Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz (Part 6)

SM: Previously we talked about cell phones and the problems that have developed over time with their hazard to driving. Could the Mendini analysis be applied to cell phones?

BK: The Harvard Medical School has concluded that cell phone drivers kill 2400 people a year in the United States which is serious. Several states have created hands free laws as a response. Those laws indicate the problem arises from holding the phone. In my eyes that is not the issue. The real problem is being in communication with someone remotely. Why is that different than yelling at the car pool passenger in the back seat, or telling a kid to get their feet off of the upholstery? Because they are sharing your driving environment with you and through their body actions they are responding to the same environment as you.

SM: The problem then is that the person on the other end of the phone is not sharing you physical environment?

BK: Exactly, they are not helping you drive. What if this issue had been paramount and at the consciousness of the first cell phone designers? What if they had been thinking about how to avoid this situation before there were 2400 people dying a year? That is the mentality I am now advocating.

SM: What do you think of the advent of the iPhone and the iPod in the history of design?

BK: I always find it humorous when I venture out of the Bay area with my Mac Book and I look for a place to plug in. I go up to the front of an auditorium or room where I am going to present my talk and they do not have the cables I need to connect with and cannot project my presentation. In the Bay area if you are an academic in a design field you could easily form the idea that the world is 50/50 between Mac and PCs. That contrasts with the real numbers, 3% or 7%, or whatever they are today.

For a long time Apple really clawed and scratched to get market share and they basically didn’t gain any. They were stuck. My take is that Job’s resigned himself to that. I don’t think he would ever admit it; he would be dumping hot coffee on my head right now and storming out the door if he were here! I just feel Apple resigned to the fact that they were not going to compete with HP and Dell. As a result they retreated into their shell and were absolutely uncompromising with their products. They could do so because they had a band of loyalists who appreciated quality.

Apple blew it plenty of times. There many crafty Apple products that never got out the front door, and some crappy ones that unfortunately did. By and large if you compare Apple products to any competing product you will find Apple products really are superior. Low and behold, to their astonishment, their resolve to stand alone became their entrance into this growing market with the iPod and iPhone. I remember when rumors started to circulate two years ago that Apple was going to make a phone. The immediate thought throughout the design world was “what is it going to look like?”

SM: There was tremendous excitement for that.

BK: It is a cool apparatus and it is nibbling out a new category of market share for Apple. Other companies are starting to do touch screen phones now. Once again Apple has this bleeding edge technology and other companies are playing catch up. The problem is they are doing it at half the price because Apple is unnecessarily expensive.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz
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