Design & Emotion Blog

Nine whole years of making things better will be quickly forgotten and replaced for the newer and cooler sense of making things simpler. Philips has finally entered the new millennium with their new slogan: “Sense and Simplicity”. And I am excited about it!

With such a great history in innovation and technology, Philips claimed to have lost the feeling with the end-users: people. Their new strategy is completely focused on designing products around people and making it simpler and thus more enjoyable to use.

Some months ago I got to talk to Georg Rakers, who is a senior manager at Philips Design. He is mainly active in the department of medical solutions (body scanners etc.), a big market for Philips. Within these rather professional-orriented machines (mainly experts have to handle them) there is also innovative research focused on the persons who are treated with the equipment. Feelings and emotions play a big role in this. Research efforts on color-schemes proved to be highly benefitial in making a body scan at least a more enjoyable experience as was the case before (sometimes people have to be in there for over an hour). Keywords according to Rakers were: comfort, pleasure and satisfaction.

To get back to what I was talking about: Philips’ new strategy and slogan. What I was wondering about is what they refer to with ‘sense’ in the new slogan. Do they refer to people who feel, experience and therefore ‘sense’? Or is it about simplicity making sense? In their explanation of the slogan on the corporate site Philips only talks about simplicity, but where did they leave the ‘sense’ part?

Well, nevertheless, I am really excited about Philips’ new plans and I will probably soon discover whether they would like to adopt new ideas on design and emotion into the ‘sense’ part of their new strategy. Doesn’t that make as much sense as the box where their new trick came out of?