Visualizing The Future Through Design: Philips Audio

At the end of the 1990’s Philips Audio held the two global marketshare position closing in on number one. Now what? How might they visualize the future of Audio?

As many brands have discovered, chasing number one in a market is completely different to becoming and remaining number one. For starters there is no longer a brand to benchmark and look up to. Your choice is to understand exactly what consumers want and lead the way for the industry or let someone else discover that and lead you!

The Role of Design

The Designer’s main responsibility is usually to create new products, services and experiences according to defined briefs. Briefs like: “Design the next generation iPhone.” What is less understood is that the same characteristics that allow a designer to perform that task also allow them to visualize the future. Characteristics like imagination, the ability to draw and render things that don’t yet exist and the mindset that they are not designing for themselves. Empathy is required to see the world through others eyes and constitutes the core of Design Thinking. Why? Designers try to understand the customer they are designing for and what they might want from a product. Now, and in the future.

Philips Audio asked me to help them understand or visualize the future. What might the future of Audio look like at the dawn of the age of solid state portable devices with internet connectivity? The times were characterized by ever increasing memory, processing power, bandwidth, download speed and lower prices.

I set my studio to work exploring these possibilities. Their mission, to breathe life into the resulting ideas with prototype models. Many of the ideas were produced by Philips or sadly by competitors. Either way, the value of visualizing the future was enormous for the group. It sped up certain technical developments. Sparked ideas for the engineers and product management and was invaluable in involving our retail partners in conversations on future products and opportunities, bringing them in as collaborators and partners in the product creation process.