming: You join a specialized yoga class called Meditation for Longevity and Gaming where you learn not only to identify and control your thoughts and emotions for personal health reasons but also to improve your mastery over new, multi-modal gaming consoles that demand the integrated use of body, spirit, and mind.

Tele-Intimacy: Your spouse moves abroad for several months on contract work and the separation puts a great deal of emotional stress on your relationship. You decide to purchase a tele-intimacy kit made by Philips that includes home-based applications designed to help the two of you connect and feel each other’s presence in…more ways than one.

To take advantage of this sense-rich paradigm early enough to prototype the kind of disruptive products and services that offer competitive advantage, brands and businesses need to understand the intersections between future technology and evolving humanity. That first requires a more robust, competitive R&D process. The research, design and development of multi-modal feelback systems and their successful incorporation in products and services will rely on multi-disciplinary teams drawing on very specific and specialized areas of knowledge, experience and expertise in and around the affective domain of ‘feel’.

Because the layering, combination, and re-combination of a wider spectrum of input/output modalities will create a host of new usability problems- one or more critical collaborative R&D areas will need to cultivate the space between Human Factors, Anthropology and Industrial Design. Standardization issues surrounding multi-touch input languages – where the function and meaning of finger gestures varies greatly from one device or platform to another or, equally important, from one group of users to another, will be solved only through research on product prototypes and users in action and in context. Otherwise, the social, cultural, cognitive, physical and performative are all potential glitches waiting to trip up organizations that fail to recognize, appreciate and design for human diversity. Like the pictures Wolf pulled yesterday on the big screen, those organizations will quickly become old news.