Packaging Future Vision

It’s not only about good ideas and visions for the future, it’s also about packaging them right.

Yesterday I spent my day together with one of the Two Antennas at cebit, Germany’s “No. 1 marketplace for digital solutions, trends and innovations”, a combination of a trade fair and some conference components. We had no real business obligations or meetings to do, so we could randomly drift all over the place.

The obligatory focus topic this year seems to be the internet and mobile. For that, a dedicated area called webciety has been set up. Although I think the overall concept of webciety has some strenghts, from a visual perspective it had a quite outdated feel: the hexagonal architecture, but mainly the “structure composed of a network of light beams hanging above everyone’s heads – symbolizing the Internet – which can take on any color”:

I’m pretty sure we visited webciety the wrong day, it felt quite empty and unmotivated and the conference panels we saw were not exciting enough to spend a lot of time over there.

We were quite puzzled by the megalomaniac nature of the Deutsche Telekom stand hall. They had the most compelling (and obviously most energy comsuming, hello “greenIT”) display technology I have ever seen (geekery), some seemingly-spontaneous fashion catwalk with iPhone/G1 product placement on a product presentation desk (embarrassment I) and some miserable improvisation theater in a fake living room, staged to nonchalantly mix in a huge HDTV and their IPTV Set-Top-Box product (embarrassment II).

We atually went there for the Trendforum conference program to see graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s talk, which we really enjoyed, although it was not all fresh if you had seen his TED talk before.

Another thing we did not want to miss was future parc, the area where researchers and universities are showing off their innovations that are going to take longer than 2-3 years to find their way into real products on real markets. And again, that got me thinking.

I’m not at all questioning the scientific dimension or meaning of the results shown. But the way they were being presented was very weak and dull. This might have to do with budgets, which are for sure not the greatest for many academic institutions that are trying to remain as independent as they can. But it seems there were just no designers involved. I’m convinced they could do a lot better without spending a fortune for design consultancy and adequate production if priorities would be shifted a bit. Technology and User Experience cannot be separated (anymore) – design can be a vehicle to make solid fundamental research results more accessible to a broader audience. It could be simply creating some exemplary “real world” scenarios instead of just showing isolated prototypes in a lab like athmosphere and surrounding. And if the idea is not making scientific research more visible to the public, why presenting on a trade fair?

To be honest, we did not spend the whole day over there – we were just not attracted and overwhelmed enough to do so. So I’m probably judging on a quite superficial level. But that’s also one of the main things that failed: getting the first impression right and make “digging deeper” mandatory for passing visitors. I was really curious to see what research in Germany has to offer in the field of robotics, but really, a semi-functional prototype fulfilling all robot stereotypes I learned as a child is putting me off. Isn’t there more to it?

It was the overall attractiveness of the different stands that I found disappointing, but also the execution of most projects shown. In most cases, the responsible people were quite nice and competent, but the ideas they were demonstrating did not wow me.

I just saw a Microsoft Research video that backed up my impression and thoughts. I might be comparing Apples to Oranges (eg. budget), and of course Microsoft are doing a quite well razzle-dazzle job – but shouldn’t it be somewhere in between lowdown and show-off when it comes to packaging future vision?

My first associations with “Microsoft” as a brand are for sure not “fresh visuals” and “innovative products”, but I think the following video fulfills its purpose quite well: