Designing Philips 21-28 Inch European TV Range in the 90’s was a lesson in refinement. Small changes in form and proportion could make a very big difference in the perception of quality. When confronted with a shelf full of same size screen sizes, the most important issue was which one looked like it would produce the best picture and that translated directly to which set looked the most sophisticated. Small differences however are extremely difficult to achieve because every aspect of the way the set is built technically is tightly constrained already by generations of mechanical development, drop test limitations, standard sizes of key components and market acceptance by the retail buyers. The challenge in this range was that Philips had traditionally spent money on their high-end sets and left the real mass market middle ground sorely neglected. The product managers here where ultra conservative non-risk takers, who were being over ridden by their factory development groups and the retail buyers who said no to any advancements in the product concepts in the name of keeping risks low.
At the time I took over this design group the designs of this range still conceptually mimicked that of the old wooden chipboard cabinet construction tv’s with huge characteristic flat sides made of plastic and a very high base under the screen. They just looked plain outdated.
Working closely with the factory in France, I discovered, like generations of designers before me that the reason our sets had such high plinths under the screen compared to our competitors was due to a specific Philips industrial policy that required that every factory needed its production lines set up in such a way that if any other factory was destroyed that any set could run on any production line, in any factory! This meant that there where guide bosses right under the circuit boards 40mm deep to allow a 14 inch set from Italy to run on the French production lines if need be. I had to take on factory management and demonstrate how a small change in their industrial policy would not affect their readiness, but would deliver vast improvements in our sales.
In the end solving this decades old problem was easy. All I had to do was build the case and demonstrate how long it would take to unscrew the bosses and remount them in case of an emergency and convince them that was a lot less time than the week it would take to ship the tools to the French factory from Monza, Italy! Design is problem solving and any problem that arises within a design project is ripe for solving by the designer. It is only when designers expect others to solve their problems that things tend to fail – badly. I am prepared to tackle any problem that requires solving, it is one of the keys to my success as a designer. For the most part my peers would be stumped by technical challenges or problems instead of taking on the responsibility to resolve them in collaboration with the engineers on the project and deal with all problems facing the project from cost, to aesthetics and user acceptance or plastic flow rates. The willingness to collaborate is a real strength.
Having successfully cleared this 30 year old conceptual hurdle, I set about reducing the height to the minimum below the screen which allowed me to do the same all around the set thus reducing the visual weight of the frame around the screen and maximizing the appearance of the screen size. Next I tackled the fake wooden construction deep front cabinet problem and with the trust of the development engineers, I was able to reduce the front cabinet to an unprecedented 60mm. This allowed me to create a mono form for a mid-range Philips Television for the first time ever. A huge conceptual breakthrough for all future designers. A mono form creates the feeling of a lot more sophisticated product versus the old concept of a flat folded fake wooden cabinet with a cheap plastic screen frame and back cover.
I wanted this mass market set to appear more sophisticated than the high end sets we were creating at the time. In order to do that I had to work on detailing for the cooling slots on the rear that would hide the ugliness of the slots and become instead a visual detailing that made the now vast back plastic molding appear to be made of a sophisticated material. This was achieved through the very careful design of the cooling slots and the integration of the speaker grills into the form of the cabinet as opposed to sticking out as ears as was the way of mounting speakers at the time. In order to do this, we had to employ a new speaker concept that Philips was working on called a horn speaker that could project sound out of a narrow slot in such a way that sound quality was not lost even though the speakers were positioned behind the bulge of the screen. Mart Van Der Tillard, a brilliant engineer, was the inventor and developer of that great technology.
This TV represented at least 4 major innovations for Philips TV’s and laid the groundwork for all future generations of TV to have a modern proportion and construction that suddenly made us very competitive against the market leader Sony after many years of uncompetitive mid market offerings.