Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Irene McWilliam, I’m Director of Design and Research at Philips Design in Eindhoven, and I’m going to talk to you today about a number of subjects, most of them related to what we at Philips call ambient intelligence, from a design perspective.

So I’m not talking technology in particular, I’m not talking business in particular; I’m going to try to give an overview of design in relation to new media, with some thoughts about how that could evolve into the future.

I’ll show you some of the work that we’ve done at Philips in the last few years, but with particular emphasis on some of the experimentation that we’re doing right now.
It’s a little bit of history, a little bit of the present day, a little bit looking into the future, as food for thought on the subject.

The first thing that’s up here: "Glory be for Le Corbusier!" We’ve had some talk this afternoon about Modernism. I want to show you something that is currently an inspiration to us as designers at Philips Design, in relation to the subject of ambient intelligence. So, a little bit of history called ‘The Electronic Poem.’ It was commissioned by Philips in 1957, as the Philips pavilion at the World Expo in Brussels, held in 1958.

Some of the qualities that we found in the design of that pavilion, we’re referring to today, in the design of new spaces in terms of ambient intelligence. So I want to go through that and show you how it might have a bearing in terms of how we think of design in terms of complexity.

This is actually LC’s specification of the pavilion for Philips; it’s quite amazing he managed to get that onto one sheet of A4, as a master specification. What you’re looking at here is a diagram of interactivity in the space of that pavilion, and round the outside is a series of windows showing what kind of visuals would come up within the building itself. And within that, the music. And within that, the seating of people and so on. So this was really the design for the electronic poem.

What’s really interesting to me about this, when I look back in the archives at Philips (they’ve got vast amounts of reference material on this subject), is just how this came about as an actual idea. So Louis Kalff, the Art Director of Philips at that time, put it to the board of management that what they should show at the exhibition, instead of products or technologies, was how their technologies could be used by artists of the future.

How could they do that? All that they had and were able to do was to put the full resources of Philips Research behind the project and say; ‘Please engage somebody that you think will be able to demonstrate how technologies could be used in the future’. And this was at a time when Philips was making televisions, radios, and so on, and when exhibiting, would put those products into that designed space, an exhibition space. But they wanted something new, just to show some possibilities for the future.

So even at that time the idea was, ‘How could we do that?’ So they talked to LC, and he was willing to work and explore this. So he asked for more or less unlimited time and budget, the full resources of Philips in terms of acoustic technologies, lighting technologies, automation technologies and so on, in order to realise this.

So, just to give you some idea of this background: this is a photograph of Louis Kalff, then-Art Director of Philips, and on the left, LC, who then decided to work with Edgard Varese to compose some electronic music. So within Philips research, they started to work out, together with Varese, how you could compose sound within space, and could direct sound into space, 3D positional sound, events of sound, soundscapes, and not just the reproduction of the score.

So this became quite a complicated endeavour. This is a photograph taken of one of the tests, once the building itself had actually been made. Again, LC with EV. This is inside the installation of the Philips pavilion at Brussels, when they were actually starting the first test round to see that everything was choreographed correctly.

Then here are one or two pictures of the opening. In the six months that the pavilion was there, they had about two million visitors. The reason that people were really attracted to it was because the actual experience was quite different from visiting a pavilion full of products. And nobody was really sure of what that could mean, or how that dynamic would work, so it was a bit of an exploration for the audience themselves.

So you can see here one of the shots that was put up on the wall, and all of that changed in terms of multimedia, as we would now describe it: multimedia imaging, going round the space and skin of the building. They also used the outside of the building to great effect.

This is EV working on programming the electronic music. Here are some of his musical notations for the electronic poem. This is the outside of the building - just finishing off before the opening. And this is the inside of the building. And we can see, even from this abstract visual, the quality of the lighting inside was quite dramatic. They really tried to fill the space inside with lighting, to enhance the experience, as we would now describe it.

So, all of these things to do with flow, choreography, integration of the visual with the music, with the complete space, an experience of the building, are perhaps some places where we can get inspiration as designers, to be designing these kinds of environments, or including these feelings, let’s say, in the homes and spaces we’re designing for today.

That’s the historical reference in this discussion.
Now for the present day. I work for Philips Design, there are about 500 designers working for Philips worldwide, many of them here in Europe. These are the locations of our design studios here in Europe and in other places across the globe. It’s a distributed community, you could say, of designers.

Like all design studios, we have to deal increasingly with new kinds of skills and thinking about design, especially with the design of new media and technologies. So these are some of the skills, design skills that we work with. And here are some small flavours of our portfolio.

Philips has about 100 business units, and we work for all of them, all of those groups, from areas of small domestic appliances, through areas of consumer electronics. And into areas of more complex systems: business to business systems, industrial electronics and medical systems. So for designers, there’s quite a rich mix of areas to be working in.

Now for a look towards the future. The subject here is interface - in it’s broadest terms. I’m going to go through this using a code, which doesn’t really mean anything, except to me, it’s a story called One-D to Ten-D, and it’s just a way I have of telling the story of the evolution of design, in terms of electronic media. So don’t worry too much about the actual visuals, or numbers, they don’t mean anything, it’s just a way of categorising. So let’s start at the beginning.

One-D: Non-Electronic
The reference here is ‘before interface.’ When designing a chair - and we still design millions of chairs, because we like them, they’re cultural objects - we can do that in a very refined way, because we’ve learned how to use the materials. We tend not, for these kinds of objects, to talk about interface design; it’s an intuitive relationship, we learn about chairs when we use them all our life.

Two-D
The movement into the interface really came about with computing, so we could say, 20, 30, or 40 years ago; but this is just a kind of icon for me, a way of looking at what is going on in terms of a relationship between a person and the machine. So over on the left-hand side (indicates picture) that’s me, I am interacting through a computer screen, if you think of the line as a screen, with some intelligence behind there.

When I started working with computers, this was really the design space available to me: it was a one-line input code, no more than that, and I had to become an expert in order to talk to that machine. So I could be a naive user, I had to be an expert user, and of course this mode is still used a lot today by programmers. But this was how it was for all of us then.

Three-D: The Revolution
In this diagram, I’ve simply brought the intelligence, that was there behind the screen, into the visual space, the real estate of the screen. This is the desktop metaphor, the graphical user interface, when suddenly we didn’t have one line, we had the complete design space of the whole screen to use for communication.

In any one of these levels, we could go down into further levels of detail, because our next move within that was multimedia, so we didn’t just have vision, we had sound, we had animation, we had video, but basically the same paradigm.
So, television today still uses that paradigm, completely.

Three-D++
Just one level down, just as an illustration, this is ‘agent technology:’ The interesting thing in this diagram is because of these kinds of technologies then the system can know who’s there, who’s interacting, and can I do it better? So within a multi-user environment, because suddenly there are three users, three people and not one, then still that single object can respond intelligently to different people.

Again, just as an example, this is from a project several years ago, called ‘Vision of the Future’, where we explored many areas of the Philips portfolio. And this was one of the concepts from a communication device, showing agent technology, just delegating some of the more routine activities that I might have to do, to some intelligence within that object.

Four-D
This is where it started to get interesting. Already there’s been some discussion this afternoon about this subject, because this is the area of virtual reality and the metaphor that I always think of for myself in this domain is, I just lift this computer, and I put it on my head.

So at this point, we’re putting the computer on our heads, and even some of the visuals from the time when people started to experiment with this idea looked like that - everyone started looking like Robocop or something. We had huge amounts of hardware on our bodies to be able to experience those spaces then. So we actually put the computer on our head, and we’re looking at some kind of simulated environment, and again this is a progression in terms of complexity and using different interaction modalities.

So again, here’s one or two stills that just give the flavour of that kind of virtual reality domain. The first is from a project called Domestic Media and shows a small girl playing a game with somebody else in terms of gestural interface.

The second is also a project from several years ago, it’s an experimental anthropomorphic cursor, the person becomes the cursor in virtual space and can contain content, it’s a bit like virtual Teletubbies.

Five-D
This is where it gets interesting I think. In this diagram, you’ll see that the PC screen, or the television screen, or whatever screen it was, is completely gone.

And we can say, if you like, that this is the stepping stone into ubiquitous computing, because we’ve simply destroyed the notion of the box and the PC as being the only large single element which contains the intelligence which we would like to use.

So at this point, the notion of the single intelligent server or PC is destroyed, and the intelligence becomes distributed within the environment, in various ways, which we can design.

So it’s no longer the paradigm of ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’, which all of the previous ones have been, with me trying to figure out what’s going on behind the glass. The glass has gone, so anything there is perhaps also manipulable, if that’s the word. I can really move it around, something that’s really a bit more familiar and can connect between each of the parts. So it’s quite interesting, from that point of view, a movement towards distribution.

So another few examples to give a flavour. These are lights. They look like the absolute icon of lights and lighting, but they’re made from a material called LAD Polymer. And these lights a re completely two-dimensional, they’re completely flat. They can be powered by putting them onto a tablecloth made from an electronic fabric – they are powered from the cloth itself. Of course you can also have electronic desk tops, bookshelves with icons for downloadable content, and so on.

Six-D
There’s me in the middle, this is my relationship with the objects round about me, whatever they may be and any one of those objects can talk to each other, or can connect me to content, to broadcast streams, to information, and also to other people.

So this was just a quick overview of those Ds as I’ve described them, from product design, multimedia with its influences from cinema and so on, right through to what you could call distributed computing, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, whatever. Then for designers, the whole territory, the domain, the context, the environment, is the place for interfacing, or it has interface potential at least.

Seven-D
This is just a zoom up into interconnected communities. So a number of people I’ve already met have been involved in interconnected community research in Europe, and these were the kinds of subjects that we looked at in the last few years when we set up these kinds of programmes.

At Philips Design we participated in such projects, like Living Memory - which you can see, it’s in the building now at the e-Culture Fair. It was looking at memory, at the sedimentation of our time. Yes, those things we want to keep, that information we would like to retain a little bit longer and let the rest fade away. So, using that kind of idea, what is it we can construct in various locations in a community to facilitate this kind of communication?

This is the interface, you can see it outside. It uses a kind of flow, watery metaphor in terms of the graphic design. More recently (it’s not on the prototype on show at the e-Culture Fair), we’ve been exploring different visual languages that we could employ. So this is more biological in a sense, it’s two-and-a-half-D. It’s the same kind of functionality, but looks a little bit different, so here’s some draft sketches of how this could start to look, using a different visual language.

This is Pogo, connecting children through the telling of virtual stories in two different locations. It’s about building children’s worlds to help them to learn. It’s for children aged four to eight, using real artefacts, moving them into virtual space. Pogo is also on view at the Fair, so I won’t spend much time on it.

Eight-D
Now we zoom into the individual, this is personal area networks on the body. Here are some results and explorations that we’ve done in the area of wearable technology, making it as light as possible. You can do this by building in conductible fibres into the actual fabric.

With the metaphor of destroying the box and distributing it around the body, the functionalities can be moved around. And this most recent picture is of a product on the market at the moment, the result of a collaboration between Philips and Levi’s, a jacket with an MP3 player embedded.

Nine-D
This is almost the picture for me that is the Internet Hype. This is the plug and play individual: once we’re connected into the World Wide Web, with global connectivity, the story goes, the world will be a beautiful place. Of course, we’re all learning it’s not quite like that. And perhaps we need to consider not the global village, but the fractal village, and start looking at spaces as local space.

Where are the people that we’re designing for? Even in the home, a familiar space, then you can see that networks within networks, wearable technologies, will be having an influence there. Something we’ve explored in our ongoing research looking at the activities within the home, rather than the spaces within the home.

This image is quite interesting, because the visual at the top is the home of the past, the one at the bottom is the home of the future, and the one in the middle is perhaps like the current home, full of these black boxes which have to be deconstructed. So we can look at these black boxes as transformational objects. They’re just there for a certain period and they will change their form into things which are more familiar - perhaps with some new ideas. So the house of the future will look more like the house of the past than the house of today.

This is some of the very latest research that I just want to end on, which is again to do with the home environment, this is a project called Noah’s Ark, which we’ve conducted over the last three months, with 13 people involved, seven students, six designers. And this particular project within Noah’s Ark is called Nebula, where we look at the transitional moments of the day.

Take the Wake-Up Experience: there’s no where more local than your own bed and your own bedroom, so how can we wake up more pleasantly? So, this is looking at time and transition and so on, the atmosphere, the interaction between people. You can see on the bed you can also use wearable electronics in these kinds of environments.

So again, some stills of different atmospheres, different ambiences within the room. I’ve just taken stills here, but all of these are moving and morphing images. So you can actually a programme or create your own atmospheres, for different times of the day. We know that lighting has a huge influence on the feeling of space. So it’s interesting to expand on this.

From Nine-D to Ten-D
To conclude, I think the place to start, if we are designing flow and transition, is with the fact that everything up until now has had a spatial reference. This is time, and really the design of interactivity, flow, and all of those different worlds, is, for me, to do with the design of different dynamics, over time. So as I pass through these different spaces, how much is pushed, how much do I pull, how much is ‘nothing’ going on? It’s that kind of range, very much like a musical score, a choreography, what we talked about at the beginning, with the Le Corbusier example.

So this is me in the course of my day, passing through different places, or it could be me walking round my home. How is that really designed as a totality? I think this is the place that we start, as designers, to look at these kinds of questions.

So whether it’s designing for people, like this guy in London, in a fast-paced world, with mobile communications, downloadable data from the Internet, all of that kind of thing, or whether the environment looks like more like this rural area, which is a very familiar place to me - a place on the west coast of Scotland.

Whether we’re designing for the fast-moving world of high-volume electronics, or the slow places, where people are living a completely different tempo, or whether all of us like a bit of both places, in terms of the dynamics of our day, that’s the design space for us as designers to address. It’s the design of flow, and what we could call optimal experience.

Thank you for your attention.

More on the Philips Pavilion:
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Philips_Pavilion.html
http://www.nexusjournal.com/N2000-Capanna.html